cireza
Member
It was not "the Saturn's fault". It was the result of abandoning the console by top management. This was purely a choice on their part. US management was even dumb enough to say that "Saturn wasn't the future" themselves to the consumers. How can you have such an attitude when you are supposed to do your best to support your own product ?The losses were all because of the Saturn.
What prevented them from keeping a profitable price point and release some games with a reasonable budget behind them ? This would have bought some time and brought some money, instead of not having anything meaningful to sell until the Dreamcast launch. Virtua Fighter 3 was pretty much ready by the way, Shenmue looked like it was pretty advanced, CPS3 was designed with the same CPU to help ports etc... There was still potential for a couple more years, which would have helped a lot launch the Dreamcast correctly. Of course Sony was cock-blocking every single ambitious third party game out there, but you can't compete with a company that is pretty much buying its way in the market with infinite money.
Nothing forces a company to sell at a loss. SNK ran their Neo Geo business and sold hardware for almost ten years, and still made games for it afterwards.
Their mistake was to go head-on against Sony while they should have targeted a smaller audience with an appropriate price point and make reasonable investments in games. Instead they threw away everything with the Dreamcast, and created a situation where they had no chance of recovering.
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