/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8784351
Sega did need to beat the PS1 to market in Japan. The Mega Drive was in last place against the SNES and PC-Engine. They needed a fresh start there.
>The reason the price point remained a problem was because the system had too many discreet parts.
This was solved within the first year. The VA0 Saturn's that came out in 1994 are very different internally from the VA1's that were available late summer of 1995. The VA1 has considerably less discrete parts than the VA0 and was much cheaper to produce, as is reflected in it's price. When the VA1 came out Sega cut the price to $299 without a game, and $349 with a game, the same as the PS1, which happened in the US around early October of 1995.

This consolidation continued and by March of 1996, they hit the 20,000 yen price point with the Model 2. Which that is where it stayed for the rest of it's life in Japan. This was equivalent to about $199 in the US, and was the price the Model 2 came out at in the US in April of 1996. Sega kept consolidating the hardware as well, which meant in Japan at least their profit margins were getting better later in the system's life as it was getting cheaper to produce, but still selling at the same price. It also meant in the US they had room to keep lowering the price to stay competitive.

The reality is the price point was only an issue with the surprise launch in May.

>>8735123
> The Saturn itself wasn't a profitable system.
Mostly because of it's bad handling in the west. Sega was able to cut the system's price by about $100 in under a year, and when you compare a VA0 to a VA1 you can see how. Further revisions continued to consolidate chips by doing things like combining the 68K and the SCSP into one chip, combining the dual SH-2s into 1 chip, combining RAM chips, reducing board complexity, etc.

And again, we're talking about Software sales. Looking at just software Saturn selling significantly more software in Japan than the N64 did in Japan means Sega is going to make more money on software sales. Throw in that CDs cost less than Cartridges and therefore had a higher margin of profit per sale, they were going to make more on software.
> That was one of the underlying reasons it was dropped like a bad habit the second the Dreamcast was on the radar.
It was dropped because they couldn't support 2 systems. If it was just Japan Saturn could have probably continued on just fine for a few more years, it was popular with third parties there and was still a good platform to sell games on. The big issue was more that it bombed in the West and Sega of America was begging for a new system. Had Sega of America handled Saturn's launch better, things could have been very different.

Ironically Sega's massive nosedive in profit for it's home division starts with the US launch of the Dreamcast. Sure it wasn't great before that, but that's where it goes off a cliff.

>>8735131
>The motherboard revisions didn't do much to reduce components.
Compare a VA0 to a VA1. It significantly gets reduced down. You can see they start consolidating RAM chips down, the system goes from being multiple boards down to 1 board that doesn't even fill the entire case.
> Every Saturn regardless of revision had two SH-2s and two VDPs.
The last few revisions had the 2 SH-2s consolidated into 1 chip.

>>8717764
The problem is they focused on the 32X so they had no western games to launch with the Saturn. So they had to rely on the Japanese games and were constantly playing catch up.

>>8717795
>Sony didn't need to buy components
Of course they had to buy components. Just because they made some of them doesn't mean they're free. The reason for the Saturn's high cost at launch isn't because Sony made some of their own components, it's because the launch Saturn is a mess inside.

Take a look at the internals of a VA0 and a VA1 Saturn, the VA1 is significantly consolidated down and cost reduced.