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/vr/ - Retro Games

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2663281 No.2663281 [Reply] [Original]

Bernie Stolar did nothing wrong.

There are literally no Saturn games he could have imported from Japan that would have saved the Western market, let alone made any difference whatsoever. He saved Sega a lot of money by not bothering.

Moving over to the Dreamcast as soon as possible was the right call.

>> No.2663284

>>2663281
ok

>> No.2663291

based bernie

>> No.2663295 [DELETED] 

All of /vr/ agrees with him, rpgs are for fat neckbeards and child molesters.

>> No.2663325

Really? Having games at all in the West couldn't save it?
http://www.gamefaqs.com/saturn/916393-sega-saturn/faqs/7161
>245 games

There's quite a bit that could have come over to help the Saturn's tiny-ass library out.

>> No.2663330

Stolar leaves Sony, and then the PSX JRPG boom takes off at the same time as an explosion of interest in anime takes off in America.

All of Saturn's interesting RPGs and anime-inspired 2D games get left in Japan because Stolar thinks Americans don't want that sort of thing.

It was a huge kick in the face to RPGamers to see stuff like Lunar and Grandia get their Playstation ports translated but not the Saturn originals.

>> No.2663334

He sucked with the Saturn but made up for it with the Dreamcast.
>no games could of saved the saturn
True but they could of at least imported
>Grandia (better verison)
>Bulk Slash
>Lunar
>Xmen vs SF (i see why they didn't but maybe with GOD tier marketing it could of done well)
But I'm sure most saturn games were made with mostly Japanese Audience in mind due to it being more successful there. If there were some others add it in because thats the only ones i can think of really.

>> No.2663338

>>2663330
>Lunar and Grandia
Oh please. Those games sold like shit on PS1. Coming out on Saturn would have produced even worse sales. Money down the toilet for Sega.

The only JRPGs with good sales on PS1 only came from Squaresoft and Sega had no access to them anywhere.

>> No.2663358

The real question is could Kalinske have saved the Saturn?

>> No.2663363

>>2663330
>All of Saturn's interesting RPGs and anime-inspired 2D games get left in Japan because Stolar thinks Americans don't want that sort of thing.
And he was right, it's only a niche minority that cares about that kind of stuff.

>> No.2663382

How hard did he lobby western developers to make games for the Saturn? Nintendo went after Factor 5 etc for the N64, did Sega actively try and sweet talk any? Imagine if they could have gotten the console exclusivity rights to Doom or Quake or hell even something like Myst.

>> No.2663393

>>2663338
Actually they sold very well on ps1 compared to other rpgs.
I think if Bernie Stolar got fired and someone else tried to do positive marketing they would have been more successful. See the dreamcast.

>> No.2663417

The DC was a mistake. Sega should have given up on home hardware earlier.

>> No.2663428

>>2663417
you were a mistake anon

>> No.2663430

>>2663417
that's retarded

>> No.2663432

>>2663393
>Actually they sold very well on ps1 compared to other rpgs.
Like what other RPGs?

>I think if Bernie Stolar got fired and someone else tried to do positive marketing they would have been more successful. See the dreamcast.
You do realize that Bernie organized all of that early marketing for the Dreamcast right?

>> No.2663434

>>2663281
Bernie Stolar said they were done with the Saturn.
You don't tell the public you're done with a system.

>> No.2663436

Bernie had nothing to do with it. The 32x is what fucking killed Sega. To some extent, the Sega CD was also a fucking stupid choice.

Sega Neptune should have launched with CD capability, a flat upgrade from the Genesis, around the time the Super Nintendo came out, and they should have released Saturn right before the N64. Sega's real competitor was Nintendo, it was never Sony.

The marketing strategy was fucked up from the get go. They frankensteined a system with a CD addon and a 32x addon and then rushed out Saturn.

>> No.2663441

>>2663436
They should never have done a CD addon to begin with. It's still the best selling addon to date, but if they had done
>Sega Genesis - 1989
>Sega Neptune - 1993
>Sega Saturn - 1996

We may have seen a totally different outcome, like
>Sega Dreamcast - 2001 - Launches AFTER the PS2
>With DVD player, and even better hardware

>> No.2663443

>>2663441
>With DVD player, and even better hardware
It's called the Xbox.

>> No.2663445

>>2663443
Whatever.

I'm just saying that Sega wanted to release too many consoles too quickly and instead of attempting to "frankenstein" as that one anon put it the Genesis for so long, they should have released Genesis, Neptune, and Saturn 3 years apart.

>> No.2663449

>>2663432
They sold better than Suikoden at least.
True but he only knew how to market sports games and normalfag shit which is great but what about all the other games on the system?

>> No.2663450

>>2663436
>The 32x is what fucking killed Sega
Nah, the 32X definitely did reputation damage to Sega, but the financial kiss-of-death was definitely done by the Saturn. It was Sega trying to price-match the Saturn with the PS1 despite the hardware being substantially more expensive. They were taking Xbox original tier losses per console, except without Microsoft style cash reserves.

>the Sega CD was also a fucking stupid choice
Sega CD was a bit silly, but it wasn't the big commercial failure that people seen to be taught now that it was. Considering it was an add-on that cost double the base console, it sold pretty fucking reasonably. It was always designed to be an attachment for hardcore gamers and rich kids, never for the mainstream.

>> No.2663453

>>2663445
I agree, anon. They should've held on to their normal consoles and stuck it out. Their story is literally a lesson to any console company today.

>> No.2663454

>>2663436
A Sega Neptune with CD built in would have cost like $800 in 1991.

>> No.2663456

>>2663281
Yeah the move was for the best considering the bad taste left in everyone's mouth from 32X/CD but I think had we'd seen a push in 97 from the Saturn they might have been able to push more units.

>> No.2663461

>>2663454
I don't think so.

>> No.2663467

>>2663454
I think that anon means take the Sega CD which was 299, beef it up a little, and put a cartridge port on it and call it the Neptune.

>> No.2663471

>>2663449
Not so sure about that, Suikoden at least got a European release, Lunar didn't. Nevertheless, selling more than Suikoden's not really much of an achievement. Not that the western Saturn was totally starved of JRPGs. Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shining The Holy Ark are damn solid. Shining Force III is still one of the best tactical JRPGs. But none of these games have normie appeal. Final Fantasy VII at least was able to bamboozle the normies with its cinematics into buying the damn game.

>True but he only knew how to market sports games and normalfag shit
Normalfag shit is your bread and butter console market. You can't be successful without them. The only reason Dreamcast sold as good as it did was because Bernie managed to set up that amazing range of Sega Sports titles that blew EA away (at least for a time).

>> No.2663480

There was, of course, another possible outcome. In the early nineties, after Sony had developed a CD-Rom drive for Nintendo’s SNES console only to be rebuffed at the last minute, Sega of America approached the spurned consumer electronics giant about working together on a new machine. Sony had its own game development studio, Sony Imagesoft, based in California, and it was making games for the Sega Mega CD. A relationship was there. Kalinske saw the benefit, he understood both the marketing and development talent that Sony could bring. He saw Nintendo waiting in the wings with its next machine – which would become the N64. He thought an alliance could win out. But according to him, Sega Japan turned it down outright.

>> No.2663485

>>2663480
>SS PlayStation
>Sega Sony PlayStation

Set Sail for adventure.

I'm glad the deal didn't go through, because Sega and Sony would have absolutely obliterated Nintendo.

Imagine a Saturn Playstation hybrid with it's foot in all the best 2D games and arcade machines in the world, plus everything Sony did with the PS1.

>> No.2663486

>>2663281
Pretty much.

Everyone gives Bernie shit about Saturn, but he had nothing to do with its demise. He just took it out back and put it out of its misery.

The DC launch was a huge success. The PS1 launch, which he was also involved with, was a huge success. He left SEGA not long after the DC launch.

Tell me why Bernie is bad again?

>>2663325
Nope; you're assuming that non-weeaboo non-faggots would play stupid shit from Japan. Surprise: they wouldn't

Disclaimer: I play stupid shit from Japan and am a weeaboo faggot

>>2663330
see also: >>2663338 and >>2663363
those games sold poorly and the truth is they don't sell in the US. Moreover, correlation != causation, do you have a source to back your claims that Bernie was responsible for these policies, other than Internet speculation?

>>2663358
no, because he was there for that shitshow of a launch and couldn't stop it. he also tried to save them from Japan's shit hardware design by bringing in SGI, but Japan said no.

Japan killed Sega, don't ever forget that. This is pretty well documented fact from tons of people on both sides. Game Over and Service Games are good sources here.

>>2663382
No one wanted to develop for Saturn because it was a nightmare to develop for. You basically had to write everything in asm and optimize the shit out of the hardware. PS1 had tons of free precompiled libraries and you could write everything in C.

Who do you think devs gravitated toward?

>>2663393
Bernie was at Sega during the Dreamcast (and Sony's) wildly successful launches.
Do you have a source for Lunar, Grandia, etc. selling well?

>>2663434
except for that time that Sega told people they were done with the Genesis, 32X and the Sega CD.

>>2663436
Sega CD wasn't a bad decision nor did it contribute to Sega's demise. The 32X absolutely did; it fragmented market share, confused the consumer and was a huge distraction from the get-go.

>> No.2663489

Daily reminder that it was a rumor that Bernie wanted no 2D games or JRPG's, and it was Sega of Japan that forbid certain games from coming to the West that they deemed wouldn't sell well here.

>> No.2663490

>>2663441
Releasing after PS2 would have doomed the console even sooner. Jumping the gun helped Sega tremendously with Dreamcast. They obviously stood no chance once PS2 hit the market; how do you think they would have somehow done better with their competitor already available and established?

>>2663449
"normalfags" make money, not idiot loser nerds like us

>>2663450
While you're right that they were incurring heavy losses on each Saturn sold, I think they could have potentially made up for it with software sales, but they didn't have good software support... due to shit hardware design, and burning developers with all of their stupid add-ons (like 32X).

It's probably a chicken and an egg problem, to be honest. It wasn't just one thing, but a combination of factors.

>> No.2663496

>>2663471
lmao at bamboozle. I just think Sega should have tried to appeal to both normies & weebs so they could have had both markets. Saturn & Dreamcast were weeb heaven. Sega should have used that to their advantage in the anime boom.

>> No.2663502

Bernie was a scapegoat that took all the blame. Everything shitty that happened post-Genesis was the fault of SoJ, even pushing the 32X.

>> No.2663503

>>2663490
>I think they could have potentially made up for it with software sales, but they didn't have good software support
yep it's pretty much that, if you're gonna take losses on hardware you better have a lot of software ready to go with it

it's why the PS3 lost sony like 3 billion in its first couple of years, they fell into the saturn trap

>> No.2663505
File: 39 KB, 700x613, AVENGE ME.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2663505

>> No.2663510

>>2663486
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/sales-figures-for-psx-rpgs.75032373/
only 200k but thats pretty good for an rpg

>> No.2663513
File: 438 KB, 2249x2241, KILL ME.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2663513

>>2663505

>> No.2663517

>>2663496
Dreamcast I think also had a good range of games for normies. Practically everything about the execution of the Dreamcast was good. I don't think it was the PS2 that killed the Dreamcast, it was the Saturn. Sega's financial situation caught up to them by 2001 and were forced to drop the console because of that.

Dreamcast sold good, but it would have literally had to sell faster than iPhones in order to beat Sega's credit crunch. It was a doomed plan from the start, sadly.

>> No.2663524

I agree OP because he pushed Dreamcast into reality but when he did a piss poor job of handling the Saturn. Of course it wasn't going to be saved but he killed it way too early.

>> No.2663526

>>2663517
>normies

>> No.2663539

>>2663517
>Practically everything about the execution of the Dreamcast was good
...except in Australia

http://www.retrogamingaus.com/wiki/index.php?title=Dreamcast

warning: much schadenfreude and hilarity at australia's expense

>> No.2663645

>>2663281
>Jews are hypocrites
>Therefore Hitler did nothing wrong

>SJWs are hypocrites
>Therefore let's act just like them, but in reverse

>Bernie Stolar was just a scape goat
>Therefore he did nothing wrong

4chan.
Contrarianism for it's own sake at its finest.

>> No.2663646

>>2663645
>thinking in black and white
>refusing to get redpilled

>> No.2663661

>>2663646
>>>/pol/
plz go

>> No.2663664

>>2663646
So you deride thinking in B&W but support thinking only in B?

>> No.2663772

>>2663441
This would have equally been bad for Sega, just not as bad. Consumers don't have the money or inclination to dump over $500 (in today's dollars) into a new system every 3-4 years. For>>2663441
that sake reason, striking a balance between being first to the market and having the best tech is important. Sega routinely released their systems staggered a half gen from their competitors, which made people stick with their old system until the next full upgrade would come around.

They needed to go:
-genesis (1989)
-saturn (1995. psx was nothing until 1997 and the Genesis held its own against SNES).
-Dreamcast (1999-2000, beat PS2 to the market).

>> No.2663885

>>2663772
What is your reason to delay the MD to 89? Because they already had the SG-1000 in 83 and the MK3 in 85?

>> No.2663960

>>2663772
Launch the Dreamcast in 1999 with a DVD drive.
It would be more expensive, but it would beat the PS2 to the market.

>> No.2664136

>>2663885
What?
The MD was released in 1989.

>> No.2664139

>>2663772
I disagree, I think that the Neptune would have been a much better seller if it had been both the Sega CD and the 32x, while also allowing people to keep their Genesis.

Hell, make Neptune a 32x with CD capability and Genesis capability that comes out in 1994 (worried about the Jaguar, I guess) and don't release the Saturn at all, go straight to the Dreamcast with DVD player in 99.

>> No.2664141

>>2664139
Anon that would never work because it would not have been able to compete if it wasn't 64 bit.

>> No.2664143

>>2664139
>>2664141
The only solution is skipping the 32x entirely.

Gensis 98, Sega CD 1992, Saturn 1995.

>> No.2664147

>>2664143
89, not 98.

>> No.2664474

>>2663281
Wasn't this the guy who tried to ban JRPGs from coming over to the west? Or was he really just a scapegoat?

>> No.2664491

>>2664474
The latter. Look into the Grandia controversy for the actual reason behind the Saturn's failure in the west.

>> No.2664492

Why didn't Sega just use 32X technology for their next portable system instead of making it an add-on to an almost dead console?

>> No.2664494

>>2664136
Late 88 actually.

>> No.2664495

>>2664491
So even when he was with Sony, it wasn't actually his doing?

>> No.2664524

>>2664495
that wasn't him either, devs were having to coerce sony to publish 2d games like konami saying no MGS if no SOTN, or capcom saying no RE if no MM8 etc. long after bernie quit sony

>> No.2664548

>>2664139
You can disagree all you want, it just shows that you don't understand anything about markets.

How loyal do you think customers (mostly parents and grandparents of teenagers) are going to be to a company that has a planned obsolescence cycle of 3 years with a piece of hardware?

"Johnny I just bought you that 35x thingamagig last Christmas. You are not getting another $300 video game console."

There's a reason that Ninendo, Sony, and eventually MS had a 5 year ish cycle with their consoles.

Also, the following is retarded business:

> Release a console that is an amalgamation of cartridge and CDs so you drive you per unit costs through the roof, causing you to either be priced out of the market vs. the SNES and eventually the PSX or to eat an astronomical loss on every unit.

Sega needed to release fewer consoles. They also should have seen the writing on the wall wrt the PSX and made the Saturn more 3rd party friendly. As it was, Sega and Nintendo figured that they had the market cornered and thought they could make every developer play by their silly rules. They were wrong.

>> No.2664553

>>2664143
I don't think that the Sega CD was even necessary. The SNES was very late to the 16-bit market and didn't offer all that much over people who had already played the Sega Genesis for years. The Genesis could have held out for a couple of years on market share alone as long as good games kept being released for the console.

The next leap should have been a full push in the mid 90s into 3D gaming. But what actually happened is you had Sega fiddling around with poorly designed consoles and Nintendo delaying its "Ultra 64" system so much that consumers had no choice but to turn to Sony's PSX. Once Sony was able to get Square and Konami to develop FF7 and MGS for the PSX, that was its gateway to being the king of video game consoles.

>> No.2664593

>>2663281
Stolar was a yes man for SoJ. He was told to prepare the ground for the DC and silently kill the Saturn. He did his job.

The root of the problem was that Sega themselves completely hated the Saturn, and wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Which sucks, because if it survived as long as the PS1, it could've done some absolutely wonderful looking games.

As for this:

>There are literally no Saturn games he could have imported from Japan that would have saved the Western market,

The point wouldn't have been saving the Saturn, but making more cash on it while preparing for the DC. They could not have saved their western market, but they could have kept it from falling into Sonys hands with zero opposition for a good 3 years. This would've given them even stronger DC support (both from devs and gamers), and this way Dreamcast sales would not have completely halted the second Sony paper launched the PS2.

And they still could've brought over a lot of titles to minimize those losses. Grandia is the most obvious one, Sakura Taisen would have been very odd but may have worked, Shining Force III Scenario 2-3 would have been lovely, Dragon Force 2 would have sold okay too, Bomberman Fight too, and if they can forget their no-2d policy for a moment then they could have brought over a shit load of AAA titles: Castlevania SOTN, SF Alpha 3, XMen vs SF, Metal Slug, Thunderforce V, just to name some of the titles that would have sold on name alone.

>> No.2664613

>>2663358
>The real question is could Kalinske have saved the Saturn?

If he was allowed to? He probably could. But he wasn't allowed. He was told to do the catastrophic launch, even though he did not want to. By 1996, his job was basically to sit in his office and look at the wall.

>>2663382
They had 6 months exclusive deal for Tomb Raider, once that expired Sony bought exclusive console rights for it for a few years. It expired some time around the DC launch.

>>2663486
>You basically had to write everything in asm and optimize the shit out of the hardware. PS1 had tons of free precompiled libraries and you could write everything in C.

Not correct. Sega used the best C compilers available, and had shit load of pre-compiled libraries too.

The problem was that using all three cores (SH2x2 + SCU DSP) was difficult as fuck, and the video hardware had frankly ridiculous limitations. And you had to do software T&L, which limited you to the efficiency of the devkits for 3d tasks. Doing a better job was a herculean task due to the multi-cpu arch.

If you developed your own engine around the limitations of the video hardware, you could get to do breath taking stuff on par with PS1 and N64 games, but Lobotomy was perhaps the only one who managed to do that, and it bankrupted them.

>> No.2664626

>>2663505
Neptune wouldn't have been a bad concept, if they didn't kill all 32x software support after like a goddamn month.

Maybe make the 32x have real polygon hardware (even if it is just a Saturn VDP1+2), then keep the 32x + Neptune on the market until 1996, and during that time develop an entirely new 32bit hardware and launch it in 1997.

>> No.2664646

>>2664613
didn't Lobotomy do the Saturn Duke3D port?

what a cool fucking port
the lighting and Quake-tilt are the best things

>>2664626
honestly, if the Saturn wasn't coming out, Sega could have probably had a successful time with the 32X
it's not even like people didn't want it, it's just the Saturn was busy being released and quite a bit better and then Sega dropped support after rushing everything and alienated consumers and then they went and fucked up the Saturn launch and alienated retailers

looking back, I really have no idea how Sega managed to just consistently do everything wrong at that time, what the fuck

>>2663486
>Nope; you're assuming that non-weeaboo non-faggots would play stupid shit from Japan. Surprise: they wouldn't
at a time when people were increasingly interested in such?

also, there's actually a decent bit of shit that really did need to come over and was PS1 exclusive in the West for no fucking reason

>> No.2664661

What could have saved the Saturn was if they actually launched it when they meant to launch it, developers wouldn't be mad and chain stores would carry more systems and games, and there would have been more publicity.

>> No.2664664

>>2664646
>didn't Lobotomy do the Saturn Duke3D port?

They did Exhumed, then used its engine to port Duke 3d and Quake to Saturn.

However Exhumed had a shitty publisher (PIE Interactive) in the USA so it barely sold anything, and it took nonstop lobbying from the british Saturn magazine for the game to be really picked off in Europe. There, at least, it sold respectably, even got extra print runs.

Their programmer wrote the game engine from scratch to the Saturn, and considered it his baby, that's why it ended up so well. Also clocked in lots of unpaid overtime to improve it.

Duke3d and Quake were massively underbid compared to the amount of work they needed (they had to re-write the games from scratch on their own engine, and rebuild every gameplay features and levels). This caused their financial problems to go from awful to straight up bankrupt. Their team wasn't paid for months at times.

And also, it turns out that their Saturn ports were SO good, that it caused companies to shy away from them as they thought they were too close-knit to Sega.
And the Quake port turned out so good, that Sony straight up refused to release Quake 1 for the Playstation, to avoid comparisons. Even though multiple teams tried making ports, including Lobotomy themselves submitting a version that ran at almost twice the framerate as the Saturn port.

>> No.2664718
File: 123 KB, 604x426, dreamcast_dvd.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2664718

>>2663960
>Launch the Dreamcast in 1999 with a DVD drive.
The number of people who bought a PS2 to watch DVD movies is MASSIVELY overestimated. By the time the PS2 came to market in the west you could get a standalone player for a lot cheaper than a PS2.

Sega could never have got DVD at the low price Sony did, because unlike Sony they were not involved in the technology's development. Also the Dreamcast would have needed an MPEG-2 decoding block included in the hardware. All you would have ended up with is a Dreamcast that costs $400 USD.

Not to mention, not that many factories in the world were pressing DVDs at that stage. Possible game shortages.

>> No.2664743

>>2664718
>The number of people who bought a PS2 to watch DVD movies is MASSIVELY overestimated. By the time the PS2 came to market in the west you could get a standalone player for a lot cheaper than a PS2.

Nah, not really. Standalone DVD players still cost quite a lot back then, and the PS2 had the advantage of being able to play all PS1 games. So you could pawn your old console, and get a massive as fuck multimedia upgrade for your home.

The Dreamcast was much, much less impressive in that regard. DVD support would have helped greatly, and also would have allowed for better quality ingame FMVs.
I don't think that the DVD license, drive, and decoder would have pushed it to $400. Maybe $350 at most. $300 if Stolar can still pass his announce-it-cheaper-against-SOJ's-wishes trick.

>> No.2664797

>>2664718
>The number of people who bought a PS2 to watch DVD movies is MASSIVELY overestimated.

I wasn't even aware that was a thing. Enthusiasts already had DVD players, and casual movie viewers weren't going to buy a video game toy to watch movies.

>> No.2664983

>>2664718
>>2664743
>>2664797


If you go to 13m45s, they basically tell you how insane the DVD Market was in Japan and it was sparked by the PS2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMXlyzyyLlE#t=13m45s

Unless you're saying they made it all up as an excuse or something.

>> No.2665004

>>2664983
sounds like an anecdote, not evidence

>> No.2665024

was bernie the sony faggot who said murricans didn't want 2d games?

and holy shit you're terrible at business if you think releasing any games -- any good game -- would be worse than nothing at all

>> No.2665058

>>2664983
>citing G4 as a source
look, PS2 obviously and undeniably increased DVD market share and consumers.

people were NOT buying PS2s to play DVDs. If we want to use anecdotes, I was working for a big box electronics retailer during that era, specifically selling home video. we had entry level dvd players for as little as $79. compare that to $300 for a PS2.

guess what people bought to play DVDs
hint: not the PS2

>>2664664
it wasn't just because it was "his baby", it was because Lobotomy was compromised of extremely talented programmers who were able to squeeze a lot of performance out of the saturn's idiotic hardware design. you basically had to write everything in asm to get respectable performance, not to mention fully utilize the two SH2s and the VDP(s)... what a clusterfuck.

there's a really good archived interview with Lobotomy somewhere where they speak at length about what a nightmare the Saturn is to work with, but how it's perfectly capable of matching if not surpassing the PS1... unfortunately, the time and level of technical skill required to achieve this was unrealistic in virtually all cases.

>>2664661
lol

>>2664646
anime? popular? in 1996? anime fandom hadn't blown up at that point. I'd know. It was still quite niche.

also, sega of japan kept doing everything wrong, that's how.

>>2664613
so you basically just confirmed what I said, except with more words and not admitting what I said was true.

I never said you _couldnt_ write saturn games in C, nor that they didnt offer libraries; what I did say was that to get performance on par with PS1, you had to write everything at the lowest possible level (read: asm) and precompiled libraries were of no use in such a case.

my point with saying that PS1 had tons of precompiled libraries and you could basically do a decent job with mostly C was that any group of monkeys could easily churn out a game... and they often did.

even with sega's developer offerings. that hardware was a nightmare.

>> No.2665081

>>2664797
>casual movie viewers weren't going to buy a video game toy to watch movies

Some kids used the "it can read disc-based movies" argument to pressure parents into buying the console. It worked to some extend. Heck, one of my friend got a PS2 by tricking his parents into thinking it wasn't a game console at home (and would then only play games when they were away).

>> No.2665432

>>2664492
Because there was still the problem of battery life and screen.

The Game Gear wasn't exactly perfect, giving it some more memory and processing power isn't really the solution when you have a poor screen and short battery life.

>> No.2665486

>>2664718
> People didn't buy a PS2 exclusively to play DVDs, ergo the capability to play DVDs is not important.

That's not necessarily true. If the Saturn were released in 2000 to compete with the PS2, the ability to play DVDs at the same price point is a perk that could have put the PS2 over the edge. If I'm a teenager or a college student with limited funds and my choice is between a PS2 for $300, a DC for $300 + DVD player for $80, I'm going to pick the PS2. It can serve as an all-purpose media device. Granted the concept of a console being used as such was fairly new and innovative at the time, as no one thought of gaming consoles as anything more than something to play games until then. But I think that it was an important feature to serve as a 'tie breaker' in the market. The only way for DC to compete with the PS2 without DVD capability is to be $50-100 cheaper per unit.

Also, while DVDs weren't really mainstream in 2000, they certainly were by 2003-2004, which is still well within the console's life cycle.

Nintendo read the tech market successfully with the Wii - the Wii didn't support HDTV, and only 15-20% of households had one at launch. They were able to shave substantial costs off the per unit price by not supporting what was, at the time, a niche tech. However, the 7th console gen lasted longer than the typical 5 years, and HDTVs became standard in households. This allowed the PS3 and XBox 360 to still obtain games that looked good on these TVs while the Wii was obsolete by 2010.

>> No.2665510

>>2665486
> If the Saturn were released in 2000 to compete with the PS2,

I meant DC*

>> No.2665515

>>2665486
>. If I'm a teenager or a college student with limited funds and my choice is between a PS2 for $300, a DC for $300 + DVD player for $80, I'm going to pick the PS2
Yeah, except the thing was that you could pick up a Dreamcast + DVD player for the exact same price as a PS2. Read that news excerpt image above. In the UK, you could get a Dreamcast + DVD player for 300 pounds. At the time, the PS2 cost 300 pounds.

The only advantage from a DVD playing perspective was that the PS2 was an all-in-one unit. Getting a separate DVD playing unit was otherwise better since it came with a remote, and front/back inputs.

Also there was absolutely no way Sega could hold the launch of the Dreamcast back to the year 2000. They did not have the cash reserves and the Saturn had left them in debt. Furthermore, from a pure attrition point of view they could not go head to head against Sony. Dreamcast HAD to be both out before PS2 and cheaper to boot. PS1 vs Saturn was only favorable for Sega initially because Sega had a good reputation and Sony had no reputation whatsoever, but by the time the Dreamcast came out Sega had a very negative reputation and Sony had a very positive one.

Sorry, but not putting DVD on the Dreamcast was the right call, and quite possibly, the only feasible realistic call.

>> No.2665543

>>2665058
>you basically had to write everything in asm to get respectable performance, not to mention fully utilize the two SH2s and the VDP(s)... what a clusterfuck.

Later devkits had C libraries that took advantage of both SH2s, as well as the DSP.

The main problem was the VDP1 being completely RETARDED. Here's an example. If you wanted to do transparency and gouraud shading, you had to use RGB colour, since all that either did was adding pixel values together (lightning is just done by applying gouraud shading). However you only had 512k vram, so if you wanted good looking textures, you had to use palettes instead of RGB because they were half the size.

Palettes were NOT stored in the VDP1 however. They were applied by the VDP2.
And if you did gouraud shading or transparency, the VDP1 still modified the pixel data as if it was RGB (it had no concept of "colour" as such). So if you tried doing shading or transparency, it garbled the palette entries of a pixel and you got garbage.

One up side was that if you used red colour only shading, it modified the part of the pixel data that fell into the same place as a palette entry. So if you used red only gouraud shading, you could ramp the palette entry value up by a defined amount. Then you saved extra palette entries (for every pixel...) that corresponded to the "lit" colour of that pixel.

And that's just one clusterfuck example. Funnily, this was used as far back as 1994, since the VU cubes on the BIOS do this exact trick.

You still couldn't do polygon transparency on palette colour though, since that would modify all pixel values and corrupt your graphic, and I think the system refused to apply transparency if you were in 8-bit mode anyway.

>> No.2665554

>>2665058
> to get performance on par with PS1, you had to write everything at the lowest possible level (read: asm) and precompiled libraries were of no use in such a case.

You COULD get good quality using C libraries, the last known devkits have tons of them. If the Saturn hadn't been killed early, it would have had even better ones (the PS1 got better devkits because it was on the market for longer - they didn't have the performance analyser until 1998 for example).

PS1 libraries were of more use simply because the hardware was stronger. Dedicated T&L unit and a much more straightforward polygon gpu.

Simply using ASM did not give you more performance. The problem was that the Saturn video hardware was a clusterfuck, and you had to ridiculous optimizations to get, say, coloured lightning for example. You could do this in either C or ASM but you had to do it either way, and most people did not.

>> No.2665570

>>2665554
>Dedicated T&L unit
Saturn had SCU which was a DSP with T&L functions (although it wasn't totally dedicated to T&L, it could do other things as well) but I think accessing it was a bit of a clusterfuck.

Software T&L does has its advantages since you can do all kinds of crazy customizable stuff, while on PS1 you are stuck with GTE's hardcoded way of doing things. N64's approach was the best though, with its hardware-accelerated T&L unit that could be reprogrammed at the microcode level.

But I guess GTE's strength was its simplicity. Nobody had time for customizable shit.

>> No.2665571

>>2665515
> In the UK

Give no fucks.

> The only advantage from a DVD playing perspective was that the PS2 was an all-in-one unit. Getting a separate DVD playing unit was otherwise better since it came with a remote, and front/back inputs.

We're still going back to a time with CRTs that have limited jacks. More than one unit means disconnecting stuff behind your TV.

Also, in 1999 the PS1 was still in full force. The DC didn't offer enough over the PS1 to make people abandon it in favor of a better system.

You also have to keep in mind that sales of consoles snowball. Some of the biggest sales periods are the Christmas following the initial launch year when there are enough games available to warrant an upgrade. So it goes like this:

> 1999: Oh, that DC might be interesting, but I'm going to wait a bit to see how Sega is handling this after the abortion that was the 32x/Saturn.
> 2000: Oh, that DC still looks kinda interesting, but now the PS2 is out and it has a DVD player. Plus it will have all of the franchises that I have grown to like on the PS1. I'll just save up and get that instead.

So again, the DVD capability is a tie breaker. What really lead to DC not doing so hot is the several systems that Sega botched before. It also lost 3rd party support to Sony.

Would DVD support have saved the DC? No. The DC was dead as soon as Sega was unable to court some major franchises to its systems after the Genesis. It suffered Nintendo's fate with the GCN, just several years earlier.

>> No.2665576

>>2665571
>We're still going back to a time with CRTs that have limited jacks. More than one unit means disconnecting stuff behind your TV.
You probably could plug your Dreamcast in through that external DVD player though.

>Also, in 1999 the PS1 was still in full force. The DC didn't offer enough over the PS1 to make people abandon it in favor of a better system.
Well, wasn't really Sega's fault that the PS1 was still doing so well. Dreamcast was a brand new console so it had to go up against a very established library. At least the graphics were really fucking impressive, and a massive leap over PS1. Even the most dim-witted consumer could tell that.

>The DC was dead as soon as Sega was unable to court some major franchises to its systems after the Genesis
Pretty much this.

I'd also argue that Sega spent too much time and money on niche style games that had no market potential like Shenmue. If they were going to go without good third-party support it meant that their first-party support would have to be absolutely perfect. And while they made some bloody good games during that period, regular consumers just weren't interested in stuff like Jet Set Radio. The cel-shaded style just looked too weeb for them.

>> No.2665589

>>2665576
> You probably could plug your Dreamcast in through that external DVD player though.

ehhh

> Well, wasn't really Sega's fault that the PS1 was still doing so well. Dreamcast was a brand new console so it had to go up against a very established library. At least the graphics were really fucking impressive, and a massive leap over PS1. Even the most dim-witted consumer could tell that.

It's Sega's fault that they misread the market and were still treating Nintendo as enemy #1. Also, like Nintendo they felt that they could just make every 3rd party developer play by their rules, which paved the way for Sony to recruit them.

The thing with the DC is that it was obsolete the minute the PS2 hit the market. The PS2, for only $100 more, could play DVDs, had better graphics rendering, faster processing, and even had internet capability (even though this was not important at the time, it was still there). That's why Sega at least would have had a fighting chance by delaying the DC by a year and including more modern tech - including the capability to play DVDs. But they ALSO needed to take a page out of the PS1's book and make themselves more developer friendly. It would have taken some time, but with a modern system and more open architecture, the DC could have gotten Konami, Square, Capcom, etc. to develop multi-plats and maybe some exclusives. These companies are in it to make money, after all, and they give no fucks who they develop for.

Nintendo ultimately fell by the same fate, they were just larger and had better 1st party franchises to slow the bleeding. Nintendo was also good enough to actually turn a profit on console sales, something Sega hadn't done throughout the 90s. The N64 had a very small library of games and the GCN had nothing worth playing outside of the Metroid Prime series, Smash Bros, and RE4.

>> No.2665629
File: 160 KB, 257x245, 1344957503246.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2665629

>>2665589
>the GCN had nothing worth playing outside of the Metroid Prime series, Smash Bros, and RE4.

>> No.2665652

>>2665589
Now hold up

>had better graphics rendering, faster processing,
This wasn't immediately apparent with the PS2. In fact, early PS2 games famously look worse than the Dreamcast games of the time.
>even had internet capability
Dreamcast came with internet support out-of-the-box. PS2 didn't.
>make themselves more developer friendly
But the Dreamcast WAS developer friendly. It is regarded as one of the easiest consoles to make games for with a fantastic development kit. It'e the PS2 which was regarded as the ugly development stepchild of the Saturn and N64.

>more open architecture
...But the Dreamcast's architecture was open. Thanks to Windows CE support you could easily port PC games to the platform.

>> No.2665660

>>2665570
>Saturn had SCU which was a DSP with T&L functions

SCU was a chip that each hardware subsystem used to control commands and DMA to each other. It also had a second chip inside, the DSP.

And it was not a T&L chip. It was a DSP, that you could set up to do T&L functions (mostly matrix operations). But it had limited instruction sets (no divider), lots of quirks that you had to get around, and the documentation was either lacking or bogus or both.

Not all games used it to do T&L. Some used it simply to copy data. Some used it as a timer.

The DSP was only faster at transform functions if you managed to abuse all of its quirks and run multiple instructions in parallel on it (that's what it was designed to do). This was extremely difficult to do.

GTE on the other hand was a toolbox of pre-defined, super useful tools, and it was also extremely fast for its task (peak polygon transform was listed as 1 million!). It may have been hard coded, but it had all the right tools hard coded to it, so you could get cracking at games immediately.

>> No.2665662

>>2665629
Yea, all those great games must be why it sold 7/50ths of amount of units as PS2.

>> No.2665665

>>2665662

"B-B-BUT THE 150 MILLION CONSOLES WERE SOLD AS A CHEAP DVD PLAYER"

>> No.2665668

>>2665576
>>2665571
PS2 was also backwards compatible.

This meant that it was a straight upgrade path for the 100 million PS1 users worldwide.

>> No.2665671

>>2665515
Sony had a DVD remote peripheral for the PS2 if I'm not mistaken.

>> No.2665687
File: 19 KB, 300x179, horizontal_stand.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2665687

>>2665671
Sure, but it was another costly PS2 accessory you had to get seperately.

Who can remember pic related?

>> No.2665698

>>2665652
> Early lifecycle software development is representative of a console's hardware capability.
> The aforementioned unimportant internet capability has an asterisk I felt compelled to tell you about.
> A console that requires developers to craft games with more limited graphics and specifications is cross-platform friendly.

No, kill yourself, and no.

>> No.2665738

>>2665698
>A console that requires developers to craft games with more limited graphics and specifications is cross-platform friendly.
Are you talking about the PS2? Because when it came to texturing, it was more limited hardware than the Dreamcast. Smaller VRAM, and no support for texture compression. Dreamcast also has built-in support for things like anisotropic filtering and bump mapping, while PS2 doesn't.

Literally the only outright advantage PS2 has over Dreamcast is it can generate shitloads more polygons. It's worse or at least more difficult to use in every other way.

Also casual gamers don't give a shit about future console potential, only currently available software. And until Christmas 2001 Dreamcast games looked better than PS2 games.

>> No.2665765

>>2665662
You can't judge a console by the number of sales, that's why underrated video games is a thing.

>> No.2665772

Just because the PS2 had no games for a year and the only thing to do on it was play movies, doesn't mean people bought a PS2 for that reason. The people claiming Dreamcast failed for lack of a DVD drive have no clue what they're talking about. It was already doing much better in the US than Saturn ever did. Sega was already too deep into financial troubles and when Sammy bailed them out they gutted everything. After this happened I remember seeing blowout sales of games, systems, everything. They sold off all inventory and completely restructured under Sammy leadership. Little by little Sammy sucked the life out of Sega and their talent left for greener pastures. After they were done, the only thing Sega was good for was its name as a publisher.

>> No.2665774

>>2665687
Aww shit, I always wanted that. It's completely useless, but looks so stylish to me somehow.

>> No.2665775

>>2665687
I don't remember the price, but it's a basic DVD remote, it can't have been very expensive (it's a very basic piece of consumer electronics, something Sony has had experience with for decades), and it's not like you couldn't make due with the DS2 for a while and then get the remote.

I fail to see the point of that stand though, it's not like you couldn't just lay the console on it's side without it.

>> No.2665785

>>2665772
I would also like to add, Sega Saturn had 6 years of life in Japan and the Dreamcast was discontinued after 3. Dreamcast still managed to sell more units.

>> No.2665786

>>2665772
Yeah, the 32X had already laid the foundation for a lot of their bad economical situation.

Sega of Japan also seemed to make some very quaint decisions, often to spite Sega of America, which feels kind of like cutting the brakelines on the car the guy you don't like carpools in, when you yourself are the driver of that carpool.

>> No.2665789

>>2665738
PS2 had hardware quirks that made up for all of that.

For example you could copy textures from system memory to video memory FASTER than the DC could texture from vram. But it was a while before people figured out how to do that, and until then, they had to use small framebuffers to compensate: hence why early PS2 games all had jaggies.

As for DC, 1 game used bump mapping in 1 scene in total, since it hogged the vram; and PS2 could do any kind of shading in software and do it fairly well due to how much memory bandwidth it had. At least one PS2 game used normal mapping for example.

>Literally the only outright advantage PS2 has over Dreamcast is it can generate shitloads more polygons.

PS2 had fully customizable vector coprocessors, and it had memory bandwidth far in excess of anything of the era (and much closer to later generation consoles). It was tricky to get maximum performance out of it, but it that maximum performance was quite staggering.

The main advantage of the DC was that it was dirt simple to set up and get going. Kind of how the PS1 was.

DC was a wonderful machine with a strong lineup, but the PS2 hardware is inarguably stronger in every way.

>> No.2665795

>>2665772
As good as the Dreamcast was doing in the US, it totally bombed in PAL territories (particularly in Australia). This was due to hilarious mismanagement.

These were places where the Master System strongly beat the NES, and the Mega Drive strongly beat the SNES.

It's funny how Sega's dominant territory moved around so much. With Master System and Mega Drive Europe was their base, with Saturn Japan was their base and with Dreamcast USA was their base.

>> No.2665805

>>2665785
>Sega Saturn had 6 years of life in Japan

It was active from 1994 Xmas to 1998 Xmas (when the DC came out). Some games still came out in 1999, but they were just the last finishing developments.

What sucked is that it was at its PEAK in 1998, and if they don't drop it, it could have held that position for 1999 and 2000.

>> No.2665806

>>2665738
Found the DC fanboy.

>>2665765
For the most part, a game that is good will sell well and a quality lineup of games will drive console sales.

>>2665772
Again, the DC was doing well, but the PS2's launch essentially made the DC obsolete. Once the PS1's established franchises started hitting the console it was the nail in the console for Sega. They needed a way to compete with MGS, Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy, Devil May Cry, and GTA. If not directly compete at least make a system that allowed some of these developers to make multi-plats.

If you didn't buy a DC between 1999 and 2000, there was no compelling reason to choose it over the PS2 after that.

>> No.2665807

>>2665789
>it had memory bandwidth far in excess of anything of the era
Yes, but that's the thing. PS2 had hardly any built-in functions or anything at all that would make life easier for programmers.

To simulate other consoles built-in features in software you would have to brute-force with multi-passes, which pretty much expended all of that large memory bandwidth.

While there's no doubt the PS2 is a more powerful console than the Dreamcast, from a practical perspective you have to admit that it really did take a long time for the improvements to become obvious. On paper the PS2 was even more powerful than the Gamecube, and looked how that turned out.

>> No.2665825

>>2665795
Mega Drive was extremely popular in the US too. I guess I wasn't aware that they blew it with the Dreamcast in PAL areas. I remember the Friday night my friend came home after work with a new Dreamcast and some games. I had zero intention of owning a Dreamcast and went out the next day and picked one up based on Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur, and Powerstone alone.

>> No.2665829

>>2665806
>PS2's launch essentially made the DC obsolete.
Not really, considering the launch games for the system were pretty mediocre.

>> No.2665836

>>2665806
>but the PS2's launch essentially made the DC obsolete
October 26, 2000 NA PS2
November 12, 2001 NA MGS2
December 17, 2001 NA FFX
It wasn't even on my radar until MGS2 came out.

>> No.2665849

>>2665829
>>2665836
The PS2 is the actual system itself, not the software.

>> No.2665854

>>2665836
>>2665849
Yes but he thinks you need quintessential games to drop before anyone would consider buying a console.

>> No.2666072

>>2665807
>To simulate other consoles built-in features in software you would have to brute-force with multi-passes, which pretty much expended all of that large memory bandwidth.

Well if you managed that memory like shit, sure. But if you timed your code right to keep the vector units fed, you could get away with a lot. That's what it was designed to do, anyway. It was as efficient as more modern consoles, but in a different way.

>from a practical perspective you have to admit that it really did take a long time for the improvements to become obvious.

Yes, because the PS2 was very different compared to all the contemporary cpu+gpu combinations, which made this take longer. And of course the stronger hardware also gave you more possibilities, but all of those had to be discovered first.

>>2665854
>Yes but he thinks you need quintessential games to drop before anyone would consider buying a console.

It had a couple of thousand games available to it at launch due to backwards compatibility.

>> No.2667351

>>2666072
>But if you timed your code right to keep the vector units fed
That's not to do with the vector units, that's to do with the Graphics Synthesizer. It literally has to do things in several passes that would take the texturizer/rasterizers of other consoles only one pass.

The console was never maxed by the way. It could never reach theoretical numbers in theory, it was just way too fanciful. Kutaragi's head was in the clouds when he designed it.

>> No.2667393
File: 28 KB, 812x563, Bernie_Losses.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2667393

>>2663436

As soon as Bernie took over Sega plummeted into the red, they were still profitable when the 32X was around.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sega_Annual_Icome(Loss)_1993-2004.svg

>> No.2667748

>>2667393
Profitable but draining money

>> No.2667767
File: 26 KB, 469x480, Grand Theft Auto 2 disc pg scan.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
2667767

>>2665806
>PS1's established franchises
>GTA
Right

>> No.2667797

>>2663281
>He saved Sega a lot of money

This is factually incorrect. He nearly bankrupted the company. And I guess eventually DID actually.

>> No.2667887

>>2667393
Yeah, but Net Income is usually a lagging indicator of problems. Also, most of this time period is when they'd have been going through:

>Developing the Dreamcast
>The decline of arcades
>Liquidate/dump Saturn stuff
>Buying out some of the stubborn SoJ board members

>> No.2667916

>>2667797

SOA didn't. SOJ did with obscenely expensive arcade hardware like the model 3 and the Saturn at the same time. He was just who Sega Japan employed because unlike Kalinske, he wouldn't fling shit back.

>>2667351

It was maxed. It was crapping out by the time Shadow of the Colossus came out. Sony always claimed it was never maxed but the amount of games during the end of the lifecycle struggling to hold 30FPS at 240P showed the developers were wringing everything out.

Also they abused interlacing a lot with the console even though you could see a resolution difference on CRT with how crisp the DC's 640x480 was compared to the PS2's 512x240 (Variable. Some were 222P, some even 220P)

All the proof is here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UXkS8OfvKw

>> No.2668012

>>2664718
>The number of people who bought a PS2 to watch DVD movies is MASSIVELY overestimated.
i disagree
i am from the uk, many people who brought the ps2 at launch did so for its dvd capabilities
most were in there early 20s and only had tekken tag
i was around 12 at the time and had a ps1
dreamcast was a massive set up in graphics, so much clearer, even more so then the ps2 at the time.

>> No.2668015

>>2665806
>and GTA
You do know that GTA3 was originally supposed to be a Dreamcast game before the hardware was canned, right?

>> No.2668019

>>2668015
who cares, it was getting a ps2 port like everything else sooner or later

>> No.2668080

>>2668015
source for this?

>> No.2668854

>>2663281
>There are literally no Saturn games he could have imported from Japan that would have saved the Western marke
X-Men vs. Street Fighter says "hi."

>> No.2668862

>>2668854
This. That game was huge at the time. An arcade perfect port in the west would have been incredible.

>> No.2669269

>>2668854
Ohh and lets not forget Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
Yes having Maria and two crappy new areas doesn't make up totally for the the problems the Saturn version has, but it's still fun to play like the PlayStation version.
I'm sure it would have helped sell a ton more systems.

>> No.2669319

>>2663417

the dc was made for sega to have an honorable end in hardware. i am still pissed by its cancellation tho

>> No.2669372

>>2669269
SOTN Saturn never came out in the US?

>> No.2669375

>>2668854
You know something's wrong when every magazine at the time said "Forget the PlayStation version, import the Saturn one instead".

>> No.2669535

>>2665058
Any links to this lobotomy interview? WOuld love to read!!

>> No.2669545

>>2663281
>There are literally no Saturn games he could have imported from Japan that would have saved the Western market, let alone made any difference whatsoever.
It's funny you should say that, when the Saturn was the first system I bought imports for. That said, you sure came up with a loaded question, cause nothing could have 'saved' the Saturn. By that point retailers were already pissed. And that carried over to the Dreamcast, killing both. But hey, blame it on the games. Much easier to do that than admit Sega of America fucked themselves before the Saturn even released.