/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8526515
Sega dug themselves a hole that no additional dvd player or extra copy protection was going to save them. The task was Herculean and near impossible. That being said the DC was a beautiful swan song that I wish was able to muster up at least one more year of support.

Gamers going to style over substance shit gaming while Sega tried to continue to release mostly arcade-style FUN games. That's what "ruined" Sega. The stupidity of modern "gamers".
Fuck you all.

>>8526515
Sega were in the shit financially
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d2xuRwYUt4

>>8526515
Dreamcast did amazing on the first year. Then, right after PS2 announcement (not even release), Dreamcast sales slowed down a lot. Add piracy to it and you have the whole story.

>>8526515
How can you post these 4 soccer dudes without screaming where is my fifuuuuark?

>>8526532
pretty much this. I'm tired of people thinking that all the blame for Sega's demise is on DC, that nothing before it mattered and the competition didn't matter.
Sega was unprofitable, devs were leaving Saturn, and they didn't have a foothold in the US anymore. they needed money quick, but they were up against a fucking PS2, the best selling console of all time. GC couldn't compete and Yamauchi stepped down because of it. Xbox couldn't compete, but MS was sitting on piles of money, so they didn't care. Sega did what they could, but they'd need a miracle for DC to succeed. miracle didn't happen, Sega brand was already damaged, PS2 came and predictably crushed everyone, and Sega died first.
it had little to do with piracy, game library, DC's specs and so on. what killed DC was Saturn and PS2.

>>8526532
>>8526642
So the 32x -> CD -> Saturn is what did them in?
Had they not fucked around with addons and half-baked hardware they would have made it?
See I never bought the whole "no dvd" argument because while the GCN was not exactly the best of its era, it had enough of a niche market to stay in the game. Sega would have been able to as well if they could have floated the DC for another year I think

Sega giving up on the west where their biggest successes were happening to try to win over Japan bit them in the arse.

Never forget that the Saturn, Sega's shittiest system, killed Sega.

>>8526589
>2001 1M units sold
>2002 685 units sold
Am i reading this wrong??

>>8526749
nah that was me. I've been hoarding them until the price goes up, gonna make a cheeky $100K.

>>8526749
no, they announced EOL on Jan 31st 2001 as March 31st.
They also deeply discounted the machine to 99 bucks to liquidate stock, so a ton of people ended up picking them up.

>>8526515
I think it was the part where they released a 32-bit console head to head against sony with gnarlier hardware, higher manufacturing costs, worse dev tools, and no sonic game.

>>8526660
It also didn't help that SoJ and SoA had a rough relationship during the best of times. And since they lost so much money in the west nothing could've saved them at that point.

>>8526660
it was saturn alone. sega CD was profitable, 32X stretched their resources a little but was a drop in the bucket for the saturn's problems and if anything they would've been better off scrapping saturn and making 32X for a couple years before coming out with a better console in 96.

>>8526803
yeah, but without the 32x/soa vs. saturn/soj fiasco the saturn would've been less of a failure.

>>8526660
it's not just that. to put it simply, they fucked up everything about Saturn. they fucked up with 32x and CD preceding it, they fucked up with the Sega of America vs Japan drama, they fucked up the hardware making it too complicated, they fucked up the launch, they fucked up with no Sonic / Golden Axe / etc.. to make things way worse, they weren't up vs just Nintendo, they suddenly got a 3rd big player in PS. while Sega was fucking up everything they could, PS came and did everything right. they came and underpriced Saturn, stole most 3rd parties, got support of Square and Enix, and it was basically starting to look very grim for Saturn that was basically same thing but way worse. then N64 came and outsold Saturn even further. both Sony and Ninty were fighting hard for US market, while Saturn failed to get traction in the West and only got moderate success in Japan where they only got small 3rd parties making anime games, jrpgs and eroge that wouldn't sell in US. so they fucked up all the momentum Genesis gave them in US and instead only got success in Japan where Mega Drive was never big and they'd get killed by Sony regardless because of Square and Enix.
all in all, their own errors and strong competition cost them all the advantage that Genesis gave them.

>>8526515
it was the lack of neurons

>>8526589
PS2 was announced March 1999 following DC's November 1998 debut, PS2's console and tech demo was revealed a couple weeks after DC's launch in September 1999, PS2 debuted March 2000, then launched in the US October 2000. Sega quit consoles January 2001

>>8526836
According to this >>8526564 video the Saturn was actually a big seller in Japan, so it's not like they really fucked that one too much outside of USA.

>>8526660
A bit of that and rushing out Saturn while game devs all around the world went "wtf sega". Releasing games they thought people wanted. And the first controller...

>>8526878
~6 million systems sold in Japan with a software attach rate of 6 isn't what I'd call a big seller, desu.

>>8526589
>>8526589
DC was relevant then for being the first next-gen console at the time. I was born during the Genesis era, but the DC was the first Sega console I owned, simply because there was no competition that year. Had PS2 come out at the same time, I probably wouldn't have owned a DC until after obsolescence

>>8526878
I dont know what kind of negroid keeps parroting that Saturn was "big" in Japan. it sold alright, got to a good start with Virtua Fighter 2 but it sold 5.8 million overall, PS did 21.59 mln. you can tell VF2 was its biggest success, none of its other games broke 1 mln copies in Japan.

>>8526923
even looking at that chart it beat the n64 in japan in half the time, lol
But I mean the real question is not how many it sold but how profitable it was for the company

>>8526936
yeah and it was basically nothing but losses because it was so expensive to manufacture and owners didn't buy enough games to make their money back. nintendo ultimately had the better strategy by cheaping out on the N64 hardware so they didn't take losses on hardware sales.

>>8526936
>even looking at that chart it beat the n64 in japan in half the time
it did, but N64 big games sold way more, and PS1 outsold both by a far margin. N64 sold the most in US anyway.

>>8526923
who were the 2000 japs buying a fucking jaguar?

it was (((bernie stolar)))

>>8526974
they said about Xbox that American military guys stationed in Japan bought it. I guess same guys could've bought Jaguar

>>8526779
Major retailers not selling the console thanks to the boneheaded early launch didn't help matters

>>8526923
JP Saturn was outselling JP PSX until the release of Final Fantasy 7. That's an "accomplishment" if you take into account that in the West, the Saturn was already losing big to the PSX the very year of its release.

>>8526996
I've seen heat a hundred times how have I never noticed this?

>>8526936
Mindshare is also important, and there's little evidence that Sega was widely known in Japan for anything outside of arcades/Virtua Fighter and Yakuza

>>8526970
this. n64 had a higher attach rate in japan which means it won there. sega saturn selling a few hundred thousand more consoles means nothing if your games aren't selling.

>>8526976
Stolar tried to save Sega by giving them their best console (the Dreamcast).

Sadly, it wasn't enough to undo the massive fuck-up that was the Shiturn.

>>8526986
American military bases ship American products like game consoles to the military version of Walmart. It's probably English teachers in Japan, or really diehard game enthusiasts

>>8527013
>JP Saturn was outselling JP PSX until the release of Final Fantasy 7.
more like, they went toe to toe, not like there was significant gap.
but lets not forget that 96 PSX wasnt all that. It had Parappa, Tekken 2, RE1, Arc the Lad 1/2, and thats about it. And Saturn was still riding off the VF2 success and Sega making other games in the same vein. when you compared the 2, Saturn didn't look half bad

>>8527051
>Saturn didn't look half bad
Hindsight 20/20 and all but I absolutely love the Saturn and it's library even tho I barely remember it existing back in the day.

Releasing the 32x

>>8527035
stolar shorted the stock with his wall street kike friends while intentionally running the company into the ground. Sega died because of Stolar. He had nothing to do with anything good about the dreamcast. He was a shark investor not a video game designer

>>8527013
even more so if you take into account that sega deliberately ramped down saturn production because of the high cost and low attach rate. they didn't want to sell to casuals because they'd lose money, but if they'd had a huge purse to blow through it could've paid off in the long run.

>To launch a new console, you really need 50-60 billion yen at the least. You have to sell those first million units. If your costs are 30,000 yen per unit, then that comes to 30 billion yen for 1 million units. And you have to design the hardware and create the electronics, make the molds and do the tooling, and this will soon use about 10 billion yen. And then you have to create the games and do advertising. You need about 500-600 people. Without all this, you can’t launch a home console. You can’t do it little by little. You really have to go all in.

>Sony had annual sales of 3 trillion yen. They made their own CD-ROM drives. They had their own semiconductor factories. Once when I was talking with Ken Kutaragi [the creator of the PlayStation], he said “Hideki-chan”—he refers to me using the “chan” diminutive—“Hideki-chan, there’s no way you can beat me. Where are you buying your processors? From Hitachi. From Yamaha. What about your CD-ROM drives? You’re buying everything. By buying from Hitachi, Hitachi is profiting. You can’t make anything yourselves. We can make everything ourselves, including custom parts. We have our own factories.” Near Nakashinden, they had a huge factory where they made audio equipment that they were using for the PlayStation. Their cost structure was completely different.

>“That’s the way it is, Hideki-chan,” Kutaragi told me. “So quit the hardware business. Why not just do software? We’ll give you favorable treatment.” He wanted us to go third party. We had been going for so long in the hardware business, for better or worse, and to go third party now? We had been half-heartedly successful in America once, and this made it impossible to quit the hardware business. Maybe if the Mega Drive, the Genesis, had been a failure, things would have been different. But we had a strange taste of success.

>>8527202
>At that time, Sega’s brand image was incredible. When you powered on a Sega console, ‘SEGA’ would always appear first. Even if it was a third party game from Namco (or anybody else), Sega’s name always appeared first, followed by Namco’s. So anybody that had a Sega console, it didn’t matter what game they played, they would see Sega’s name. This helped plant the Sega brand in peoples’ minds. This was incredibly effective. To go from that to a Sony third party… Well, we had already started so it was too late.

>I would have a polite dinner with Kutaragi about once every three months. He’d tell me that because we released a console last time, they would be the ones to do so this time. We are the same age, although he’s two or three months older. I would call him the polite “Kutaragi-san,” although sometimes I’d call him “Ken-chan.” Because I was two or three months younger, he’d say “Hideki-chan, please give up!”

>So we released the Saturn, and in the end, it came down to software. It’s obvious, but what do consumers look forward to? They want fun games. And that’s where we failed.

>>8527079
Saturn library wasn't bad, sure. That said, it stood no chance vs PS. Saturn had Sega Rally and Daytona? PS had Gran Turismo. Saturn had Virtua Fighter 2? PS got Tekken 2 and 3. Saturn had Sakura Taisen and a bunch of other neat JRPGs? PS had basically the biggest JRPGs in history. every advantage Saturn had with its pretty good games in Japan was rendered almost obsolete with PS.

>>8527148
that's bullshit and you know it. sega managed to rebound a bit in 1999 thanks to stolar's brilliant marketing campaign for the dreamcast which was even better than the genesis' and give it the most successful launch in sega's history.

the only reason the Stolarcast failed was because sega fired that great man.

>>8526976
he sucked but the saturn was already dead by that point after how hard the nips bungled it.