I don't think the surprise Saturn launch in itself was a bad idea, it was SEGA's execution of it. Not telling all of their retail partners and offering up slots for them to get in on it (that way even if it was just only four, at least you gave the others a chance to be one of the four), not telling devs and pubs ahead of time (that way maybe those who had games further in development, to incentivize them in finishing the games early. Maybe SEGA even offering dev assistance to make it happen) etc. THAT'S why the surprise launch failed.
Actually Sega wasn't ready for the launch, they barely hadany software, had unsold merchandise on retailer shelves, and didn't really articulate their long-term plan, because they had none honestly.
This is a bit disingenuous. The vast majority of games that did million-seller numbers at that time were some of Nintendo's and Square/Enix titles (particularly in Japan). Gaming as a whole was a smaller industry then and therefore the amount of sales for something to be considered a success was lower than it is by today's standards. And that's a large part also due to budgets being much smaller for the average time.
This is just not a fact. Outside of Japan SNES/NES/DOS/C64 had million selling games. Coleco/Atari/Mattel also had million selling games. It's not just million sellers either, Sega basically had few games that sold even middle tier number.
Before Sonic the best selling games on the Genesis was Ms.Pacman, which later was a pack-in, and Altered beast, a pack-in. Nothing else even sold 500k.
After Sonic, Sega wouldn't have a major 1stparty hit until Virtual Fighter. The last thirdparty hits they had at EOL on the genesis until the Dreamcast launch were NBA Jam, MK2 and some others.
Meanwhile the SNES had Several 1st and 3rd party titles selling millions (outside jrpgs which only sold in Japan) to over 500k. This would get WORSE when the Saturn came out where there was 1-2 major selling titles and there, with next to zero games that sold over 500k outside of Japan and even in Japan only a few and a chunk of those were Jrpgs.
A shmup like Gaires (fantastic game btw) didn't need to sell 1 million compies to become profitable. It didn't even need to sell 500K to do so. You have to take into account market size, genre and budget when looking at sales numbers for a vast majority of older games. Also in terms of a lot of SEGA's stuff, they were basically arcade ports, so you would also need to take into account the arcade revenue and profits before determining if the game itself was a financial wash.
There's zero logic in this statement and I hate when Sega fans bring it up. There's a difference between making some cash and making profits. If I sell computer products and I only made $4 from a year of sales, technically I made money, but I didn't make any real profits. If that $4 became $400,000+ then we would be talking.
Not to mention outside of Japan there weren't that many shmups, and considering how Sega was broke by 97 those shmups clearly weren't that profitable This is a poor defense to excuse Segas shitty game libraries and poor management that didn't appeal to anyone and didn't move consoles. Only Sega is usually given this excuse and it doesn't help them at all.
Again, Sega was broke when the Dreamcast was announced and hinted at BEFORE it launched, there was no "arcade revenue" to take into account they had NO money. This excuse is used for the Genesis as well, but I only see that making sense before the SNES came out because Sega was still making arcade money primarily then, but then from 1991 Sega switched to being a real competitor instead of small niche console that made money and basically lost most of the profits they made because they didn't know how to actually manage themselves in the market post-success. But for some reason everyone wants to pretend the Genesis did everything right and love to throw all the blame on the Saturn.
This one is false. Virtua Fighter in particular was for Saturn in Japan what Sonic was for Genesis/MegaDrive in the West. The first game basically sold 1 to 1 with the Saturn during launch, and the 2nd game did very strongly on the platform as well. I don't know who's "debating" the sales numbers of those games but I would argue as to their purpose in doing so since this only seems to happen with SEGA games on their older consoles, never anyone else. That's....an odd thing, to say the least.
How is it false? Virtua Fighter 1 (and 2) are the only games that sold over 1 million, and with VF1 I'm giving the benefit of the doubt because it sold 630k in japan and I'm assuming the rest of the world made up enough to get it past 1 million. VF2 sold 1.4 million in japan alone, no other game in japan sold 600k or more.
Also again you have to keep budgets in mind when it comes to discussing the sales; a game like Daytona (even the buggy original version) did modestly well on the system but the arcade version is one of the highest-earning revenue titles in the industry. Virtua Fighter continued to be a strong performer in Japan, it basically became the defacto fighting game IP there during the mid-to-late '90s, supplanting Street Fighter (and it was generally always more popular than Tekken in the region).
No, Daytona didn't make anywhere near as much money as your implying. Also, as I said above, you can't keep using such a flawed excuse for Sega, especially when we are talking about the age of the Saturn, the age were Sega HAD NO MONEY just a couple years in. Also I hate to say this but VF was not that big in Japan. VF2 did well mostly because there wasn't competition on the Saturn when it came out, but if VF2 was on the PSX, it would be lucky to sell 300k.
VF sold 630k (that's with selling 1:1 with saturns)
VF2 sold 1.4 million
This was the best of the Saturns reach in japan, where it had worse software sales, even with Jrpgs, than the N64, which came out two years late and sold nearly the same amount as the Saturn there.
Also SF was never that big in Japan outside the arcade so that's not much of a milestone. The biggest SF titles were on the Super Famicom and Alpha 2 rode that wave, but at an over 50% sales drop, and the Alpha series was the last time a SF game sold over 250k in japan.
Heck the best selling Street Fighter game after Super Famicom SFII variations and the Alpha games is SFEX3 (Xmen vs. SF for crossover titles by only by a small bit more) which tells you how quickly SF faded into irrelevance
So not much of an accomplishment to beat SF during that time, and SF was only number 1 for the SFII variations on SFC, it was never number one post 1994. It was replaced by a few games, including Toshinden. Yeah, Toshinden was selling more than SF was, WORLDWIDE.
Proof of this? I don't doubt they did some deals (including product placement deals, i.e Sega Saturn in Neon Genesis Evangelion episodes, since they co-funded the production of the show), but you'd think if this were a huge thing there'd of been more games on the Saturn, particularly the higher-tier big-budget stuff.
The Saturn has a pretty big library, just most of it's in Japan. A good chunk of those games are deals You forget that the Saturn was a japanese-first system controlled by Sega of Japan and even they they could only sell 5 million units with poor software sales.
It's to my understanding that most Japanese devs just chose to develop or port to the system of their own accord, a lot of 2D devs in particular to play to its strengths. If anything I would call out SEGA wasting money on things like Gameworks, which may've been big ambition, but was poorly utilized funds that could've gone towards securing 3rd-party timed exclusive and exclusive deals, plus more 1st-party content that the system sorely needed.
Gameworks was done to slow the bleeding for Segas arcade business by attempting to expand it, which was rapidly draining due to the Model 3 and pushing the Model 3 over their other machines. I'd argue Sega would have lost more money without it since it was purchased in 1996 which is when the model 3 launched.
Now you're just making bold statements just to make bold statements. There isn't any much indication SEGA panicked over the 3DO, particularly due to its pricing, though there's the obvious stuff with PS1 (and oddly enough, the Atari Jaguar).
Actually, you basically ignored my post, and decided to form your own sentences. I said the Sega panicked due to the 3DO and Sony, and then talked about the reason for that: 3D. Yes, the PSX was the trigger because of the massive marketing campaign, but the 3DO also was a factor into Sega abandoning the original vision of the machine by adding that second VDP,which also increased the costs. Also the 3DO wasn't $500 at either the Japanese Saturn launch nor the North American one so you can't really talk about price here either. Remember Sega panicked due to the Jaguar
which is why the 32X even existed.
The bolded part, you gotta provide some receipts here buddy. And I mean something besides transparencies. AFAIK, both 3DO and Saturn used quads, so any particular quirks devs had with Saturn in that regard, they would've had with 3DO. And 3DO's dev kits never got to the maturity of Saturn's SGL or SGL 2.0 (yes, that's largely due to 3DO falling out the market early, but the point still stands).
Not only was the Saturn more difficult to make games on than the 3Do, but the 3Do had better polygon generation which offered smooth 3D graphics and interpolation that the PSX and SAT 3D lacked, which mean that several jags, warping and other graphical issues that are common complaints about PSX/SAT 3D did not ecist on the 3Do or only a select few games had issues with at best. The 3D also had better audio execution, technically the Saturn should have better audio than the 3DO but it and the PSX have many games that still use chiptunes as the primary sound generator or in conjuction with some higher quality sounds based on the space provided on CD's. Also for the saturn specifically, it can't move polygons around as fast as the 3DO without cutting something else which is why some faster games that were on the Saturn would have better graphics than the 3DO version but run slower (or have worse graphics than the 3DO version and run faster).
As to the Nomad stuff (I think you're referring to Nomad, right?), well the price was ridiculous but in terms of actual R&D costs it was not in the same ballpark as GameGear because the Nomad is essentially a portable Genesis. So a large chunk of its R&D was already covered well in advance. It was neat idea for the time but too early for the market, the time for that kind of power in a portable hadn't come yet.
No it wasn't too early, the portable TG16 sold more and it was the same concept, and smaller. The Nomad was slapped together at a high price and Sega assumed it would sell, it didn't. GG also never made much money either. There's rumors that they were going to put out a stronger game gear but backed off. Sega was dumb to not try and do something with the GG marketshare they had after the Nomad, it removed one of their revenue generators. This left only the console and Arcade divisions.
The Saturn wasn't AS big a money sink as you think; SEGA cut back on Genesis early and lost a lot of potential revenue that would've brought in. So in doing that, more financial responsibility was shifted onto the Saturn than had originally been planned. Also a good chunk of the losses they were incurring during that period were due to the softening of the arcade market as a whole; I do agree SEGA could've (and should've) made more efforts to clean up that revenue stream and Model 3 (much like Capcom's CPS3) wasn't the answer (neither were things like Gameworks); in hindsight though, what could they have realistically have done there?
No, Sega was already losing revenue on the Genesis, they were already cutting their western studios, they stopped courting third-parties, they were losing ground to the SNES, and Sega of Japan was fighting with SOA. Several experiments all sold poorly and failed as well. The 32X was supposed to try and keep sales stable or increase them while preventing the "Jaguar" from basically helping write-off the Genesis outright, as the SNES had a few FX chip games, but those few sold 5x was the Genesis was selling with its top titles in 93 and 94.
The Saturn lost money before it launched, and lost money after launch until its death, it literally made ZERO money. The Model 3 not making money made this worse. Naomi replaced Model 3 pretty fast since it was stronger and cheaper, and they made the Dreamcast based on that board because the idea was sharing the console and arcade wings would work to solve profit issues. In the arcade that wasn't true, for the console it did work in the US and maybe the Uk to an extent.
All the players were getting softer results in the arcade market, the recession (and for the West, eventual collapse) was inevitable in that sector. Maybe they should've found a better way to integrate their arcade and home console ecosystems to facilitate players going between the two of them? They would've still needed costly proprietary solutions since tech homogenization wasn't anywhere to the degree in the mid '90s that we have today.
And several of those players were still making money while the overly expensive model 3 machines were bleeding Sega dry losing allt he arcade profits they had before the model 3 launched in just over 1 year. This excuse if "it being inevitable" doesn't apply to Sega who worked with Lockheed to make an insane system they though would be future-proof without doing research on where consoles and PC's were going. They also cut their other machines back for the model 3. There should have been consolidation so that all the best performing arcade games still kept being send out along with the new model 3 games that did relatively well. They did the same thing Atari did with their computer market, the exact same thing.
I wouldn't say SEGA had a facade at that time, at least, not SEGA of America or SEGA of Europe. And prior to Model 3, the arcade division was doing extremely well in revenue and profit. But it was always SEGA of Japan messing things up one way or another; they forced people like Kalinski and Katz out when they arguably needed them most, and started making decisions for the Western markets out of spite and arrogance. If they weren't so hungry to sacrifice the global markets simply for Japan (which was a pyrrhic victory anyway; they were ultimately still trounced by Sony and the N64 didn't finish that far behind Saturn when all was said and done), things could've worked out a lot differently...
....at least with home consoles. We don't really know what they could've done for arcades aside from skipping Model 3 (and I suppose, not doing games like F355 Challenge; those sort of machines kind of being vanity projects with excess costs even while using the much more cost-effective NAOMI).
Arcade division was doing well, but not extremely well since model 3 released in 1996, you'd be talking about Sega in 94-95 which is where they were starting to sink. Genesis was definitely an accident.
It took off, Sega of America tried to manage it but didn't really handle it well, SOJ went nuts and neither side figured out what to do with the success. SOJ was actively upset that it was a success outside of Japan, and in the end there were only a handful of top selling titles. in 1992 and early 1993 Sega was at it's highest peak, and lost all that and then some in just under 3 years, and lost everything 3 years after that.
It wasn't always Sega of japan either, Sega of America mishandled studios, and didn't take advantage of mind share. They are also the ones that offered the 32X as a solution to the Jaguar. However,r if they didn't they would have quick launched the Saturn, so there was no winner here either way. Sega of America also supported all those accessories and experiments like channel, and they screwed up marketing for tons of partners.
By 1994, the japanese launch of the Saturn, Sega of America was in turmoil and became under SOJ control by 95 and then from there you could blame SOJ 95% of the time, though SOE made a few mistakes as well.
Also as for the N64, the N64 only lost to the Saturn by 360k, two years late, with better software sales.
You ask what Sega could have done? It's easy. They needed better management. Sega of America wanted to run their branch from the top, and so they didn't have people or departments in place to manage the success the Genesis achieve post-Sonic. Sega of Japan was run the same way but much more strictly where even middle staff had no say and it became a grudge match.
Sega shouldn't have cut their other arcade machines after the model 3 and kept top selling titles in circulation. They should have expanded their arcade machines by having tiers and prices for each tier so that operators would be interested. Instead, Sega basically tried forcing operators to by overly expensive machines, when almost everyone elses arcade hardware was catching up and were much cheaper.
With the Saturn, them panicking likely wouldn't have changed, they still would have launched the 32X in response to the Jaguar, but they could have made the 32X a bigger thing byt marketing it more and promoting it longer.
That way, Sega could have kept the Saturn price low and took some early profit hits for better sales. They also would need to get developers on board in the west for launch, because that first year+ of the Saturn was badddddd.
Just those simple changes would have changed so many things. Instead people want to act like Sega of Japan is the only one to blame, and that Sega was killed by an E3 announcement by Sony no average person saw, and all this other nonsense.
Don't forget Sega trying to enter then PC market twice and failing. Maybe if they actually took it seriously they may have been able to put out some cheap computers with another partner for the low-end casual and business market, but instead they want to make these hybrid PC machines that cost money and didn't go anywhere.
Atari made many similar mistakes, although they didn't have an arcade division because Atari corp DID NOT BUY the arcade division which became Atari games, and Atari games was a separate company that later fort brought by Midway and made them a lot of money. Still one of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen, they doubled down too, they had years to buy Atari games.
