Every console they put out after Genesis was a pile of shit or a complete financial/commercial failure in the long run. Why did they even bother? Nobody cared about the 32x, the Game Gear was 2nd-tier next to GB, the CD was forgotten, the Saturn flopped compared to PS1/N64, and the Dreamcast brought nothing new or innovative (just better graphics & weird quirky nonsense like Seaman). So why did SEGA fail, and was it always doomed to die in the end? I feel bad for them for being so stupid but...it's ultimately their own fault.
Apparently video games in general were doomed to fail, but here we are
The saturn and Dreamcast ruined them, but the Dreamcast was actually a top tier system with many forward thinking features that are now standard in gaming. The Saturn is what ruined them, and they never recovered on the home market. It was just a complex under-powered machine that mostly put out ugly games. The Dreamcast titles were gorgeous, but too little too late, as they had to compete with the PS2 juggernaught. And Dreamcast still focused on Arcade titles when home games moved to longer more story driven adventure titles.
Nintendo and Sony were just too big, and Sony's system was too perfect. How could you beat that?
The only way to fix this:
>NEC and Sega decide on a console
>NEC provides the chips and designs
>System is a successor to the PCE-CD and Mega Drive, and Mega CD
>32X doesn't happen
>PC-FX doesn't happen
>Triangle polys
>push cross-platform games with PS
>Focus on 3D
Even then, you've now created the Sony PlayStation. How can the market deal with two playstations, one from sega and another by Sony with Sony's mega-bucks backing it? Sony PS still wins.
>How can the market deal with two playstations
Easy. SEGA SPORTS
Be honest with yourself OP, do the other options really look any better to you at this point? They all failed. SEGA, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft. Not one of them as good as they used to be
No, they weren't "doomed" to fail, if they hadn't made the 32x, had properly supported the Mega CD... and had made the Saturn NOT be a disaster in the west, they likely would've survived, but in the 90's they lost their main market, gave up on most of the IPs that made them popular, and the market was about to have Sony start off strong, with both the PS1 and PS2 doing it all right, and Microsoft, but still... Nintendo survived, so why not SEGA? It's simple, because they messed up a bit too much, if they didn't, they'd still be around, so they weren't "doomed" to fail, but they did.
So what if they never messed up and were still hated regardless?
Why would they be hated if they never messed up?
We're not talking about what happened, it's about if SEGA was doomed from the get go or not, and I'm claiming that if they hadn't made their biggest failures, the Genesis add-ons, and the Saturn didn't fail the way it did, then they'd be just like Nintendo, with no failures, which would make it viable for them to exist even with Sony and Microsoft entering the market, they weren't doomed at all, they died because they messed up, the same would've happened to Nintendo if they messed up too hard, but they didn't, so they're still going strong, it could've been SEGA too if they weren't a fricking mess.
Nintendo was bigger with a longer history of success - Arcade, Famicom, Super-famicom, N64, Gamecube. All of them were profitable systems, even if the Gamecube was the least popular. At no point did Nintendo make a system that was an actual loss until the WiiU (if you ignore the Virtua Boy but that was a blip on the scale). They made MASSIVE amounts of profits from Pokemon, GB, GBC, GBA, NDS, that they were able to weather any storm.
Sega? They had arcade success and Mega drive success, and even the MD wasn't as big as the Super-Famicom. They just didn't have the ability to weather the storm of the 90's and 00's like Nintendo did.
Snes:
>49.10 million
MD:
>30.75 million
Then arcades in the west started to die after 2000 and then THAT revenue stream dried up too. Sega only really got its footing when it had mega-hit series like Yakuza.
the Dreamcast needed to use DVDs
But hwo wuz King of teh CD then?
No, they could have succeeded, they just didn’t. There are many things they could have done differently, had they more foresight.
Nintendo would have probably done more stupid shit like Sega if they hadn't been gifted the portable market
With the IP counter removed will we see an explosion in morons pretending to be auster?
Reason #11 - Sega continued to prioritize arcade-style gameplay while Nintendo and Sony were busy evolving the medium.
i had the genesis with attached sega CD and 32x...
I did my part. i assume its (You) fault.
Okay, lets just get this out of the way right now. Lets go through it. Why did Sega fail in the home console market? There are 5 big reasons for this failure. The first three are simple: In the mid-90's, Sega really alienated their consumers, their retailers, and their developers. How did they do this? This revolves around the debacle surrounding the 32X and the Sega Saturn.
Sega alienated 3rd party developers in the following ways: 1. They were asking people to develop for the 32X and the Saturn at the same time, which was annoying and an inefficient use of resources, and 2, the big one, The Sega Saturn is a completely insane machine that is hell to develop for. The thing has 8 processors -- 2 CPU's with 2- co-processors linked together in a complex Master-Slave state, and 2 VDP's with 2 co-processors linked together in their own master slave state. The thing doesn't even use triangles as primitives, it uses quadrilaterals instead. Developers hating making games for this thing, and it's 3D architecture was so weird that people struggled to make good games for it (which were 3D) and also struggled to make multiplats for it.
Furthermore, Sega alienated retailers due to their surprise launch of the Sega Saturn which retailers were unprepared for, and this caused long-lasting enmity. Many refused to stock it, and I think all throughout the 90's, K-Mart for example did not stock ANY Sega products after this incident. But really, Sega alienated it's consumers, and this is the worst sin they conducted. First, anyone who bought a Sega CD, or a Sega 32X, probably felt scammed. Even though I like the Sega CD personally, they were expensive as frick and received very little support and had a very small amount of decent games. And then, if you further went on to buy a Saturn, you probably felt shafted as well, because the library for the Saturn is limited and mostly bad. Its here that we need to discuss a 4th reason for Sega’s failure.
The Sega of Japan executives are massive cultural chauvinists. They could not stand the fact that, in the 4th generation of consoles, they came a distant 3rd to both the SNES and the PC-Engine in Japan. To them, the Japanese market was really important, and a matter of personal shame that they were not competitive in it. So, for the Saturn, they focused on appealing to the Japanese market above all else, and in this, they were moderately successful. The Saturn’s share of the Japanese market was higher than the Mega Drive’s, but this success came at tremendous cost. See, even today, about 60% of the games I actually like for the Saturn, I have to play fan-patches of. The Genesis/Mega Drive did exceedingly well in North America, Europe, and Brazil. But in their effort to focus on the Japanese market, these consumers were left with very little. Many of the games for the Saturn focused on very Japanese sensibilities, and of those that had broader appeal only a fraction were even translated. Who cares about Battle Garegga in the US? No one. So on top of the fact that developing for the damn thing was hard in the first place, the stuff that got successfully developed was targeted at basically the wrong audience; Instead of playing to their strengths, Sega of Japan left the foreign market wide open for Sony, and Sony capitalized on it big time.
For these reasons, Sega’s reputation was tarnished with everyone by the time the Dreamcast came around. That is part of what makes the Dreamcast such a romanticized console; it’s failure has very little to do with the console itself. It actually has very sensible, economical hardware in a way that the Saturn did not. It had extensive 3rd party support, especially from Capcom and SNK, and very good in-house games as well. There is no real internal reason for it to fail, but at this point, no one trusted or liked Sega. Developers didn’t want to work with them, and consumers who trusted Sega branding in the past hadn’t gotten a good deal since 1993.
But, we have to address the 5th reason for Sega’s failure, which speaks more to your point about inevitability – Sega was an arcade developer. It’s most innovative ideas came from it’s arcade division. The Dreamcast was designed around the NAOMI arcade board, built to be compatible with arcade ports. The fact is, at the end of the millennium, gaming tastes were changing a fair amount, and Sega wasn’t changing with them. I love my Dreamcast to death, but aside from a handful of RPG’s and Survival-Horror games, the thing is just an arcade machine. It seems clear to me that Sega thought they could inhabit a shrinking niche of gamers in the late 90’s – the only capabilities of the Dreamcast make possible online leader boards for STGs, or online matchmaking for fighting games. I think they thought that they could carve out a niche for themselves by focusing on action and arcade sensibilities, attracting those gamers, and leaving Nintendo and Sony to squabble over the rest.
Now, if Sega hadn’t fricked up so hard in the mid-90’s, this might have been able to work. We’ll never know. But what’s clear to me is that this could not have continued working. By the time of the 7th generation of consoles, the niche to which this appealed was so small there would have to have been some changes with Sega’s design philosophy, and we really don’t know if they’d have been capable of making them.
This is a bit of an addendum, but let’s talk about the Sega CD and the Sega 32X and the business rationale for them. There is this thing called Price Discrimination that firms employ, to get consumers to sort themselves into high and low value customers. Basically, firms want the rich to pay as much as possible without losing the middle class or poor customers. So they try and market the same or similar products to them at different prices. Sega’s business practices in the early 90’s are a great example of this: while they were actively developing for the genesis, the Master system received a lot of low-quality backports. Games are expensive to make once, but really easy to copy. So the plan is to sell $30 master system games and a $120 master system to poor households, and $60 Genesis games + $299 Genesis to middle-class households. This practice, by itself, I think was effective. The Sega CD and the 32x are just attempts to do the same thing, but scale it up to the wealthy – Now, buy even more expensive add-ons and expensive games to compliment the system. This is the spiritual predecessor to expansion packs and DLC; Just trying to get the wealthy to part with their cash without doing that much to change the underlying product.
It’s clear to us now that this is not how the console market was going to work, but it wasn’t necessarily that clear to them. This practice works well in the market for cars. It’s just antiquated for video games.
>K-Mart for example did not stock ANY Sega products after this incident
Kay Bee Toys also banned them over the Saturn launch.
>Even though I like the Sega CD personally, they were expensive as frick and received very little support and had a very small amount of decent games
The current reputation of Sega CD is a rewrite of history from people who never actually bought it. A lot of customers were pissed off on both sides. The people who got it were mad that they kept having to buy carts, because all the best games were still on the Genesis. So their big expensive add-on was just sitting there most of the time. It never should have been released.
I own a Sega-CD, and I like it a fair amount. I think it's overall a good idea. the PC-Engine CD worked well. Going back to price discrimination, it's not a bad idea to release a CD player add-on in the early 90's, look at how much the PS2 flourished from doubling as a DVD player. It has some great games as well. The ultimate problem was just support. Even now, when I can just burn all my games and pay nothing for them.... there are maybe 10 games I really play on the thing? It's just so underdeveloped. If they put more weight and support behind the Sega CD and supported it for longer, avoided the 32X entirely, and spent an extra 1-2 years developing the Saturn instead of rushing it to market, it could have been okay. However, that's not what they did. The released essentially a $250 CD Player that you could maybe find 2-3 decent games for if you were really looking, and those were like $80 or something.
>another Saturn what-if thread
I wish sega-16 hadn't died, so all these autists still had a containment forum instead of shitting up /vr/. We get this exact same thread every fricking week. The one for the Megadrive is still on the catalog.
Piracy killed the Dreamcast.
True. I did see a friend with a lot of pirated copies of Dreamcast games during the summer of 2000 or 2001 I think.
It certainly started in the summer of 2000. I remember it being a huge deal at the time. I read a magazine article about how piracy drove away publishers/developers because they didn't want to lose money on the Dreamcast. I knew Sega's days as a console maker was numbered.
It was a bad time for Sega fans.
Yeah, I kept buying official copies and yet my friends kept burning games for it. I was like "dude...bro...WTF? This is why Dreamcast failed."
Yup. It's like the other anon said, piracy was a detriment to video game sales. Piracy scares away devs and publishers.
Which is exactly why we don't get sequels to games that could have been successful if piracy didn't exist.
Sega was always kind of screwed because Konami, Capcom, Namco, etc didn't really want to work with one of their arch-rivals while Nintendo was a minor player in the arcade business so they didn't threaten their core business.
EA didn't want a sports rival either, so they just stopped support.
In EA's case, they could've gone with a non-compete agreement, leaving EA exclusivity for the big 4 (NFL, NBA, NHL, FIFA), with Sega Sports concentrating on more niche games (volleyball, team handball, futsal etc.)
especially between Sega, Namco, and Capcom it was a bitter, bitter rivalry
Konami loved supporting non-Nintendo consoles because the guys who ran it at the time hated Yamauchi and the forced game limit.
>Konami loved supporting non-Nintendo consoles because the guys who ran it at the time hated Yamauchi and the forced game limit.
NOA policy, not a thing in Japan and anyway Konami made their own Famicom carts and didn't buy them from Nintendo.
They only ever had one IP that the general public ever cared about: Sonic. And that was only ever a hardware mover for one generation.
Sega failed because they were an inherently niche company. And in the hardware business you HAVE TO appeal to the mainstream.
Sega during the Saturn generation had one of the best in house studios out of the major game companies, AM2. AM2 was the company that brought us great games like Daytona USA, Virtual Cop, Rent a Hero, Die Hard Arcade, After Burner and Fighting Vipers. They were the part of the company that were developing the best 3d games that were being brought to the market at that time. When Sony was muddling about with early 3d titles Sega was running rings around them with colorful, flashy, fun and we'll designed titles. They weren't niche, Sony just had a much better marketing department and stole Sega's position as the cool older kid console which was their niche when competing with Nintendo.
>They only ever had one IP that the general public ever cared about
No, Sonic was the only one IP THEY cared about.
Shit like Streets of Rage was extremely popular but got no Saturn update. Hang-On had a bullshit entry that had nothing to do with the original series other than being a motor race, Golden Axe only got a VS fighter (decent graphics, crap gameplay, and it was next to SF Alpha, X-Men, and Ultimate MK3). Shinobi and Beyond Oasis got a sequel but they were just nothing special. Columns 97 and Thunder Force V was japan only. Vectorman, Eternal Champions, Comix Zone all had sequels pitched or planned but they all got shot down. Road Rash at least got a new game, but it was just the 3DO port and not the later full 3d entries. No Ecco. No Disney games. No great run&gun games (MetalSlug and Elevator Action were japan only). No new Outrun (only an arcade perfect port).
At least there were plenty of X-Men, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter titles.
Doomed to fail? I mean, Nintendo and Sony are doomed to fail. I'm not trying to be a smart arse here, but I assume you mean doomed to fail when they did, then the answer is a simple no. IF they played their cards better (no 32X as others have said) they would have lasted longer, maybe into the PS3 era. But no one can compete with the all consuming Microsoft, damnation and ruin is inevitable for all other (serious) competitors in the Video Game industry. They have an Operating System that isn't going anywhere (unfortunately) and is backed by industry, they have a huge market share of cloud infrastructure and are going into the AI market and will probably make profits there too. Not to sound like a doomer, but the console wars will end with MS as the last one standing, no one has the backing to come close, at best Nintendo will be kept aflost by their loyal base and the occasional gimmick release (see Wii) but in that case it's not really competing, more living under MS's shadow.
Ultimately anon, your thread is pointless. Stop shitting up my board.
>Never THE company
>Never drew a dime
>Never had a good game before 2005 and even then was carried by vastly superior games
>Never put anyone over
>Never had the balls to step out their Japan comfort even when Microsoft threw millions at them when the company needed it
>Instead, allowed themselves to get worked into a shoot by pachinko money marks
>Main evented the lowest drawing console generation
>Tanked the buyrate of Saturn outside Japan so hard it also tanked Dreamcast's buyrate, leading to the company quitting the console business
>Was barely ever supported by anyone because the company was never a big enough deal
>So stubborn it refused outside help from others when developing Saturn's architecture
>Buried 3dfx for no reason when developing Dreamcast
>Only the 6th best arcade developer
>Only the 7th best console manufacturer
>Only the 9th best gaming mascot
>Only the 5th best rhythm game developer
>The company's mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, was utterly BTFO by everything else and achieved nothing notable unless fans have 100% creative control on him
>Japanese and American branches constantly headbutts each other in backstage politics all up the ass
>Needed misleading performance enhancement advertising to beat SNES
>Bought Atlus, the company's only positive impact on the business, purely for the crossovers and weeb appeal
>Spent the rest of company's life carried by weebs and nostalgiagays
>Signed a deal with a talent agency company who has history of abusing their trainees like the cucks they are
>Is the gaming equivalent of that one insufferably mediocre developer whose sole professional """""""achievement"""""" is staying in the same shitty business for years
>The biggest impact the company had on the business was sitting around in the back and survive off merch and gacha money.
Having this much hate towards Sega tells me a few things...
1) you've been a virgin your whole life. Your obsessive hatred towards Sega prevented you from having sex with a woman.
2) some Sega Chad hurt your feelings, especially when he dated a girl you had a crush on.
3) You're likely a Nincel or a Soncel who hates Sega so much, that it affected your outlook on life.
In other words...grow up.
>So why did SEGA fail, and was it always doomed to die in the end?
Sega needed to stop making so many consoles and hardware and just focus on one console.
Sega made:
1. SG-1000 (Mark 1, Mark 2, and Mark 3)
2. Master System
3. Mega Drive (Genesis)
4. Mega CD
5. Sega Mega Jet
6. Sega Nomad
7. Sega Pico
9. Sega Laser active
10. Sega Mega PC
11. Sega Pico Advanced
12. Sega 32x
13. Mega CD 32x
14. Game Gear
15. Sega Saturn
16. Sega Dreamcast
17. Sega Mega Karaoke
And like 5 others I can't remember right now.
Wtf. Imagine being a store and having to stock all that on shelves and only half of them even sell. You would be pissed at Sega for releasing all that hardware.
> 1. SG-1000 (Mark 1, Mark 2, and Mark 3)
> 2. Master System
keep
>3. Mega Drive (Genesis)
keep
>4. Mega CD
>5. Sega Mega Jet
>6. Sega Nomad
>7. Sega Pico
>9. Sega Laser active
>10. Sega Mega PC
>11. Sega Pico Advanced
>13. Mega CD 32x
>17. Sega Mega Karaoke
into the trash they go
>12. Sega 32x
>14. Game Gear
keep
>15. Sega Saturn
awesome sound chip, amazing 2d capabilities completely neglected for 3D cancer that looked like trash.
>16. Sega Dreamcast
absolute trash. if they released naomi as a console instead of an arcade board the system would have done better in the market.
if sega had managed to invent a new system for saturn that wasn't shit, sega's console division would still be alive today and people would not have given up sega for playstation and nintendo. all of their problems started accelerating after saturn's launch and the nails for the coffin were delivered on day 1 of dreamcast's launch.
>Sega CD
>into the trash
But it was good and had some great games. Don't fall for the FMV games meme.
Too expensive. Needed to be like 100 dollars cheaper.
>if they released naomi as a console instead of an arcade board the system would have done better in the market.
Dreamcast and NAOMI are essentially the same hardware. Or do you want it to be something like MVS/AES thing like Neo-Geo did?
>Was Sega doomed to fail?
absolutely not. it was mismanaged by fricking idiots in japan and in the united states. the literally had the goose that shit out golden eggs but they were so stupid and full of yes men that they all agreed to some of the worst hardware decisions i've ever seen.
If only they'd just forgotten about the stupid Master System compatibility mode on the MD and used the VDP die space for more colors or sprite scaling instead.
If they just made a cheaper neo geo clone they would have won
experimental cover of a mortal kombat 3 (sega game) song by Dan Forden, "The Bank".
i tried different tunings to make this cover, and finally picked 31ed2 which was the harshest. its a great song hopefully im not destroying it.
the middle solo is improvised, the notes are doubled with a minor 3rd, the 8th step of 31edo. but an octave lower. so inversely the lead is a major 6th (23/31) above the bass.
all the instruments are synths.