What Killed Sega Saturn & Dreamcast?

[spacecadet]

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.

 

The PS2 did not have most of those things when it launched. It only had promises and in some cases vague rumors of those things. That's called "hype". And that's what people bought the PS2 based on.

 

The one game off that list that the PS2 *did* have at launch was Tekken Tag Tournament, but I would argue that that game was hardly a system seller.

 

The two real system sellers at the PS2 US launch were SSX and Madden 2001, which were both EA games. And that was Sega's one big failure with the Dreamcast. I don't know if there's really anything they could have done to get EA on board with the Dreamcast, but I know EA screwed Sega with the Genesis so I can only imagine that Sega tried to restore a natural balance with the DC and that really hurt them. EA and Sony were both incredibly ruthless.

[0078265317]

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".

 

Sorry I meant dreamcast. Dreamcast died too early.

[keepdreamin]

 

Sorry I meant dreamcast. Dreamcast died too early.

 

Which wasn't due to lack of advertising.

[xenomorpher]

There were full page ads in magazines, and I think a TV commercial, hyping the Dreamcast's US launch which was more successful than the Japanese launch. There was an episode of Icons dedicated to the Dreamcast that covers all this and it's on YouTube. Sega was losing money and, in my opinion, they put out too many systems and add ons before the Dreamcast.

Edited January 8, 2017 by xenomorpher

[Tanooki]

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

 

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.

You're correct, and I did too at Midway for 2 years on the back end of the DC dying off. I got the same line from my supervisors and co-workers who had been there a few years earlier than I. Sony did the same exact shit to Nintendo too with the N64. Ever wonder here the fake story came from where the N64 was a kiddie box, that it has absolutely just kids stuff and no Teen or Mature titles came from? Sony (Sony Media.) Sony (PS side) went and gave away kits almost, pennies on the fees, and otehr tactics to really hurt nintendo on the back end. They did the same with the media giving them freebies, extra corporate perks, other fun items and considerations as well for making them their first platform and minimizing Nintendo. The first year to year and a half the n64 had more T and M games than the PS1 and the software was rating of higher quality as well. Sony was hurting them with the CD vs cart argument, Nintendo deserved it too, but it was the back channel sleaze move that really did it. Once they crippled the n64 beyond a few developers plus Rare, they sicked their teeth as you wrote into Sega on both ends of the stick. They saw a wounded animal due to their bungling of the 32X, CD and Saturn, knew the DC had to blow it out or they'd be screwed and played them as you said. They also timed a nice E3 event with EA up on stage with them saying e're going here, Sega is finished. They also earlier told dev's as you noted some, not to support sega because they had their hardware ready for 2000 in Japan and 01 in the US and it was US or them and we have the better hardware and the PS1 user base. They deceitfully curb stomped both the 2 bigs of the 80s and earlier 90s in back to back years. Nintendo unlike Sega with all their IP and other fun parks, merch and the rest isn't able to be toppled but Sega had nothing compared and folded like a cheap suit.

[+selgus]

Well it wasn't always rosy between Sony and EA. I still work there so I won't go too much in depth, but the relationship between the two companies started off with EA reverse engineering the Sony boot disc and threatening to bypass their security..

[spacecadet]

Well it wasn't always rosy between Sony and EA. I still work there so I won't go too much in depth, but the relationship between the two companies started off with EA reverse engineering the Sony boot disc and threatening to bypass their security..

 

They did the same thing to Sega with the Genesis. EA were real jerks.

[+Black_Tiger]

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.

You just manufactured this fact, as those games weren't released until the Dreamcast was already discontinued.

[Silverfleet]

Man, this thread goes WAY back!

 

My two cents, if anyone cares:

 

As far as the Saturn goes:

I was a huge Sega Fanboi when it was released. I remember the "surprise" release, too. I was walking through a mall with a friend, and we walked by the Software ETC and saw a sign saying "Saturn is HERE!"... understandably, we both ran into the store to see it. There it was, with the 2-3 launch games. Still, it was cool.

 

Another friend went out and picked one up a couple months after the launch when there were more games out for it. I remember playing it at his place and being impressed. About 6 months after that, he stopped using it. Why? Because he wanted a fancy new Sony Playstation, and he went out and got one. He said that "it did the 3D games better" and that "all the good Japanese developers were going to make games for it". He then sold me his Saturn and all his games for $100. I sort of fell out of gaming at that point for a little bit, but I remember when I started getting back into it, Saturn games were nearly gone from store shelves. For some reason, everyone jumped on the Playstation hype train, and by the time the N64 came out, the writing was on the wall.

 

For some reason, kids didn't care about the Saturn anymore. It seemed like all of the good games were coming out on the PS1 and N64. There were no real Sonic games on the Saturn (3D Blast was multi-platform), and I remember people waiting for the vaporware Sonic Xtreme, only to come away empty handed. Sounds dumb, but stuff like "Mascot games" were important back then. Saturn had no mascot.

 

I still have that Saturn, BTW.

 

On the Dreamcast:

The 9/9/99 launch date was like nothing I had ever seen as far as launches go. The hype train for the Dreamcast was huge! And this time, Sega delivered. There were quality launch games, and a Sonic game! But personally, I was fully entrenched in the N64/PS1 world at the time, and was waiting on the PS2. The backwards compatible thing was a selling point for me, but the fact that it played DVD's was even better. Remember, back then, DVD's were fairly new, and dedicated players were expensive. Spending $299 on a console that played PS1 games, new PS2 games, AND DVD's made more sense than spending $199 on a console that just played new games. Sony "Trojan horsed" their way into people's living rooms with the DVD playback feature. The early PS2 titles were decent but not great. I think SSX and Timesplitters were the really big ones, but it didn't matter: I could play all my PS1 games and watch movies via a cutting edge format. That's what sold me early, and that was lethal to the Dreamcast.

 

I did buy a Dreamcast much later on, when they had a pile of them in the bargain bin at GameStop for $19.99 each. I then built a library of great games for dirt cheap once the system was discontinued and on clearance. To my surprise, I loved the thing. It was a great console with great games, and Sega did give a solid effort to it, but they seemed to get caught at a bad time between the old way of doing things and the age of multimedia consoles. It was really too bad, because I would have loved to see what Sega could have done next.

[Boschloo]

On 4/3/2006 at 7:41 PM, ninjarabbit said:

The DC was doomed to the massive hype over the PS2 and the bad business decisions Sega had been making for the 5 years prior to the DC's launch.

It never made any sense to me.

I bought the Dreamcast at launch and it became my favorite console of all time. It bridged the gap between generations. It was more fun to own and even more pleasant to look at than the PS2. 

I played Resident Evil games on it, it would have easily handled Silent Hill 2. 

Suddenly Sega pulled the plug on hardware, simple as that. 

I remember the massive discounts on DC games over at KayBee toys, suddenly discs were going for $.99 and entire systems for $19.99. They had cost $200 a year before. I snagged up quite a few. I even ended up with a lot of discs I didn't care about because they were 99 cents. 

The only thing "wrong" with the DC is that there were no Zelda games for it, and for smaller kids, there were no Mario games. 

Terminating the best console on the market at the time made zero sense to me. 

On the marketing side, in Japan, they should have created a follow-up mascot to Segata Sanshiro, have it played by Hiroshi Miyauchi, and gone from there. Instead, they used a business executive as a mascot.

As a side note, Miyauchi would have announced his presence by playing guitar, dressed similar to his Hayakawa Ken character, and proceeded to beat up people and tell them "You must play Sega Dreamcast." Hahaha