Afaik retailers earned more for every sold PS1 than the Saturn & N64 and Sony had vertical integration for the CD medium which Sega lacked.
The machine had the odds stacked against it.
TBF, NEC had even more vertical integration available to them and were like 3x Sony's size during that period, yet PC-FX was still a catastrophic failure (in large part because they & Hudson Soft simply did zero real work on it for two years after showing off Tetsujin).
So sure while retailers getting a bigger cut per PS1 sold and Sony having vertical integration helped them, those weren't surefire factors that'd enable their success. And they weren't things which SEGA couldn't have planned better around. A better-designed VDP1, VDP2, a possible delay for a single SH3 instead of 2x SH2s, simpler CD-ROM CPU (tho I guess they got a great deal on the SH1 there), better CPU RAM setup and actually finishing the SCU DSP would've been key things to do.
Also seen some people like kool kitty (mainly in a years-old Sega-16 forum thread) suggest SEGA could've taken the SEGA CD's CD subsystem and reused it in Saturn since the controller IC support 2x drive interfaces, so there's that too.
Right. If the launch games were VF2, Sega Rally and Virtua Cop (i assume those are the games you refer to) things would be different for the Saturn.
But it was too late.
If Saturn had its surprise May launch and had those games there, they'd still probably run into a similar problem because the surprise launch itself was rushed to hell and pissed off many major retailers.
Truly, since those three games released at end of 1995 anyway, SOA & SOJ were best off maybe pushing Saturn's American launch to November. A 2-month head start for PS1 wouldn't have been impossible to counter with a November launch if they had VF2, Sega Rally & Virtua Cop present. I do think they might've still eventually created problems longer-term though unless they had some heavy hitters to follow afterwards.
At minimum, they'd still of needed something to counter NFL Gameday, ESPN Xtreme Games, and into early 1996, Resident Evil. But at least a November launch would've given SOA more time to mature SGL ahead of the system's launch, provide better documentation (especially on the SCU DSP), and build up a better support network for developers. Would've helped to get Saturn ports of PS1 games more faithful to the original or even superior in some areas depending on the game, and I'm talking the 3D titles here.
Sega of America created excellent MegaDrive games like Sonic 2, 3 & Knucles, Kid Chameleon and Comix Zone.
On Saturn they produced shit like Ghen War.
TBF, STI produced garbage on the Genesis too like Green Dog, X-Perts and depending on who you ask, Chakan the Forever Man. At best their batting average was probably like 60%, and that's prior to Saturn where it tanked to make 10- 20% at best.
They both had Toshinden.
Original Tekken looked like this:
Virtua Fighter Remix was shipped to registered Saturn US owners for free and looked like this:
Sega Rally was better than Ridge Racer:
But was Ridge Racer "good enough" for racing game fans back in 1994/1995 for a brand new home console? Seems the answer is overwhelmingly "yes". Most of the people who considered Daytona better than Ridge Racer were likely hardcore arcade racing game nuts, or competitive racing game players (competitive tournaments for Daytona actually existed back in the early 1990s, but from what I can tell were Japan-only).
An average Joe buying a new 32-bit console back in 1995 just wanted whatever looked like the slickest racing game, and that's an area Daytona on Saturn completely failed at. Ridge Racer looked a lot cooler and visually better right off the bat; it just also happened to be a very fun game even if it lacked Daytona's depth.
Sega did a poor job of catering to the American market. It's not just Sonic. The NFL game they released was a pile of shit, which is crazy considering they made great NFL games on Genesis. Meanwhile Sony made the best NFL game up to that point. Their baseball game was good, but that's probably because Japanese people like baseball too.
Launching with a good NFL game would have done wonders for Saturn in 1995 and maybe kept American buyers happy until VF2/VC/SR arrived.
VF2 on Saturn was great. Nobody denies it. But PSX got Tekken that same year and anyone who had a PSX and wanted a 3D fighter could play that. Tekken was good, maybe not VF2 good but good (unlike BAT). Tekken 2 was great, though, and launched the following year. So even something like VF2 wasn't essential.
That's kind of ultimately what the problem with Saturn in America was: on a week-to-week basis, it just never had enough essential games at a given point of commercial relevance for shoppers of the time, to choose it over the PS1 (and later the N64).
We here on these types of forums make a common mistake of judging systems by the totality of their libraries in hindsight, and the ability to access all of the games through multiple means like fan translations, emulation, widely accessible importing etc., which weren't common options when the Saturn was commercially relevant.
Creative Cat Productions did a Saturn video a bit ago that's worth a watch IMO, tho I don't 100% agree with how they did the random Japanese game picks to make that particular point. Also he clearly doesn't care much for NiGHTS or Panzer Dragoon, but his opinion on those is probably actually in line with what most normal folks who tried them at kiosks back in the day, felt about those games too.
Definitely worth a watch.
This doesn't mean Saturn games didn't have the "texture wobble", it just meant that at times they had less of it.
That was due to the use of quads, which distort less than triangles, and where you don't need to do as much subdivision. That's the basics of it; I believe Saturn also applies a form of projective interpolation, but I could be conflating that with something I've been researching for a spare project of mine.
At the very least, linear interpolation with affine texture mapping (which the Saturn uses) is going to be less distorted on quadrilateral primitives than triangular primitives. But it comes at the cost of calculating an extra vertex per primitive, dealing with potential non-planar primitive vertices, and the Saturn's specific implementation of forward texture mapping which wasted a lot of pixel write bandwidth due to overdraw.
