What Killed Sega Saturn & Dreamcast?

[malducci]

What Killed Sega Saturn & Dreamcast?

 

The competition. /thread done

Edited January 4, 2017 by malducci

[SoulBlazer]

why you quote a decade old post?

 

More then likely he came across this thread through one way or another, didn't realize the last post was 10 years ago, and posted a reply. I've seen that happen before and done it myself.

[Gabriel]

How did I miss this thread back in the day? Back when this was new, I was at my most irrationally vitriolic. I could have ranted at great length about why I felt the Saturn and Dreamcast sucked.

[Flojomojo]

Who has two thumbs and is most definitely NOT responsible for the death of the Saturn and Dreamcast?

 

Me! (points to self)

 

I bought the hell out of those two things, despite the clear direction of the market towards everything Playstation. I loved the AM2 arcade ports, the Sonic Team weirdness, the psychedelia of Panzer Dragoon, Rez, and Space Channel 5. Virtua Fighter is great, Soul Calibur is beautiful, Daytona and Sega Rally eat Ridge Racer's lunch.

 

I'm glad Sega is kinda-sorta around, even in a massively diminished way, even though this old thread was irrelevant even when it was new!

[keepdreamin]

The saturn is an awesome system, as long as you're not trying to collect for it. That's why there's a sd card in mine.

[Eltigro]

why you quote a decade old post?

 

Because Albert said it was okay.

[Atariboy2600]

Okay back to this idea of backward compatible BS I been seeing these day many gaming companies would LOVE to tell you many reasons on why they don't support backward compatible on gaming systems and throw many technobabble on why there units cant' play old games and I call Bull$*^&. It's not because there systems CAN'T play last gen games it's technical reason it's because these gaming companies DON'T want to make them backward compatible.

 

You can not tell me that if you by a CD album and play it on a CD player one day and years later a new album came out only for you to buy a brand new CD play just to play the new songs you call FOWL. I cant believe these gaming companies could get away of doing such back handed dealing and say what YOU CAN and CAN NOT DO on these systems. If you buy a PC and wanted to update and upgrade with new hardware you can. If you buy a can and wanted to hotrod with what ever gear you could.Its your item you brought you can hack it, build over it you can eat its belong to you but not to gaming systems, since when? These are not cable boxes when you move or have to replace them you don't go to a Gaming Building and just leave them there as of you are renting then but now it seem this is happaning thanks to DLC crap and digital only gaming this is why I HATE STEAM. Call me an "Old Geezer Gamer" to quote from 'Shane R. Monroe from Retrogamingradio' (BTW what ever happen to that podcast?) but I love to collect old games and system with read Carts, CD, Tapes, DVDs and with there box and cases I missed having real Booklets and Manuals to see and read and also like the idea of playing older games on newer systems.

[+selgus]

I was in charge of Saturn development at the games company I was working at back in the mid '90s and can say it wasn't the easiest console to develop for. We were doing Playstation and Saturn games at the time, and there were many factors that made this console harder to develop quality titles. I was an assembly language guy before the Saturn, so working with the SH2s at that level wasn't really an issue, but we could create stuff quicker on the Playstation and use more standard techniques.

 

The Saturn was made from a bunch of off-the-shelf parts and was a bit awkward trying to do polygonal model rendering with the VDP. To get the power of the multiple CPUs, I needed to develop a very different type of rendering engine, which distracted from putting more time into the games. We were doing a game for EA and it took awhile to get an engine to a state were we could iterate on the game design.

 

That said, I did like the system, but that's because I liked getting down to the medal and low-level programming. As a commercial platform, it wasn't the best for delivering games on tight schedules.

[spacecadet]

Okay back to this idea of backward compatible BS

 

Topic starter returns 11 years later to comment on his thread!

 

Seriously, backward compatibility isn't the easiest thing unless you're developing a console using chips and architecture that were designed to be backward compatible. It's one thing if you're going from one system using x86 architecture to a new system also using x86 architecture, but that doesn't often happen. Game consoles have always been meant to be standalone, so manufacturers will use whatever combination of technology that makes sense at the time for the best combination of features, performance and cost. That usually means switching wholesale to a new architecture with basically every release.

 

Different manufacturers have used different tricks to get some games backward compatible, from emulation to just including what amounts to a whole second machine inside the new machine. And some new systems do have architecture close enough that games just need relatively minor updates to get to run. (I believe that was the case with a couple Xboxes.) But if a manufacturer's goal is to think 5 or 10 years down the line and how a new system's going to run games over that period of time, what sort of developer support they're going to have and how they're going to have to price the system, often backward compatibility is just going to take a back seat.

[Tanooki]

The Saturn and Dreamcast died not because of the hardware itself, they both had solid fantastic game line-ups, especially if you throw Japan in there (more so with Saturn by far) but it was Sega. A true story of 1990s bungling and gross mismanagement. The 32X, the Sega CD, the Saturn, the blow back of killing off still late but health Genesis and Game Gear sales to cold turkey into the Dreamcast. They loved to keep putting more crap out there to split the market, piss off fans, drive off more fence sitters (to Nintendo and Sony), and much of it petty childish squabbling egos and honor based bullcrap between the Japanese and US offices not playing nice. Hell had they perhaps never done the 32X, supported the CD further and not nuked the GG and Genesis when they did maybe they'd have held out a bit longer. History is odd, it can be anything potentially given just one little thing changes. Perhaps no 32X means better Saturn sales, and in turn another year to cook the DC into a DVD using device with slightly more RAM/cache in it so it could take PS2 ports well enough and they'd be going still. It's all a big fat what if at this point.

 

I guess unlike flojo you can blame me. I never bought anything of theirs new as I was into Nintendo until it was too late to do any good, three weeks after it arrived I got Dreamcast and I rode that one out beyond Sega calling it quits on the hardware. Anything pre-DC I ever owned came second hand. I got a Genesis in 2001, part of a deal with an aussie lady friend Sega nut who hated PAL crap. I got a Genesis3 with like 2dozen games in turn for mailing her the few she wanted in an ebay lot along with another lot of gamecube stuff. It sucked so I upgraded to a Nomad and got an a/v cable to run it on the TV too. All my Sega ownership came in 2001 and after once the DC was toast. Funny enough 12/13 I found a pristine DC with 2 controllers, 2 ext cables, and 3 vmus for $6 and it made me want to get into it again so I've been picking up stuff and man has it aged well, it's a blast.

[Hydro Thunder]

As a huge fan of both who to this day actually genuinely prefers them to their competition (Psx, N64, Ps2)...

My theory is severalfold on their failure. But a lot of it is what Tanooki said, management infighting. Console Wars is an awesome read and details how the great marketing behind the Genesis (and planning of the product line, including Sonic) got tanked by ridiculous influences from the Japanese Sega not understanding the US Market and vice versa.

 

My thought on them for the most part is that they were great arcade machines, but arcade fans were few at that point. They both didn't have the two extremes of game fanhood which were: RPG fans (who flocked elsewhere for the Final Fantasy games) and Sports Games fans (though the DC had the Awesome 2K series, the EA games were a huge draw and they didn't have many games for Saturn or DC). So basically you've got the "nerds" and the "jocks" left for the Playstation, and a bunch of guys like me playing Nightwarriors, Street Fighter Alpha 2, Virtua Cop, Nights, Soul Calibur, Rush 2049, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi and loving it. But we weren't by far large enough in number to outweigh the FF7 fans, the Madden buyers. Not even close.

 

Arcades were dying, but I won't accept any arguments that the Saturn and DC weren't the best damned arcade consoles ever. They were awesome. And for what it's worth, they actually had some less well known fantastic RPGs and sports games too (Panzer Saga, Dragon Force, the 2k series, Skies of Arcadia...).

 

Oh, that and they got plowed in by the marketing juggernauts of Sony and Nintendo. The claims about the PS2's and N64's power were and are hilarious. The PS2 eventually got some good games, but it was an overpriced DVD player for the first full year or more.

[0078265317]

lack of advertising

[spacecadet]

Ok, since we're going back to the original topic now I guess I will post my thoughts.

 

I worked in the industry at the time of the Dreamcast, at a then-influential game web site (this was before the dot-com crash) which is now gone. But back then we were roughly the size of IGN or Gamespot, which remember were also both smaller than they are now. So we were all on an equal footing. I got to go to all the parties, played all the new releases, met all the people, went to the E3's, etc.

 

I don't buy the "Sega was mismanaged" thing or the "Sega didn't know how to market" theory. Sega seemed to be doing everything right with the Dreamcast, at least. Their marketing was everywhere and it was good stuff. Their people knew what they were doing. Their games were killer, and they had a *lot* of them. 80 games in the Sega booth alone at the 2000 E3. 80! And about 90% of them were great games. The press was totally in Sega's corner, because we saw what they were doing and it looked like they were firing on all cylinders.

 

I still remember the first time I got any inkling the Dreamcast was actually in trouble. It was at a THQ event in New York, must have been just after E3 2000, which literally everyone in the press thought went so well for Sega. One of the THQ reps pulled my editor-in-chief aside and actually whispered "what are you hearing about the Dreamcast?" to him. He said something like "I dunno, it seems like it's doing pretty well, and people like it." She said, "Really. Because we're switching all development to the PS2." I remember my EIC saying "it seems a little early for that, isn't it?" And she replied with something like "that's the way the whole industry's going."

 

There's always a question of what's the chicken and what's the egg, but in the game industry (like a lot of industries), a very small push in one direction can snowball. I got the impression over the next few months - especially with the way Sony dealt with my own site - that Sony was strong-arming a lot of people into supporting the PS2 over the Dreamcast. And they had a lot of power. They eventually stopped sending my site review copies of games and demanded their debug systems back when we refused to give them universally positive *reviews*, not just positive previews. I'd heard that for developers, they'd refuse to send dev kits, documentation or whatever if that developer also developed for the Dreamcast.

 

Sony basically forced everyone to make a choice between the PS2 and Dreamcast. You couldn't support both. And you couldn't be objective; you couldn't call a bad game a bad game (I remember one thing that set them off was a poor review my site gave of the Japanese release of "Driving Emotion Type S" from Square, which is easily one of the worst driving games ever made). You had to throw your allegiance to either Sony or Sega; it was a "you're either with us or you're against us" kind of thing. Obviously, at that point, about 90% of the industry, including both the press and developers, threw its support to Sony. They had to.

 

Sega just got stomped. It didn't matter how well they were managed, what games they put out, how good their marketing was. Sony threw their weight around and forced everybody to abandon Sega. And without either developers or the press on board, Sega had no hope. Think about how bad things have to be for a major system to be discontinued after only 2 years. Even the Saturn lasted 3 years in the US and 6 years in Japan. Sony was like a giant boot in Sega's face.

 

Sega was too small and the Saturn had hurt them too badly. There was nothing they could have done. The industry was Sony's for the taking.

Edited January 5, 2017 by spacecadet

[keepdreamin]

lack of advertising

 

No

[xenomorpher]

lack of advertising

You don't remember the Dreamcast's launch, ads, or magazines?

Edited January 5, 2017 by xenomorpher

[Austin]

I don't buy the "Sega was mismanaged" thing or the "Sega didn't know how to market" theory. Sega seemed to be doing everything right with the Dreamcast, at least. Their marketing was everywhere and it was good stuff. Their people knew what they were doing. Their games were killer, and they had a *lot* of them. 80 games in the Sega booth alone at the 2000 E3. 80! And about 90% of them were great games. The press was totally in Sega's corner, because we saw what they were doing and it looked like they were firing on all cylinders.

 

From my consumer viewpoint, Sega was putting up one hell of a fight with the Dreamcast. They came out swinging with the US Dreamcast launch and they kept doing so until the day they pulled the plug. I believe their mismanagement was mainly with some of their prior efforts (Saturn, 32X, Sega CD, etc), and it's possible that past caught up with them at least a little bit behind the scenes.

 

That PS2 hype though.. I think that was one of the biggest factors in the demise of the Dreamcast. Even in that first holiday season after the PS2 launch, people passed on the Dreamcast despite it being about a hundred bucks and having one of the healthiest libraries by that point ever in a platform's lifespan. Even when PS2 systems were impossible to find due to limited supply, people still held out for it. As someone who had a Dreamcast since launch day, read all the news sites and saw the praise for the Dreamcast in magazines, the whole phenomenon was mind boggling to me at the time.

[spacecadet]

From my consumer viewpoint, Sega was putting up one hell of a fight with the Dreamcast. They came out swinging with the US Dreamcast launch and they kept doing so until the day they pulled the plug. I believe their mismanagement was mainly with some of their prior efforts (Saturn, 32X, Sega CD, etc), and it's possible that past caught up with them at least a little bit behind the scenes.

Yes, I was on the outside in the Saturn days but from the outside it did seem like 32X through Saturn was kind of a disaster. But I don't think that's usually what people mean when they say the Dreamcast was mismanaged or had no marketing. I think the past caught up with Sega to the extent that when developers and the press were forced to choose between the PS2 and DC, they chose the PS2. But with the DC on its own, Sega was doing literally all they could. They had learned from their mistakes and there is absolutely nothing I can see to criticize them for about that system or the way it was handled. They did a textbook job. But Sony was bigger and more powerful and had more clout in the industry at that point because of the previous generation, and they used that clout like a sledgehammer against Sega.

 

That PS2 hype though..

The PS2 hype was to a large extent manufactured, though, which is the point I'm making. My site refused to partake in it and were punished for that. Other press outlets made a different choice under that threat.

 

I don't pretend that the press has absolute power to influence, but certainly the previous generation had influenced consumers as well, who were predisposed to supporting Sony over Sega at that point. But the press feeding Sony's hype machine didn't help Sega at all.

 

Basically it was the 2012 Super Bowl with the 16-0 Patriots against the 10-6 Giants. Sega maybe had a chance if they did everything perfectly *and* got a little lucky somehow. I will say that that experience really soured me on the gaming press; I had expected better, I had expected others to join us and be independent, and maybe Sega had as well. Also, if only they'd gotten EA to support them early on, that might have helped equal the score as well. That's really the one thing that might have been somewhat in Sega's control that they didn't do. But the rest of what they controlled, they did as well as they could have. That's why we can look back on the system now and see it for the amazing games it has, and it's why the system's become almost legendary in hindsight. It's no 32X, that's for sure.

Edited January 5, 2017 by spacecadet

[Austin]

The PS2 hype was to a large extent manufactured, though, which is the point I'm making.

 

Manufactured or not, the hype severely hurt the Dreamcast. That's my point.

 

(And yes, for the most part, it was totally manufactured, which is what made it feel all the more absurd at the time.)

[mbd30]

What wasn't manufactured was that the Playstation 2 had all the the big name titles such as Final Fantasy, Gran Turismo, Tekken and Metal Gear Solid that people would buy a system for. The Dreamcast did not.

[0078265317]

Yes but in other countries I read another guy complaing like in germany they had no adds.

 

And in the usa there were some adds but after 3 years it failed. So they did not push hard enough.

Edited January 5, 2017 by 0078265317

[keepdreamin]

Yes but in other countries I read another guy complaing like in germany they had no adds.

And in the usa there were some adds but after 3 years it failed. So they did not push hard enough.

No

 

Sega was taking out full advertisements for Saturn games right up to the final moments in major trade publications like EGM.

 

Saturn was long dead in most stores by this time, yet they were still putting in an effort for games with low print runs.

 

Back cover multi ad for Shining Force III, House of the Dead, Panzer Saga:

 

https://retrocdn.net/images/f/f4/EGM_US_104.pdf

 

Burning Rangers:

https://segaretro.org/images/2/26/BurningRangers_Saturn_US_PrintAdvert.jpg

 

Full back cover ad for Panzer Saga:

http://www.retrogamingaus.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Panzer-Dragoon-Saga-USA.jpg

 

I don't know how you can say a company that is still advertising for a console they are burying "isn't trying".

Edited January 5, 2017 by keepdreamin

[Hydro Thunder]

 

Manufactured or not, the hype severely hurt the Dreamcast. That's my point.

 

(And yes, for the most part, it was totally manufactured, which is what made it feel all the more absurd at the time.)

 

I recall that at one point there were actual news outlets talking about how the forthcoming PS2 was powerful enough to launch and control nuclear missiles. Which was shortly debunked as it was shown that a scientific calculator could perform the same feat in a manner of speaking. Somehow, Sony got an actual news story released to major media and got it run about this nonsense; way better than free advertising. In conjunction with completely false numbers coming out of Sony's camp about it being eighty katrillion times more powerful than the Dreamcast, any and all DC momentum (which was built on all the great games the system had) was slowing while people, in droves, bought the PS2 hype.

 

The worst part, managing an Electronics Boutique during the PS2's launch year... was the disappointed, confused PS2 customers. And I'm not even talking about the ones who didn't get a system. I mean the folks who bought a PS2 and realized that it really, really didn't have many good games at all (if it didn't break in the first three months while they played DVDs on it, which was amazingly common). The launch was an absolute travesty in terms of software (though personally I actually love Tekken Tag tournament and The Bouncer, but I have odd tastes ), all those awful RPGs, and that firecracker game, and even games by great houses were weirdly garbage (like Stretch Panic). They would try to be proud...they had a Mighty PS2! But when asked what they were playing on it that was so great... it was uh...well you know...it's so powerful! And FF9 was coming someday!

[Gabriel]

No

 

Sega was taking out full advertisements for Saturn games right up to the final moments in major trade publications like EGM.

 

...snip...

 

I don't know how you can say a company that is still advertising for a console they are burying "isn't trying".

 

Well, they were certainly incompetent in wasting resources for major advertising campaigns to promote games with print runs so tiny that even the people who wanted to buy the games couldn't get hold of them.

[keepdreamin]

 

Well, they were certainly incompetent in wasting resources for major advertising campaigns to promote games with print runs so tiny that even the people who wanted to buy the games couldn't get hold of them.

 

 

If you view it as incompetent or not isn't really the point of my post. The guy said lack of advertising killed off the systems. They were advertising, even while lowering the casket.

[Trooper Galactus]

I think Sega kind of let themselves get pushed out of the market in the latter half of the 90s. The Genesis was a runaway success, but its peripherals (CD/32X) were demonstrably awful in terms of their overall offerings and hurt some of their brand perception. It didn't help that basically every Sonic the Hedgehog game after the first three was a complete piece of crap for the most part, which meant their company mascot was reduced to a punchline. This while Nintendo did very well overall with the Mario brand (Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, Mario Galaxy, Mario Party, etc.). They were already losing market share to Nintendo when Sony interjected themselves into the marketplace with a very similar system and much larger corporate pull, and given the PS1 was easier to program for, third party developers weren't exactly flocking to develop games for the Saturn. Of lesser concern but still significant, Atari (Jaguar) and Panasonic (3DO) were also consuming a not-insignificant portion of the market share in the mid-to-late 90s. Once Microsoft entered the fray with the XBox, Sega was competing with three corporate giants on another level of being. Let's face it, even now partnered with Nintendo the former 1-2 of the gaming industry is collectively overshadowed by Sony and Microsoft these days.