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It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

forbes.com

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Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#71

Post by jonny_eh »

schnevets wrote: post #15

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…

And there's far less meaningful innovation in gaming today. VR was pretty promising, but has failed to be transformative. The new consoles' graphics frankly don't look much better than current ones IMHO, despite having 10x or 100x the performance. Game streaming is the most interesting and disruptive technology, once the major players figure out the right business model.

Back in the 90s, opening a gaming magazine was so exciting due to the crazy stuff you might glimpse.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#72

Post by MengerSponge »

defen wrote: post #61
ErikAugust wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"he American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black)" I have to love that these aesthetics the Americans were upset about made no difference to the success of the PlayStation.

Sounds like a classic case of bikeshedding - the execs in question probably weren't qualified to have opinions on hardware design or software development, so instead they focused on entry-level stuff like the name and the physical appearance.

Yeah, and that makes Sony JP firing them so much more satisfying.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#73

Post by fl0wenol »

kevinmgranger wrote: post #62
raiyu wrote: post #41

The article misses the point entirely. It wasn't about launching early, or not having enough games, or wait times. It comes down to pricing. In gaming, the same thing has always played out. The console that can deliver the best value wins. $399 vs $299 is a huge difference. That's the equivalent of $500 vs $750 today. And don't forget that this was a huge step up already from the $150-199 price point of Super Nintend…

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)

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#74

Post by krustyburger »

schnevets wrote: post #15

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…

I don’t think Nintendo has developed those issues, except for (arguably) overplayed IP.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#75

Post by jacobush »

riffraff wrote: post #70
jacobush wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people with PS1, maybe one of them knew how to pirate games.

Anecdote-wise, everybody in my home town who owned a playstation had pirated games. You don't need to know how to make illegal copies, you could just buy them for 1/10th of the original price on the street.

Ok - update - they didn't have pirated games.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#76

Post by fl0wenol »

Narann wrote: post #57
macspoofing wrote: post #35

Not just Sega, but Nintendo as well. The N64 was a moderate success, but if it was a CD-based system and came out a year earlier, Nintendo would have cut the PSOne at the knees and maintained console dominance.

Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply very slow loading. N64 fall was mostly due to: * Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures. * (Very) bad developer API…

The N64 was so close to being even better than it was, but the field was so new.

Any of the following would have helped a lot: * Larger VRAM cache * Dedicated VRAM with DMA moved between it main RAM. * Trade-off bandwidth for latency in RD-RAM configuration * Static work RAM for the main CPU * Splitting off audio duty into a 65c816-like DSP/cache

Hindsight 20/20, etc.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#77

Post by sbierwagen »

jandrese wrote: post #67
jdietrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Saturn was difficult to develop for That's something of an understatement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn#Technical_specific...

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...

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#78

Post by arprocter »

larrik wrote: post #68
arprocter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Genesis 2 and a corresponding Sega CD2 which were smaller than the originals

The Sega CD2 was actually vastly better, in my recollection. I explicitly got that one and attached it to my full size genesis back in the day.

I always thought you'd need the matching version, but apparently not

https://i.imgur.com/7jlcbQ1.jpg

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#79

Post by chrisseaton »

a_e_k wrote: post #66
chrisseaton wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you even render a quad? What if it isn't planar? Does it curve or crease?

In higher-end rendering, a quad that can be non-planar is called a bilinear patch. Yes, it can curve (cross sections tend to give parabolas), and while you won't get infinitely sharp creases you will get saddle-shapes. See, e.g.: http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/publications/ramsey-2004-RB...

Wow seems like that’d be an order of magnitude or more slower to render bilinear surfaces rather than triangles. I wonder why they did that.

Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake

#80

Post by sitkack »

jonny_eh wrote: post #65
sitkack wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wise sage once said, https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs?t=2 when you aren't number one, you can't afford shenanigans.

Hard to remember, but in North America at the time, Sega was #1.

Sometimes if you are number one, you still can't afford shenanigans.
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