My analysis of Saturn's failure

N64 had Mario 64 followed two years later by Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Saturn didn't have Sonic or Streets of Rage

That's a big reason why N64 vastly outsold the Saturn.

Nintendo made it of the utmost importance that their 2 biggest franchises successfully made the transition to 3D and, as a result ended up with two big sellers that sold consoles. Mario 64 and Ocarina both still being considered two of the greatest ever games to this day is testament to the time and care that Miyamoto and his team took handling them.

Sega, on the other hand, decided to let their two biggest franchises just rot. Yu Suzuki should never have been allowed to proceed with NiGHTS: into Dreams before firstly delivering a 3D Sonic game. As much as I love NiGHTS (and I really love NiGHTS) it should have been put on the back burner in order for Sonic Team to focus on getting a 3D Sonic game ready for the 1996 holiday season to go up against Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot. It really should have been the company's number one priority following the Saturn's launch. NiGHTs could have then released in 1998 on a much more successful platform and therefore, a larger potential audience. As for Streets of Rage, developer Ancient ended up making Story of Thor 2 (Legend of Oasis) for Saturn instead of Streets of Rage 4, imagine a 90s SoR game with Yuzo Koshiro's music in CD quality. Sequels to the popular Phantasy Star and Golden Axe games were also absent.

Who's to blame for that? Sega of Japan, they focused far too much on the Japanese audience having had their arses handed to them by Nintendo and NEC the previous generation and completely took their prior success in America and Europe for granted.
 
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RetroGamingUK said:
I believe the issue in America was partly down to how big retailers had stock demands, demands which both Sony and Nintendo also had to comply by.

Sega of America can't be blamed entirely, especially after MegaDrive being a relative flop in Japan.

America and Europe kept Sega in the game.
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It was over supplying a decline and shirking market with SEGA America horrendous return policy for unsold Mega Drive games, then add in all the money they pissed down the drain with Multi-Media Studio, Activator 3D glasses and Gods knows what else that prick Tom was wasting SEGA America money on
 
RetroGamingUK said:
I believe the issue in America was partly down to how big retailers had stock demands, demands which both Sony and Nintendo also had to comply by.

Sega of America can't be blamed entirely, especially after MegaDrive being a relative flop in Japan.

America and Europe kept Sega in the game.
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Sega cut their launch retail partners down for their surprise launch leaving a lot of retailers with a bad taste in their mouths. Some retailers like KBtoys in the states never stocked any saturn products because of it.
 
RoboFu said:
Sega cut their launch retail partners down for their surprise launch leaving a lot of retailers with a bad taste in their mouths. Some retailers like KBtoys in the states never stocked any saturn products because of it.
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A decision that Sega of Japan pushed for in order to beat Sony to market in America, despite Saturn being more popular than PlayStation in Japan at the time.

I'll blame Sega of America and Kalinske for the 32X debacle, but countless stupid decisions regarding the Saturn and its game lineup can be places squarely at Sega of Japan.
 
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Team Andromeda said:
It was over supplying a decline and shirking market with SEGA America horrendous return policy for unsold Mega Drive games, then add in all the money they pissed down the drain with Multi-Media Studio, Activator 3D glasses and Gods knows what else that prick Tom was wasting SEGA America money on
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Tom Kalinske was the sole reason the genesis was as big as it was. The bigger issue if you look at it from a distance is there was no need to rush a new 32bit console in the states. it was because of the lower sales in Japan and the CEO of Sega always hanging the SOA success above their heads that made them want to get a new console out sooner. In the states the genesis was still selling a lot and they could have waited and put out a real console later that rivaled the playstation. SOA even were researching their own plans to show to Japan for a 32bit power house console to be released later.

Thats kind of how the 32x came about and why it wasn't really supported. the 32x was really an answer to the FXchip not to counter the playstation. SOA said they could ride the genesis wave against nintendo for a few more years but SOJ wanted a console out for Japan asap. That started a big string of massive bad decisions.
 
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RoboFu said:
Tom Kalinske was the sole reason the genesis was as big as it was. The bigger issue if you look at it from a distance is there was no need to rush a new 32bit console in the states. it was because of the lower sales in Japan and the CEO of Sega always hanging the SOA success above their heads that made them want to get a new console out sooner. In the states the genesis was still selling a lot and they could have waited and put out a real console later that rivaled the playstation. SOA even were researching their own plans to show to present to Japan for a 32bit power house console to be released later.

Thats kind of how the 32x came about and why it wasn't really supported. the 32x was really an answer to the FXchip not to counter the playstation. SOA said they could ride the genesis wave against nintendo for a few more years but SOJ wanted a console out for Japan asap. That started a big string of massive bad decisions.
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I'll have to watch the video again, but I'm pretty sure during his interview with Saturn Shiro he emphasised the importance of Sonic to Sega of Japan and wanted Sonic Team staff at the helm.

Instead Sega pulled their Japanese talent away from Sega Technical Institute to work on NiGHTS.

Seriously I think Sega of Japan were fucking clueless as to the reasons behind their global success.
 
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there's no point looking for someone to blame, absolutely everything in the Sega Saturn project was wrong, it would have been better not to even release it in the west like Wonderswan.
 
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RetroGamingUK said:
I'll have to watch the video again, but I'm pretty sure during his interview with Saturn Shiro he emphasised the importance of Sonic to Sega of Japan and wanted Sonic Team staff at the helm.

Instead Sega pulled their Japanese talent away from Sega Technical Institute to work on NiGHTS.
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That is correct but also the SOA STI team was actually 2 teams who both were lead by inexperienced idiots with huge egos who didn't want to work together. The sonic demos we saw were nothing but proof of concepts using 3 different game engines.
because it took so long and nothing was really getting done SOA management asked SOJ if they could use thier new nights engine but Naka who new the STI team was BS and knew SOJ got compared to SOA at every turn of the mega drives life said
FU if you do I quit!
 
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Oh ...so let's talk then about the 32x. Why the 32x? Again because Sega wanted to counter the FX chip and star fox hype with the genesis. They created the SVP but the cost was too high to manufacture so the retail price was high ($100 US). So they played around with a base lock on cart but decided against that as well as the cost would still be too high for the base unit with limited functionality relying on the cart slot to power the unit. so if they were going to go that route they would make a more powerful unit that sat in the cartridge slot with its own power supply. in theory it makes sense. a single unit for around the price of Virtua Racer that played normal priced game carts instead of releasing multiple lesser SVP chip carts for $100 each. If they would have release it at the beginning of 1994 instead of doing the svp cart and then waited until end of 1996 for their next true console it may have worked out better for Sega all around.

I personally think that they should not have put out the 32x, but instead they should have put out a $99 Sega CD in 1993 and pushed it more with devs.
 
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RoboFu said:
Try marketing ... Sonic helped a lot for sure sales wise, but SOA gave it a platform with its "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" marketing campaign. The momentum was already there. Sonic just gave Sega their own answer for Mario marketing wise.
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That "Genesis does…" campaign seems so cringe from a British perspective. We also have rules regarding using adverts to directly criticise the competition.

We didn't need "Genesis does…" or comparisons to Mario, we had Right Said Fred…

 
RoboFu said:
Oh ...so let's talk then about the 32x. Why the 32x? Again because Sega wanted to counter the FX chip and star fox hype with the genesis. They created the SVP but the cost was too high to manufacture so the retail price was high ($100 US). So they played around with a base lock on cart but decided against that as well as the cost would still be too high for the base unit with limited functionality relying on the cart slot to power the unit. so if they were going to go that route they would make a more powerful unit that sat in the cartridge slot with its own power supply. in theory it makes sense. a single unit for around the price of Virtua Racer that played normal priced game carts instead of releasing multiple lesser SVP chip carts for $100 each. If they would have release it at the beginning of 1994 instead of doing the svp cart and then waited until end of 1996 for their next true console it may have worked out better for Sega all around.

I personally think that they should not have put out the 32x, but instead they should have put out a $99 Sega CD in 1993 and pushed it more with devs.
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32X was a miss and a piece of shit, but I am not sure it was a big factor in Saturn flopping at least with customers. I think most people just ignored it.

It did lead to internecine conflict within Sega at the worst possible time but I think that Sega could have quickly transitioned to Saturn when it became clear it wasn't it, not unlike what Nintendo did when the VB flopped.
 
Geometric-Crusher said:
The important thing isn't that the N64 sold three times as much as the Saturn. It's the "why" and the "how."
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Parents bought the toy console for their kids.

RoboFu said:
Oh ...so let's talk then about the 32x. Why the 32x? Again because Sega wanted to counter the FX chip and star fox hype with the genesis. They created the SVP but the cost was too high to manufacture so the retail price was high ($100 US). So they played around with a base lock on cart but decided against that as well as the cost would still be too high for the base unit with limited functionality relying on the cart slot to power the unit. so if they were going to go that route they would make a more powerful unit that sat in the cartridge slot with its own power supply. in theory it makes sense. a single unit for around the price of Virtua Racer that played normal priced game carts instead of releasing multiple lesser SVP chip carts for $100 each. If they would have release it at the beginning of 1994 instead of doing the svp cart and then waited until end of 1996 for their next true console it may have worked out better for Sega all around.

I personally think that they should not have put out the 32x, but instead they should have put out a $99 Sega CD in 1993 and pushed it more with devs.
Click to expand...
Sega CD is kind of crap. There is not much visible improvement on screen, the higher fidelity audio is not always an improvement, and the endless FMV games are trash. The 32X is pretty damn amazing in contrast and allows for great novel experiences unavailable on the base console. It is a shame it received some embarrassing ports like Doom 32X.
 
RoboFu said:
Try marketing ... Sonic helped a lot for sure sales wise, but SOA gave it a platform with its "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" marketing campaign.
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Sonic is an above average game on the Sega Genesis, hell, it has the best music on the system (at least among the games I've tried). Marketing requires the product to have quality to be effective.
RoboFu said:
The momentum was already there.
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This momentum was quite ineffective as it took 24 months to happen, the future of a console is decided in its first 12 months. If it were life or death, Sega could have gone bankrupt because companies like Sega need their products to sell quickly.
 
RoboFu said:
Try marketing ... Sonic helped a lot for sure sales wise, but SOA gave it a platform with its "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" marketing campaign. The momentum was already there. Sonic just gave Sega their own answer for Mario marketing wise.
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If Sonic only sold well in the USA, you might have had a point. Sonic was massive in Europe and like in the USA when hardware sales took off.
RetroGamingUK said:
Who do you think is ultimately responsible for the lack of a proper Sonic game on Saturn.

It should have been treated as the most important game/franchise by Sega.
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The twats at SEGA America and STI. Not that I would have had Sonic Team making S&K or SEGA Japan making Chaotix, it would have all been Sonic for Saturn and would have told, to Tom fuck off
 
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Geometric-Crusher said:
Sonic is an above average game on the Sega Genesis, hell, it has the best music on the system (at least among the games I've tried). Marketing requires the product to have quality to be effective.
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I knew people who had MegaDrives with just the Sonic games.

I remember telling my friends all about how great Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally were and they'd just ask me "what about Sonic".

They ended up getting their Sonic fix via Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 instead. NiGHTS just didn't have the same appeal, most people didn't get it. Bug! fell flat too.
 
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NeverYouMind said:
Parents bought the toy console for their kids.


Sega CD is kind of crap. There is not much visible improvement on screen, the higher fidelity audio is not always an improvement, and the endless FMV games are trash. The 32X is pretty damn amazing in contrast and allows for great novel experiences unavailable on the base console. It is a shame it received some embarrassing ports like Doom 32X.
Click to expand...

Sega cd had hardware rotation and scaling of backgrounds and sprites. Only the fx chip could do that on the SNES. technically it could do Sega super scaler games but they were never ported because FMV was all the rage,
but also it added a lot of ram which makes a lot difference in those consoles. It had a great launch but never really came down in price making it not consumer friendly.

n804qgfbckxc1.gif
 
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RetroGamingUK said:
I knew people who had MegaDrives with just the Sonic games.

I remember telling my friends all about how great Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally were and they'd just ask me "what about Sonic".

They ended up getting their Sonic fix via Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 instead. NiGHTS just didn't have the same appeal, most people didn't get it.
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Nintendo will relaunch Mario Galaxy and will sell millions. Sega was sitting on Sonic CD, few people played it, they just had to remaster the CGI and change the backgrounds, job done. The Saturn's failure is what I said, idiots were steering the ship.
 
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Geometric-Crusher said:
Nintendo will relaunch Mario Galaxi and sell millions. Sega was sitting on Sonic CD, few people played it, they just had to remaster the CGI and change the backgrounds, job done. The Saturn's failure is what I said, idiots were steering the ship.
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This so much. Sonic cd was great and highly praised.. and because of the high Sega cd price tag not that many people got to play it. It should have been remastered with more colors and ported to saturn at launch.
 
RetroGamingUK said:
I knew people who had MegaDrives with just the Sonic games.

I remember telling my friends all about how great Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally were and they'd just ask me "what about Sonic".

They ended up getting their Sonic fix via Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 instead. NiGHTS just didn't have the same appeal, most people didn't get it. Bug! fell flat too.
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NiGHTS was weird and overrated.

Bug! was ok but felt much more old-fashioned than Crash or Mario 64. It was an interesting experiment but maybe too hard (Crash 1 was hard too).
 
diffusionx said:
NiGHTS was weird and overrated.

Bug! was ok but felt much more old-fashioned than Crash or Mario 64. It was an interesting experiment but maybe too hard (Crash 1 was hard too).
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Nights is actual a masterclass on gameplay. it is just there a 2 ways to play it and its intuitive enough that you can go through a lot of the game just mindlessly moving around. To get the high scores and best ending you need skill and to go for the sub A-life system .

It really is like the Mario paradox. make a game that caters to both the skilled and unskilled and most people take the path of least resistance then call it crap.
 
diffusionx said:
NiGHTS was weird and overrated.

Bug! was ok but felt much more old-fashioned than Crash or Mario 64. It was an interesting experiment but maybe too hard (Crash 1 was hard too).
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NiGHTS is very much a vibe game for me, I absolutely love the art style and the soundtrack. Gameplay is largely memorisation.

Bug! has a nostalgic charm, but once the 3D novelty wore off it's a crappy platformer.

Crash was excellent but the difficulty spike is horrible, it doesn't become a great series until the third installment in 1998.
 
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RoboFu said:
Sega cd had hardware rotation and scaling of backgrounds and sprites. Only the fx chip could do that on the SNES. technically it could do Sega super scaler games but they were never ported because FMV was all the rage, but also it added a lot of ram which makes a lot difference in those consoles. It had a great launch but never really came down in price making it not consumer friendly.
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Rotation and scaling of that era were crap. You had Master System games that could fake it better. All that extra RAM did not translate to a better experience. In fact some games had load times added.
 
cireza said:
It was such a success that after losing part of their market share to SEGA, they again lost part of their market share to Sony, only to lose again part of their market share the generation after.

Huge success.
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Compared to Saturn it was a huge success, they managed to outsell it over 3:1
 
NeverYouMind said:
Sega CD is kind of crap. There is not much visible improvement on screen, the higher fidelity audio is not always an improvement, and the endless FMV games are trash. The 32X is pretty damn amazing in contrast and allows for great novel experiences unavailable on the base console. It is a shame it received some embarrassing ports like Doom 32X.
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This is largely wrong and the SEGA-CD was a strong enabler of games impossible on the base console. You have a preference for the 32X, that's fine. But we were never getting Lunar, Dune or Snatcher on MegaDrive.
 
cireza said:
This is largely wrong and the SEGA-CD was a strong enabler of games impossible on the base console. You have a preference for the 32X, that's fine. But we were never getting Lunar, Dune or Snatcher on MegaDrive.
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Snatcher is sort of neat like The Secret of Monkey Island but adventure games are better experiences on PC. Why would I want Lunar when I could play Phantasy Star IV? Why would I want a Phillips CDI experience like Dune in the first place? These are not amazing experiences in line with greatness like what TurboGrafx CD attachment could offer.
 
NeverYouMind said:
Snatcher is sort of neat like The Secret of Monkey Island but adventure games are better experiences on PC. Why would I want Lunar when I could play Phantasy Star IV? Why would I want a Phillips CDI experience like Dune in the first place? These are not amazing experiences in line with greatness like what TurboGrafx CD attachment could offer.
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Wow, you most certainly haven't played the Lunar games to say this, because Eternal Blue is so good it is almost 32bits territory. This is the best Game Arts game as far as I am concerned, much better than Grandia games.

And Dune is a fantastic game and experience, I loved every minute of it, and it made great use of the SEGA-CD. But these were just quick picks, I have a ton of excellent games on SEGA-CD that just wouldn't make it to the MegaDrive or 32X because the CD format is a strong enabler. It's a mix of having no limit for the size of your 16 bits games and best possible quality for soundtrack. This is exactly the same thing as the TurboGrafx CD, but even with additional features like the ASIC chip.

The SEGA-CD was a much better thought out add-on than the 32X, which is strongly bottlenecked.
 
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cireza said:
Wow, you most certainly haven't played the Lunar games to say this, because Eternal Blue is so good it is almost 32bits territory. This is the best Game Arts game as far as I am concerned, much better than Grandia games.

And Dune is a fantastic game and experience, I loved every minute of it, and it made great use of the SEGA-CD. But these were just quick picks, I have a ton of excellent games on SEGA-CD that just wouldn't make it to the MegaDrive or 32X because the CD format is a strong enabler. It's a mix of having no limit for the size of your 16 bits games and best possible quality for soundtrack. This is exactly the same thing as the TurboGrafx CD, but even with additional features like the ASIC chip.

The SEGA-CD was a much better thought out add-on than the 32X, which is strongly bottlenecked.
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I rented Lunar Silver Star Story Complete for PS1 and was bored to tears despite it being much improved version of what was offered on Sega CD. Super basic and too much pointless text. I dislike everything Dune so I can't appreciate it in the first place. TurboGrafx CD and 32X had exclusive games worth a damn. Nothing exclusively available on Sega CD was more than mediocre.
 
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NeverYouMind said:
I wouldn't know but I doubt the narrative or mechanics were downgraded in the porting process.
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eh the writing arguably was, but in any case it's irrelevant

The Sega CD had a pretty good library although yes it was not as high-end as the PCE CD.

The 32X, I mean... ok glad you liked it but lol
 
NeverYouMind said:
How so? Were some mechanics removed or was it just balanced differently?
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I may be thinking of the psp version.. 🤷‍♂️

for me with the updated PS and Saturn ports I just didn't like the story changes and graphical changes. it wasn't a 1 : 1 upgrade they changed things totally in some areas.
 
Sega consumer business (console) experienced a sharp increase in profitability around 1992 but it was all smoke and mirror since in a couple of years profitability severely shrunk down and went in loss terrotory all within the end of the Mega Drive era.
"Phyrric" is an apt adjective to describe Sega's Mega Drive era.

AZfyEcs.jpg

When Sega introduced the Saturn the consumer division began posting losses year after year meanwhile much bigger rival companies like Nintendo and Sony console division were posting strong profits.
The little company had no choice but to knee before Nintendo and Sony after one last depserate attempt that lead to nowhere but on brink of bankruptcy.


PdeYe0O.jpeg
 
NeverYouMind said:
Sega CD is kind of crap. There is not much visible improvement on screen, the higher fidelity audio is not always an improvement, and the endless FMV games are trash. The 32X is pretty damn amazing in contrast and allows for great novel experiences unavailable on the base console. It is a shame it received some embarrassing ports like Doom 32X.
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Thats just the crap one gets from people who's never owned the system, or if they did.. just bought one game . Try playing games like Batman Returns, Cliffhanger, Battle Corps, SoulStar, Thunder hawk, Wing Commander for graphics way beyond, what a base Mega Drive could handle
 
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NeverYouMind said:
I wouldn't know but I doubt the narrative or mechanics were downgraded in the porting process.
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That's the issue when you don't know what you are talking about. Differences are pretty massive between the originals and the remakes.

In the first game for example, there is one massive change that is Luna staying with the team... And in terms of gameplay and dungeons, the games are totally different.
 
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