It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
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Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#2I 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."
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#3I’m been doing some Nintendo 64 development lately, and sometimes all ask the CEO at my workplace for advice or insights as he worked on Nintendo 64 games when he was younger.
It’s not uncommon for him to finish the conversation with noting that he worked on Sega Saturn before the Nintendo 64, and the former was difficult to work with due to its particular architecture.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#4In case anybody else is denied access because of an adblocker: https://outline.com/bujnmX
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#5It's hard to say what the biggest mistake was exactly. The Sega CD and 32x were bad ideas, compared to just creating a new console. The Sega Saturn would have been a great 2D console, but they delayed it to add a really strange (quads versus triangles) underperforming 3D capability to their design. I think the Saturn should have been released earlier in 2D only form, so they could move on to making a 3D capable console that trounced the PlayStation and N64 on a delayed timeline, perhaps even backwards compatible with the 2D Saturn.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#6I 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."
now its just "lets do a mid-life separate SKU with the same name and everything is compatible, but at least the airflow is better, maybe cheaper to manufacture, and maybe it outputs higher resolution"
its a better outcome, reminds me thats what happens when we allow companies to fail
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#7Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU's.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#8I 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 competition not them, given that they had a market-leading position at the time.
Japan was, also correctly I suspected, convinced that Hardware Supremacy was essential to maintaining their Market position. Unfortunately, internal politics at Sega Japan caused the Saturn to be overly complicated and expensive to produce. I also think Japan failed to recognize that Americans were much more price conscious and less status- conscious than the Japanese Market.
We all know who won in the end. I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy.
Sega allowed internal politics and the Japanese Centric vision to Cloud their decision making process.
And then they doubled down on their flawed strategy with Dreamcast... And the rest is history
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#9I 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."
Totally this, and if I recall the upgrade was like $170 itself which was really expensive for teenagers at the time, plus it was confusing, sega genesis, add the 32x, Saturn comes out in a few months, oh and also sega CD has been around a for a year or so, it felt really disorganized. I felt the only thing sega had going for it was non-censored games, mortal kombat for snes had non-red blood in the fights, genesis did not.
Re: It’s 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake
#10I 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."
> I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines
2.5 machines. There were a few SegaCD+32X games.