101–110 of 119 posts
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It's pretty ironic that Sony almost made the same mistake with the PS3 at $599. I say _almost_, because it might have benefited Sony as a whole anyway.
The fact that it was a Blu-Ray player saved it because families could justify the purchase for that feature alone (and typically tacked on the bluetooth remote too)
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The Saturn always struck me as overdesigned and underengineered. So many custom chips to program and coordinate and a high unit cost when the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony ends up being just as good and cheaper almost all of the time.
>the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony I mean, up to a point? The PS1 was so simple it didn't have a floating point processor. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bkedc/heres_a_quest...
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> Everything else at the time rendered with triangles, while the Saturn uniquely used quadrilaterals. Isn't that still the case? I know that quads are used quite a lot for modelling but is there any modern system which uses quads for rendering?
Quads are used as geometric data primitives because they allow consistent subdivision. But quads are not good as a rendering primitive compared to triangles. Triangles are rasterizer-friendly because they are composed of two edges and its quick to know if you are inside or outside two edges.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU's.
I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake. "Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."
My company was deeply involved with Sega Saturn development at that time. One of the problems was a serious rift between Sega of America and Sega Japan. SOA was committed to the idea that the Sega Genesis had a few more years of life in it, and that the American audience was not as interested in new technology for its own sake. They were, rightly in my opinion, concerned that a change in platform would benefit the co…
I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake. "Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."
All the Sega stuff after the Genesis/Megadrive seemed really tied to their arcade efforts, in a way that Nintendo (and, toward the end of Sega's time in the market, Sony and Microsoft) didn't. AFAIK the 32x, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all only a little more different from their arcade counterparts than the NeoGeo was, which is why there were so many very faithful arcade "ports" on them (Star Wars Arcade and NBA Jam o…
First there was the SG-1000 and the SC-3000 computer in 1983. Then there was a mostly cosmetic update, the SG-1000 II. Then there was the Sega Mark III and Master System; the Mark III had a variant release with an FM sound chip. All of these releases happened within a span of four years, 1983-1987. Throughout these releases there was a heavy focus on arcade ports, and Sega struggled with marketing the console as its own kind of experience.
When the Mega Drive came out in 1988 it was a big enough leap to be a stable target for a few years, and then Sega reverted to their previous ways. To the extent that Sega "got" their console business, it was a case of a few teams in various departments and subsidiaries that bucked the trends.
For me as a kid, there was this sense of confusion and whiplash when it came to post-genesis hardware. The CD came out in 92, with no real notable games at launch: Sonic CD came out a year later, and Snatcher + Lunar at the end of its life in 95. The 32x came out shortly after in 94, and only saw a handful of games before being buried by the more powerful Saturn in 95. With two major peripherals and a new console in…
Everyone understood what Nintendo was up to. Sega friends (that's how I thought of them, defined by the console they owned) would tell me about this or that technology, but not many games for this new tech.... on the Nintendo systems (and later my PC) I had games.
By the time the Saturn was out.... most Sega friends had converted to something else, it was already over.
There's something beyond the obvious nostalgia factor that makes these 25 year old video game business stories so captivating. It might be from these massive corporations moving with a gut-driven, ride-or-die mentality or the fact that the only indicator that matters is sales. In comparison, today's gaming industry is fragmented beyond all recognition. The audience has grown and matured, but every major player is a u…
Not really. The gaming industry today is free-to-play MOBA games for Android and iOS.
Anything else is legacy that only keeps existing due to nostalgia of the 25+ crowd.
Granted, this crowd is the largest and the one with the most disposable income here in 2020, but it's obvious that going forward it will quickly wither and disappear.
This narrative has been pushed quite heavily by former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, but it leaves a lot out. Kalinske claims the Japanese president of Sega, Hayao Nakayama, forced him to launch the Saturn in NA before Kalinske was ready, and because of that, the Saturn failed and Kalinske resigned shortly after. As always, it's best to approach with caution when CEOs are assigning blame for company failures unde…
I agree that this is way more complicated. Nobody knew what 3D hardware would look like in 1994, they were too busy inventing it. For example, the Saturn provides quads as your primitive, which seems weird to anybody looking at the Saturn today. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 both used triangles. You might have various reasons to prefer the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, but from a developer's perspective, the main rea…
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Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive that.
The expansion pak was only required for 2 or 3 games, and bundled with one of them. Most of the games with epak support used it to increase quality and / or framerate, the game worked fine without. It was also relatively cheap ($50).
Which is kinda impressive (for the time at least) considering how expensive RDRAM was/is relative to e.g. SDRAM.