Check out battle of the ports

[16bitter]

How so? Those figures point to the Saturn selling pretty slowly up to early 1996, and really picking up in the latter 1/6 of '96 (summer generally isn't huge sales, so most of that 650k was likely sold in the fall/winter of '96 -at which point the Saturn had dropped to $200), and given the early 1997 sales that would indeed point to the following holiday sales being very strong had they kept up the marketing.

Sega didn't dump the Saturn until late 1998, which is when games and hardware really got dumped, but it's 1997 when they pulled back resources heavily and Stolar made some really stupid moves that confused the market and made for bad PR (including "not out future") that killed sales that fall. (not sure how much the shift to the DC was SoJ's decision or pushed by Stolar)

Stolar's mistake was that he was right.

In public.

In other words, he was being honest.

So far as sales numbers improving right as Sega supposedly was pulling the plug, I think people are reading those numbers and their precipitation from the wrong angle.

This returns to the issue of how Saturn was just too damned complex not only as far as software output from its hardware, but also so far as manufacturing issues. Sega didn't have the money to sell the system at what had to be a massive loss in 1996.

Certainly they didn't in the pursuit of a respectable third place finish or hold on the market, itself disconsolate+discordant.

The Saturn's 1996 Christmas was a desperate attempt that, I believe, most at Sega realized would end up being little more than a liquidation sale.

Their plans from 93, maybe before, had failed pathetically. The Saturn could not be sold as a mainstream item, at sub-$200, that early in the game.

Meaning it was the wrong hardware from the wrong company.

Which, in itself, likely returns to the spurned SGI deal. What a mistake that snub was.

Or Sonic X-Treme which would have been out by early Spring of '97 had Stolar not canceled it. (it was few weeks from completion when cancelled at the beginning of '97 as he felt they'd lost the market by not making it by the Christmas '96 deadline)

I don't see how he was wrong. The entirety of the Saturn plan is one of running to catch up, if not standstill. Always behind the curve.

The 32X was either a headstone for Sega or a mushroom in the same way the nuking of Hiroshima was.

Bifurcating their own market strategy was tantamount to a Y-incision -- with the patient still alive.

[16bitter]

I am aware of that.

The fine print is that Kalinske said this: "You are relying on Japanese software too much."

And he was right. This was borne out by the antipathy the Saturn faced in the West.

What worked in Japan -- arcade ports, particularly the huge impact of VF -- would not work in the States. Yet Sega of Japan seemed either oblivious to this or outright hostile about it.

An example would be, supposedly, retiring the 'Eternal Champions' brand so VF would have no competition. The problem was that the VF franchise was no competition for 'Tekken' and 'Toshinden' in the West.

From firsthand experience, the Playstation was far better on Western appeal.

Games like 'WipEout', 'Loaded', 'Twisted Metal' and 'Warhawk' were in no way replicated or branded to the Saturn's side early on, if ever.

Sega showed so little understanding of what made them number one that they didn't even release a football game in America that first year. Come on! 'Madden' had made Genesis just as surely as Genesis had made 'Madden'.

Biggest market. Its biggest sport. MIA=Saturn DOA.

Oh, but there was soccer.

Ridiculous.

Losing MK3 to Playstation was an early buzzkill as well.

Getting UMK3 the next year, after the brand was worn down, was typical. Sloppy seconds.

[Thenewguy]

How so? Those figures point to the Saturn selling pretty slowly up to early 1996, and really picking up in the latter 1/6 of '96 (summer generally isn't huge sales, so most of that 650k was likely sold in the fall/winter of '96 -at which point the Saturn had dropped to $200), and given the early 1997 sales that would indeed point to the following holiday sales being very strong had they kept up the marketing.

Sega Saturn (May 1995):
Sales from launch to May 1996: ~450,000
Sales from launch to 1st quarter 1997: 1.1 million
sales in 1st quarter 1997: 0.6 million

-------------------------------

Total sales as of Mar 1997 were 1.1 million

1st year sales were ~450,000
Jan-Mar 1997 sales were 600,000

That leaves ~100,000 sales for June-December of 1996, based on what j_factor said I'll revise this to have been up until the three pack deal started in December, at which point the sales turn around and upsurge.

The upsurge was caused by the Three Free Games deal, combined with some key releases in late '96. In Q1 '97 nobody was dumping stock yet, and the Saturn was still thought to be viable. Saturn sales exceeded most people's expectations in Christmas '96 and it got some good press, with people calling it a comeback. This carried it through early '97, but SoA apparently had little interest in maintaining this momentum.

See here:

The choice of games included was also a very shrewd move on Sega's part. All three were well-known names. All three were from 1995 so their time to sell on their own had mostly passed. And all three had accompanying controllers that Sega was selling: the Virtua Stick for VF2, the Stunner gun for Virtua Cop, and the racing wheel for Daytona USA. Bundling these three games with a lot of Saturns likely helped their accessory sales significantly.

What they should've done, IMO, is kept that deal going but changed the games out. For Christmas '97 they could've made NiGHTS one of the three and made the analog controller the normal controller bundled with the system. I guess they weren't interested in selling Saturns

OK that's cool, that totally explains where the sudden upsurge came from then.

However I disagree that it would indicate any kind of a come back, in my opinion bundling three of their best games with a system which is already losing money hand over fist from the price war shows that the three pack deal in the US was simply there as damage control to clear away as much stock as possible before they planned to discontinue, Sega's subsequent lack of interest in building on the sales upsurge created by this deal seems to point towards this being the case IMO.

Also, based on the multi-format US charts I've run into from reading magazines, the Three Pack Deal did not increase US Saturn software sales at all, by 1997 Saturn games are pretty much never entering the US charts, and software is the only area of profit.

Everything I run into points that the Saturn died maybe a year earlier in the US than it did in Britain, even the last British Saturn hits like Tomb Raider, and Powerslave had nonexistent sales in the US, in an interview in one of the magazines I was reading Lobotomy actually stated that the only thing keeping them going was their British sales.

Sega didn't dump the Saturn until late 1998, which is when games and hardware really got dumped, but it's 1997 when they pulled back resources heavily and Stolar made some really stupid moves that confused the market and made for bad PR (including "not out future") that killed sales that fall. (not sure how much the shift to the DC was SoJ's decision or pushed by Stolar)

I'm not sure if the "not our future" remark is really that important anymore, I think its possible that Stolar actually decided the Saturn was not his future late in 1996, and spent all the time between the two limiting the amount of money they were going to lose

I don't think anyone from the western branches of Sega liked the Saturn at all, when you see later interviews with these people they talk simply as though they immediately thought they had a bad product on their hands that they were going to struggle to sell. I've also run into yet more mentions of Sony reportedly taking apart the Saturn after being initially beaten in the Japanese market, and their tech people thinking the entire Saturn design was completely absurd, they sent a message that Sega would be completely crucified if Sony started a price war so thats what Sony did.

What did Sega do with their excess hardware stock? if it ended up in the shops, adding to the total 2 million US Saturns, then taking into account that they had already sold over a million in the US as of the beginning of 1997, and were selling 600,000 at the beginning of the year, that doesn't leave much of the 2 million total as dumped hardware.

Or Sonic X-Treme which would have been out by early Spring of '97 had Stolar not canceled it. (it was few weeks from completion when cancelled at the beginning of '97 as he felt they'd lost the market by not making it by the Christmas '96 deadline)

Also it looked like utter, utter crap, and was probably not sellable anyway

[Da_Shocker]

As crappy as Sonic X-Treme looks it could'nt end up being no worse than that lame ass port of Sonic 3D Blast.

[kool kitty89]

Stolar's mistake was that he was right.

In public.

In other words, he was being honest.

Which was absolutely idiotic whether it was true or not... It would have been like Sega blatantly stating the same thing about the Master System in 1988.
The Saturn was THE onyl thing that could have been Sega future for 2 years in any case, so by saying it was the future they basically said they had no future for almost 2 years running.

But really, telling "the truth" like that is not good business sense, and shows he was not very good at marketing/salesmanship in that regard at all. One of the major points is that EVEN IF you want to shift away from something like that, you NEVER use negative terms, but push positive, like Dreamcast is the Future" (assuming they had the name by that time in '97), but given the timeline and the Saturn's position on the market, even that would have been stupid and premature. (much more so than pushing the Saturn out in May of '95)

But yeah, no matter what the truth or reality of the situation was, good business/marketing sense was to make things looks as good as possible: it doesn't matter if you're honest, it matters what you can make people believe and get them interested.
Being able to convince/persuade people to want to buy a product and want to like it regardless of the product itself is what marketing's about and if Stolar couldn't handle that he shouldn't have been hired. (unless perhaps he purely managed the business side and had other PR and marketing people focusing on those points -and scripting his public statements)

This returns to the issue of how Saturn was just too damned complex not only as far as software output from its hardware, but also so far as manufacturing issues. Sega didn't have the money to sell the system at what had to be a massive loss in 1996.

And yet they were diverting tens or hundreds of millions into he Dreamcast followed by selling it at an even greater loss just months later.
They had the funding, it was just misplaced by putting too much into the DC too soon. (something they'd also done with the Saturn)

And the contending factor would be if software sales also exceeded those losses, and more importantly, if it kept PR up more: higher revenue in spite of deficits is more attractive to investors and then there's the consumer side of things with very bad PR from people getting burned on the Saturn. (far worse than the 32x which had a much smaller userbase and was a far less significant product)

Their plans from 93, maybe before, had failed pathetically. The Saturn could not be sold as a mainstream item, at sub-$200, that early in the game.

And yet the DC was far worse in that regard with the 1999 price. (let alone compared to the Saturn selling in '99 at $100 -as manufacturing costs dropped dramatically)

Which, in itself, likely returns to the spurned SGI deal. What a mistake that snub was.

Except we know almost Nothing about the context of that (Joe Miller might be able provide more details). SGI's project in early 1993 would have definitely been far different than the cost slashed down hardware that Nintendo put out, and it may very well have appeared inefficient and expensive compared to what Sega was planning at the time. In particular they also must have considered the design timeline and the time/resources needed to address full development of the chipset; indeed under Nintendo they suffered considerable delays and even the planned release was a year after Sega wanted the Saturn out (but it ended up another year later).

On top of that you'd have to factor in the added cost of a CD-ROM drive and associated hardware, and in that case the N64 might not have been that much cheaper than the Saturn in some respects. (at least once they consolidated the chipset a bit -in parallel with the newer chip processes used in the N64, though the N64 was also more advanced and thus had a better cost/performance ratio even at higher cost -granted much of that power was artificially limited by the cartridge media and the limited use of custom/alternate RSP microcoding -had it been Sega they likely would have put a lot of work into a 2D optimized microcode along with something like the SGI turbo 3D code Nintendo refused to use for some reason -probably because it lacked texture filtering which was unacceptable with the low-res textures being used)

I don't see how he was wrong. The entirety of the Saturn plan is one of running to catch up, if not standstill. Always behind the curve.

Except in some respects it was the opposite, they pushed too fast too soon with the Saturn and screwed up. So they wouldn't have been playing catchup otherwise as they had the superior development support and software library up to mid 1996, the only issue (from the consumer POV) was pure marketing and PR and the release of the 32x and the subsequently confused handling of that alongside the Saturn screwed up both of those categories early on in the Saturn's life in the west.

And he was right. This was borne out by the antipathy the Saturn faced in the West.

Except the Saturn had tons of western support early on and most of the killer apps, including some the PSX didn't get like Quake. (and of course Tomb Raider -Sony didn't buy up exclusivity until TRII in '97)

The issue with the Japanese software was they didn't have as much luck with games catering to the west like Sonic had (by coincidence or not), though some of SoJ's flagship titles other than Sonic were also missing, especially Phantasy Star at a time RPGs were becoming big mass-market games, especially with the multimedia edge -which SoJ had already been pushign with stuff like Panzer Dragoon. (probably never could have been an FFVII killer at best -namely due to Japan's bias toward Square and general hype of FF games vs PS ones before that, but it still could have been very significant) Of course, they already had a number of good RPGs from 2nd/3rd parties that didn't come over. (no FFVII killers, but some significant games)

What worked in Japan -- arcade ports, particularly the huge impact of VF -- would not work in the States. Yet Sega of Japan seemed either oblivious to this or outright hostile about it.

They did invest in a 3D Sonic game following Nights, Sonic Adventure, using the Nights engine as a starting point, but the performance of the Saturn was felt to be unsatisfactory and they stopped it until later moving to the DC with the demo of it put into Sonic Jam. (Sonic Adventure on the Saturn may have tied into the conflict of SoA using the Nights engine that delayed Sonic X-Treme -too bad they ever got permission to use the Nights engine in the first place as they had a perfectly usable engine -better than what they did with nights- that they halted and later had to go back to after wasting time with the Nights engine)

And as to Arcade ports, it was VFII that REALLY hit big in Japan, the earlier VF was only good in the context of getting it started with almost no games at launch. (something true for almost all Japanese launches)

And if you notice, Sony was also focusing heavily on arcade ports or arcade style games with the majority of 1st/2nd party games on the system for the first 2 years at least. (especially with Namco onboard)
I assume you've seen the 1995 "Powered by Namco" infomertial.

An example would be, supposedly, retiring the 'Eternal Champions' brand so VF would have no competition. The problem was that the VF franchise was no competition for 'Tekken' and 'Toshinden' in the West.

Games like 'WipEout', 'Loaded', 'Twisted Metal' and 'Warhawk' were in no way replicated or branded to the Saturn's side early on, if ever.

Twisted metal is a pretty mediocre game that sold well regardless... Wipeout (and sequels) of course made it to the Saturn (Sequels not in the US though), but well after the PSX release (interesting that Sony was letting Psygnosis push it multiplatform), and of course the N64 took longer to get that stuff and had many less other racing games in general than the Saturn.

And much of that stuff is 3rd party too, something Sega didn't have direct control over: plus, even had they replicated such games, it would have been 6 months at least before anything was produced, and Wipeout for the Saturn was actually released only 4 months after the PSX release. (Tomb Raider of course came out before the PSX version in Europe and only a few days after the PSX game in the US)

Sega showed so little understanding of what made them number one that they didn't even release a football game in America that first year. Come on! 'Madden' had made Genesis just as surely as Genesis had made 'Madden'.

And did Sony do any better???
Madden didn't come to the PSX OR Saturn until 1996 with NFL '96, though Sega could have pushed a Sega Sports title earlier. Though it really didn't matter (other than PR) until the mass market hit in late 1996, which would also be a major reason why EA was sticking to PC and 16-bit consoles for Madden '96 in 1995. (EA hadn't been putting it on the 3DO either oddly enough)

And of course, the Genesis didn't get a football game until the end of its 2nd year on market with Madden followed by Joe Montana at the beginning of 1991. (the first year the Genesis really hit mass market, like the nex generation would in '96)

Oh, but there was soccer.

The early Soccer games weren't that competitive either, though that was critical in Europe. (and one major edge they had over Nintendo on the SMS)
So Soccer and Foot Ball would have been important for the western market as a whole.

[kool kitty89]

Sega Saturn (May 1995):
Sales from launch to May 1996: ~450,000
Sales from launch to 1st quarter 1997: 1.1 million
sales in 1st quarter 1997: 0.6 million

-------------------------------

Total sales as of Mar 1997 were 1.1 million

1st year sales were ~450,000
Jan-Mar 1997 sales were 600,000

That leaves ~100,000 sales for June-December of 1996, based on what j_factor said I'll revise this to have been up until the three pack deal started in December, at which point the sales turn around and upsurge.

Yeah, that does seem odd, I'd have thought there were more than 100k sold from late 1997 through '98 (when it was officially discontinued). I really wonder if that 2 million figure is wrong, it's a very round number and for all we know could have been 2.4 million if not way off base like it seems the SMS figure is. (given both officially publicized market share figures and Atari's sales figures from the time, it seem like the SMS should have sold at least 4 million, if not more)
There sure is a lot of mixed info on the Genesis/MD sales as well, and it took a lot of digging to even get a remotely reasonable picuture of the total sales. (which still look to be anywhere from 35 to 44 million)

OK that's cool, that totally explains where the sudden upsurge came from then.

Yeah, especially since the price hadn't changed since mid 1996 when it dropped to $200, though it dropped to $150 at the very end of the 1st quarter to follow Sony and Nintendo. (they also started cutting games to highly competitive prices -advertising price drops of up to 50% on certain tiles)
At least according to Pettus's article: http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-ind...34d0d0smcmghl3
(note there's a type that says the PSX dropped to $100 when it should say $150)

However I disagree that it would indicate any kind of a come back, in my opinion bundling three of their best games with a system which is already losing money hand over fist from the price war shows that the three pack deal in the US was simply there as damage control to clear away as much stock as possible before they planned to discontinue, Sega's subsequent lack of interest in building on the sales upsurge created by this deal seems to point towards this being the case IMO.

Well, not a comeback, there was nothing to come back to, but still increasing in popularity significantly. The thing was that the PSX and N64 were increasing in popularirty far more rapidly in general. (the SMS and 7800's popularity would have been rising up through 1988, but market share would have been declining steeply due to Nintendo's far more rapid rise)

And yeah, of course it was going to lose money if they were going to compete with Sony's deficit spending even moderately, the question would be if it would pay off more in the long term, after all they did the exact same thing on the Dreamcast, except pouring a lot more money in. (more into software, more into ads, and a lot lost on hardware -with both the Saturn and DC, they didn't stay in the market long enough for the Hardware to get cheap enough to start selling for profits -the PSX pretty much locked-in at $100 for some time, and the longer the Saturn stayed at that price, the closer they got to selling for profit -especially as RAM prices took a dive sharply and the Saturn -even without further integration- would have dropped by more than $100 in manufacturing cost from 1996 to 1998 in RAM alone -then there's more savings from the CD drive getting cheaper, economies of scale, moore's law, and then further integration on top of that -it would never have been as cheap to build as the PSX using similar cost-cutting, but it would have quickly become more reasonable from 1997 onward)

Also, based on the multi-format US charts I've run into from reading magazines, the Three Pack Deal did not increase US Saturn software sales at all, by 1997 Saturn games are pretty much never entering the US charts, and software is the only area of profit.

Market share wouldn't show that though: you'd need straight sales numbers as the market itself was growing very rapidly (especially if sales was restricted to 5th gen consoles and not the SNES and Genesis as well) and thus market share would have fallen significantly even if the Saturn had tripled its 1996 sales.

Everything I run into points that the Saturn died maybe a year earlier in the US than it did in Britain, even the last British Saturn hits like Tomb Raider, and Powerslave had nonexistent sales in the US, in an interview in one of the magazines I was reading Lobotomy actually stated that the only thing keeping them going was their British sales.

That may have been a marketing issue with Sony's massive budget, but also some other issues, in particular GameVet mentioned this earlier in the thread:

Black Falcon is right on about the Saturn version of Wipeout. I owned the Saturn version first and did not play the psx game until a couple years later. I really didn't enjoy the Playstation version.

The Saturn version of Tomb Raider pretty much got swept aside by the gaming mags. You'd think the Playstation version came out first, but supposedly that's not the case. Something fishy was defineatly going on.

Fishy as in Gamefan was praising the game as if it was a Playstation exclusive and sort of pushing the Saturn version aside like it didn't exist. I'd go to Electronics Boutique and see Tomb Raider at the Saturn demo kiosk, but I couldn't find a copy of the game on shelves; I ended up with the Playstation game because of that. Gamefan called the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha the inferior version, because it had blue shadows, and would not recognise their wrong in that review until a couple of issues later. It just felt like magazines and stores were against the Saturn from the beginning and were writing the system off long before the Playstation became the the dominant console. It just makes you wonder who or what motivated these views and practices.




It seemed more like a month after at EB.

I wonder if the screwy Saturn presence in 1995 contributed to stores not dedicating much shelf space to the Saturn: especially due to the extremely limited quantities available for the earlier part of 1995. (frustrating even retailers like EB who had been included in the early launch)

I'm not sure if the "not our future" remark is really that important anymore, I think its possible that Stolar actually decided the Saturn was not his future late in 1996, and spent all the time between the two limiting the amount of money they were going to lose

Kalinske was still president in '96 for much of the year, if not the whole year: I'm not positive when Stolar became president, but he may have been there several months before taking over, rather like Kalinske seemed to do while Katz was still president in 1990: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_E2lh1lgmk (at 2:28 it simply lists him as "Press: Sega Genesis")

I don't think anyone from the western branches of Sega liked the Saturn at all, when you see later interviews with these people they talk simply as though they immediately thought they had a bad product on their hands that they were going to struggle to sell. I've also run into yet more mentions of Sony reportedly taking apart the Saturn after being initially beaten in the Japanese market, and their tech people thinking the entire Saturn design was completely absurd, they sent a message that Sega would be completely crucified if Sony started a price war so thats what Sony did.

I think a big part of that came from Nakayma giving them the impression the Saturn was going to come much later and the 32x was going to be the main priority for a good while in Japan and the west. The 1994 release of the Saturn causing a big upset at SoA (given the article Sheath reviewed) and then another upset when the Saturn had to be pressed out in Spring of '95. (I'm not sure, but it seems like SoA had gotten the impression -at least in early 1994- that the Saturn was probably not going to be in Japan until '95 and perhaps not in the US until '96, hence the push for the Mars project in the interim)

Also it looked like utter, utter crap, and was probably not sellable anyway

You don't like the fish-eye engine? I'm not talking about that crap time wasting Nights engine thing, but the real final design being work on in late '96 which was basically identical to the game being pushed in parallel on the PC iirc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpfMxNi5bAI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftNgzZ3Ovig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOd0mQ-uXE


there's a ton more of the PC version on YT like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq_iPxQsbm0


Team Andromeda posted a full article explaining the development in detail:
http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?p=295584

As crappy as Sonic X-Treme looks it could'nt end up being no worse than that lame ass port of Sonic 3D Blast.

Again, which version are you referring to, the crappy Nights hack that sidetracked SoA or the real game? (granted on of their own engines was also crappy based on Nakayma's response, but they had 2 other engines to build on -the game that started on the PC and the parallel adaptation of the Boss engine from the Saturn team)

[Da_Shocker]

kool kitty89 i'm talknig about the fish eyed version that everybody knew about not the NiGHTS based engine.

[kool kitty89]

kool kitty89 i'm talknig about the fish eyed version that everybody knew about not the NiGHTS based engine.

Oh OK. I wasn't that impressed, but the more I watched it, the more it grew on me. It looks somewhat like a much more detailed and faster version of BUG! with a ton of added features.
Not a direct competitor to SM64 or Crash, but significant nonetheless and probably better than a pure 2.5D (or full 2D) sidescrolling sonic in terms of mass-market appeal.

They don't show any of the boss battle sections either, so that's anyone's guess.

Had the Saturn stayed reasonably popular long enough maybe SoJ would have pressed on with Sonic Adventure (still probably no sooner than fall of 1998) and maybe even Shenmue. (there are claims that it was dropped on the Saturn due to difficulties, but it seems like one big reason was simply the shift to the DC in general)
And of course, they could probably have upgraded and done some cross-platform releases for the DC for late Saturn games, and obviously PC ports for all their major Saturn games as well.


Sonic R actually looks pretty close to makign a proper 3D platform engine, so perhaps that would have been possible too, especially between X-Treme and Adventure. (perhaps a Sonic X-Treme 2 or something)

[16bitter]

Which was absolutely idiotic whether it was true or not... It would have been like Sega blatantly stating the same thing about the Master System in 1988.

I never said it was good PR.

So...

The Saturn was THE onyl thing that could have been Sega future for 2 years in any case, so by saying it was the future they basically said they had no future for almost 2 years running.

That sentence is not working for me logically. You either have a future -- whether you meet a deadline or release schedule -- or you don't. Sega still had a future.

Saturn was not it.

The next generation -- being at its apotheosis by way of being there first -- was Sega's future. From their vision.

But really, telling "the truth" like that is not good business sense, and shows he was not very good at marketing/salesmanship in that regard at all.

Generally, no, you don't want to tell the truth. But the question may be as to who Stolar viewed as competition.

If he was trying to angle the company to his side of the Pacific, however, it may have been clever. It may have been right.

Shut down the Saturn as much as possible in the West, as the system itself is a money-bleeding implement (off the shelf parts after all; it diced and it sliced the parent equal to any attempt at competitive pricing) so far as Sega's financial health.

To the point, a power play. Perhaps a critically needed one.

Perhaps.

And yet they were diverting tens or hundreds of millions into he Dreamcast followed by selling it at an even greater loss just months later.

See, as base logic, you're again missing your own point: the Dreamcast was the future. You know, that future you assume can blink in and out like an embarrassing rash?

From a business standpoint, it makes far more sense to shift to the new tech.

The Saturn had already lost the market. It had. It was not going to ever make up that gap.

Dreamcast's underlying argumentation is vast. And full of merit.

Better designed and integrated, it would be cheaper to produce as a mass-market item and easier to develop for.

Further, releasing early with a cost-effective -- within and without -- design was Sega's real chance toward survival as a hardware manufacturer. Unlike the Saturn, the DC was a model that was created with a real feel for where the market was, as well as where it was going. It was future-proofed far better than the Saturn, which was outdated, and reconfig'ed, a full year before release because of it.

Supporting Saturn long-form would have been similar to a public school that pays a hundred grand for a workstation dedicated to a single retarded child.

Guilt over the fact that the parent was responsible was not going to save it.

They had the funding, it was just misplaced by putting too much into the DC too soon.

You don't seem to understand, for all your talk (if not actual consideration) of numbers, just how numerically separate Sega's position was in 1996 or 97 from 1994 or 95.

The Genesis was a hit, that had millions upon millions of dedicated users and was at a cost-surplus price point.

The Saturn was an unpopular, niche system that was a net drag on the company every time the manufacturing lines were fired up.

And the contending factor would be if software sales also exceeded those losses, and more importantly, if it kept PR up more: higher revenue in spite of deficits is more attractive to investors and then there's the consumer side of things with very bad PR from people getting burned on the Saturn. (far worse than the 32x which had a much smaller userbase and was a far less significant product)

There's a huge amount in that paragraph that doesn't work.

But to simplify and summate: weren't you the one arguing that the 32X was either a decent or fine idea to the side of revenue?

By your own standard for that mess, a new system every couple of years that obscures if not extirpates the prior system's market share should be just fine.

Not my argument. Yours.

And knowingly or not, you perpetuate it whenever you push the idea of the 32X "not being given a chance" or being a minor bump in the road leading to Sega's fall of the cliff.

Except we know almost Nothing about the context of that (Joe Miller might be able provide more details).

Here's the context: they turned down a chipset that Nintendo ran with, selling more than 30 million units at a cost-effective and largely profit-ridden ratio, while Sega lost over a billion dollars on Saturn to sell under ten million.

I get the feeling that I could provide photographic evidence of a Second Kennedy Shooter and you'd ask for "context" on when the grassy knoll was last mowed.

SGI's project in early 1993 would have definitely been far different than the cost slashed down hardware that Nintendo put out,

How about some context?

and it may very well have appeared inefficient and expensive compared to what Sega was planning at the time.

So Nintendo can get the price down on a superior chipset (SGI), while Sega drives it way up on an inferior one (Saturn Project).

Basically your argument is that Sega Corporate was retarded. Logically extrapolated, at least.

In that context we agree on the method of Sega's madness, and the fallout, far more than you may think.

In particular they also must have considered the design timeline and the time/resources needed to address full development of the chipset; indeed under Nintendo they suffered considerable delays and even the planned release was a year after Sega wanted the Saturn out (but it ended up another year later).

What's wrong with releasing late?

The tech leapfrogged both the Playstation and Saturn. Timing didn't kill it. Rather, the cart did.

On top of that you'd have to factor in the added cost of a CD-ROM drive and associated hardware, and in that case the N64 might not have been that much cheaper than the Saturn in some respects.

So? I'm supposed to think that the Saturn -- in its messy application, design and launch -- was superior to the N64 chipset because it may have cost only slightly more to manufacture than the latter if they were both CD-ROM?

That's your argument?

Except in some respects it was the opposite, they pushed too fast too soon with the Saturn and screwed up.

And yet you just argued that Sega may have been contextually (there's that word) right to pass up the N64 chipset because...of a need to rush the Saturn hardware to market.

Your narrative is all over the place. Are there POV shifts that I should be aware of? Because it appears that the same thing you were defending/advertising in the positive is a paragraph or two later something you find critically flawed.

Talk about a breakdown contextually.

So they wouldn't have been playing catchup otherwise as they had the superior development support and software library up to mid 1996,

The Saturn's developer support sucked.

Everybody has said this. Their SDKs were complete shit for the Saturn, and completely backward compared to the Playstation's trailblazing.

As for superior software...no.

Certainly not for marketing purposes, diversity and third party output. Much of that due to the Saturn's messy innards.

Except the Saturn had tons of western support early on and most of the killer apps,

No. No it didn't. Especially not internally.

And whatever it did get from third parties, was usually late.

including some the PSX didn't get like Quake.

'Quake' released for Saturn in 1997.

Sega lost the battle in 1995/96.

And as to Arcade ports, it was VFII that REALLY hit big in Japan, the earlier VF was only good in the context of getting it started with almost no games at launch. (something true for almost all Japanese launches)

What are you talking about?

VF was always a big title in Japan, and it helped to keep the Saturn either in the lead or in competition with the Playstation early on.

This is well-documented.

And if you notice, Sony was also focusing heavily on arcade ports or arcade style games with the majority of 1st/2nd party games on the system for the first 2 years at least. (especially with Namco onboard)

You go into all this detail, yet you miss the details inherent to those you're replying to.

Case in point: I mentioned 'Tekken'. And other Playstation arcade ports.

In the context of being big on Western appeal. Something that could not be said for Sega's side to nearly the same degree.

Note that you ignored this, and simply ventured off into some pedagogic rant about arcade ports. Redundant. And oblivious to the real point.

Twisted metal is a pretty mediocre game that sold well regardless...

I'd argue the point (the game was unique to Sony's side, atmospheric, WESTERN, and a blast with friends), except you're again missing it altogether.

Appropriately this is taking place in tandem with your need to over-state and reply to every paragraph from the other side. And yet you can't seem to grasp what's being argued.

Is sophistry and likewise or generalized obfuscation your aim here?

Wipeout (and sequels) of course made it to the Saturn (Sequels not in the US though), but well after the PSX release (interesting that Sony was letting Psygnosis push it multiplatform), and of course the N64 took longer to get that stuff and had many less other racing games in general than the Saturn.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS THIS IN REPLY TO???

WTF?!

The point was marketing in 1995 of Western-appeal product. Yet you reply with some left-field (of a separate stadium, on the opposite coast) pedantry about the N64's release list.

And did Sony do any better???

Yes. Way.

Madden didn't come to the PSX OR Saturn until 1996 with NFL '96, though Sega could have pushed a Sega Sports title earlier.

Sony released 'NFL Gameday' in 1995, a critical hit for them that helped establish the Playstation as the new sports system in the West.

Though it really didn't matter (other than PR)

You excoriated Stolar on PR, yet now it's beside the point?

Also, PR was the point of the post you replied to. Really.

until the mass market hit in late 1996, which would also be a major reason why EA was sticking to PC and 16-bit consoles for Madden '96 in 1995. (EA hadn't been putting it on the 3DO either oddly enough)

This is the problem with your OCD need to reply, with or without the most base of facts.

It's filler. And here I am replying to it (oy!).

As far as EA, they were producing a 'Madden', first for Playstation, but they got spooked when Sony unveiled 'Gameday' and canned both the Playstation and Saturn revs.

Sony killed Sega in so many ways that year.

And of course, the Genesis didn't get a football game until the end of its 2nd year on market with Madden followed by Joe Montana at the beginning of 1991.

And of course, you again flunk history and the attendant context -- both broadly and in your direct reply to my statements -- as sports truly took off with Genesis, creating a huge market sector for Sega.

One they ignored when releasing Saturn, and which Sony catered to.

The early Soccer games weren't that competitive either,

Who cares? Soccer means jack shit to the American market.

A market that Sega ignored.

My point. Pure.

[zetastrike]

The more I read christuserloeser's posts regarding Kalinske and SOA, the more I start to agree with him. Not on everything, though. I still think SOJ shares a good part of the blame with the way things turned out, but Kalinske really seems like he was just flying by the seat of his pants the whole time.

[16bitter]

The more I read christuserloeser's posts regarding Kalinske and SOA, the more I start to agree with him. Not on everything, though. I still think SOJ shares a good part of the blame with the way things turned out, but Kalinske really seems like he was just flying by the seat of his pants the whole time.

My biggest issue with Kalinske would be just how much he had to with the 32X push. If he was all-in, then yeah, that's a major mark against him.

On the other side, I give him a great of credit for trying to shift the company away from the Saturn chipset with the aborted SGI plan.

[kool kitty89]

My biggest issue with Kalinske would be just how much he had to with the 32X push. If he was all-in, then yeah, that's a major mark against him.

On the other side, I give him a great of credit for trying to shift the company away from the Saturn chipset with the aborted SGI plan.

Even that depends though. If he thaought Sega was not goign to have a new console otherwise until 1996, the 32x would have made much more sense, especially if a software push on the Genesis and CD alone wouldn't have been enough. (the latter is the sticking point though as you could argue that even with nothing new until '96 they could have followed through with what they had)

OTOH if he was fully aware of the situation with the Saturn (at least by late spring of '94) then yeah, he's at fault big time for not pulling the plug on 32x or at least shifting emphasis heavily. (at that point the design may still have been primitive enough to strip down to a much simpler/cheaper system without the need for even an external power supply -ie drop to 1 SH2 plus the PWM and interface circuitry and SDRAM and drop the VDP, 2nd SH2, and framebuffers -though not as cheap or quickly available as a plain SVP cart, it would have been more flexible and more powerful in many areas, ready months sooner than 32x and under 1/2 the price of the 32x)

I never said it was good PR.

I wasn't implying PR, I was comparing Japan's Strong Saturn market to Europe's strong SMS market with the niche markets in both cases for other regions. (albeit the Saturn was less niche in Europe than the US, so EU with Saturn would be more like US with SMS and JP with SMS would be more like US with Saturn)

Bad for PR, bad for business (revenue and volumes going down if nothing else -losses on hardware and software profits would be another issue but by '98 at least the Saturn would have been much closer to sellign for profit with the massive drop in RAM prices and cheaper hardware costs in general and at $100 in 1999 it could have been selling for profit -slimmer than the PSX of course)

And it give Sony an even larger userbase and hurt relationships with developers. But after Stolar screwed up in 1997 they were pretty much stuck going down that path.

That sentence is not working for me logically. You either have a future -- whether you meet a deadline or release schedule -- or you don't. Sega still had a future.

The Saturn was the best option for the near future and by starving it Sega threw away its near future and weakened the Dreamcast as well. (it was more than that though, it was Stolar's marketing AND the shift in funding that screwed things up... had they tried to push the Saturn after the fact of Stolar's actions it would likely have hurt the DC and made too small of an impact to fully matter)

If he was trying to angle the company to his side of the Pacific, however, it may have been clever. It may have been right.

No, he may have been stupid as it made Japan shift away from their domestic market: which was the main thing going for them in the short term and the niche markets in the west far sooner than they should have.
And there was the potential for PC releases as well for 1997-1999. (a shame not even that version of Sonic X-Treme came out)

Shut down the Saturn as much as possible in the West, as the system itself is a money-bleeding implement (off the shelf parts after all; it diced and it sliced the parent equal to any attempt at competitive pricing) so far as Sega's financial health.

THe dreamcast bled off tons of money too, the Saturn (in the short term) would have been a good investment for much of that and they might have even been able to break even in the west and more than that worldwide. (especially with PC sales further offsetting things)

To the point, a power play. Perhaps a critically needed one.

A power play with a 2 year wait during which Sony became so dominant that it made the DC's position even more desperate.

If Sega was going to drop the Saturn, the might as well have skipped the DC and gone straight to 3rd party development.

See, as base logic, you're again missing your own point: the Dreamcast was the future. You know, that future you assume can blink in and out like an embarrassing rash?

Sega burned themselves out too quickly with the DC and didn't want to risk trying to play in the US market for the long haul... hell, if they'd managed to buffer things with the Saturn well enough they might have even gotten away with holding off on the DC long enough to steal some of Sony's hype, especially if they could have afforded DVD, especially offloading the DVD video license to an add-on like MS did. (cheaper more efficient hardware than the PS2 and with the push for a later launch date, even more consolidated than the 1998/99 DC and Sega might have even managed a 1999 DVD release in Japan -even at a high price that could have made it in the market with the popularity of DVD -something I hadn't realized was so significant for the PS2 in Japan until some additional info was pointed out recently)

From a business standpoint, it makes far more sense to shift to the new tech.

That's what they though with the 32x vs Nintendo's push for continued old software. (or 32x and Saturn rather, in either case it was jumping the gun)

The Saturn had already lost the market. It had. It was not going to ever make up that gap.

It could have still filled a significant niche on the market. Sega could never have beaten Sony, even on ideal terms, though (at best) they might have beaten Nintendo in the US. (as it was they might have been able to beat Nintendo in Europe and continue to stay ahead in Japan vs falling behind quickly in 1998 -with lower market share than the N64)

Better designed and integrated, it would be cheaper to produce as a mass-market item and easier to develop for.

It would have if they hadn't dumped the price to the point of taking massive losses as bad as the Saturn at that $200 launch price with modem pack-in. (even more so with the rebate with SegaNet)
Software sales had to make up for it in either case. (the Saturn would have been losing far less at $100 in 1998 than the DC at $200 in 1999)
Te Saturn could have been very integrated in later revisisions as well, and it's not like the DC was a single bus design either. (and it used 64-bit buses vs 32 and 16-bit on the Saturn)

The DC had better 3D cost/performance for sure, but that doesn't mean $200 wasn't selling well below cost.

Unlike the Saturn, the DC was a model that was created with a real feel for where the market was, as well as where it was going. It was future-proofed far better than the Saturn, which was outdated, and reconfig'ed, a full year before release because of it.

Yes, and in spite of its near ideal hardware and Sony's much worse than Saturn PS2 architecture, it wasn't enough due to Sega's unwillingness to shift to a US specific DC market when Japan and EU failed to take-off, but more-so due to the bad position the DC was in from what happened with the 32x and Saturn in '95, '96, '97, and '98. (releasing and then prematurely dropping the 32x, and the Genesis, and the GG, and the CD, and their South American niche, and then doing it AGAIN with the Saturn was crazy)

Supporting Saturn long-form would have been similar to a public school that pays a hundred grand for a workstation dedicated to a single retarded child.

True, in the sense that the school's management would have gotten heavily chastized for doing otherwise.

The Genesis was a hit, that had millions upon millions of dedicated users and was at a cost-surplus price point.

Though Sega was deficit spending for most of its active life. (investment capital kept that from becoming losses) The hardware may have been sold at cost most of the time, but with the massive market spending and general investments made, they were spending much more than they were making through sales. (again investment capital is another issue)
At least that's the impression I got from market analysis that came up a while back. (and several articles mention Sega's exploitation of deficit spending and that causing some concern from SoJ who didn't understand the concept of lower profits being a good thing if revenue was higher and growth was high)

But to simplify and summate: weren't you the one arguing that the 32X was either a decent or fine idea to the side of revenue?

No, I never said the 32x wouldn't have been better off unreleased in general, especially in hindsight, but I was arguing the sensible reasons for it at the time in the context SoA developed it. However, some of that is speculation filling in the gaps and there's certain aspects that are unclear. (whether SoA truely thought the 32x would have been released in a different timeline relative to the Saturn among other things)

By your own standard for that mess, a new system every couple of years that obscures if not extirpates the prior system's market share should be just fine.

No, I was saying Sega was used to doing it, not that they should have done it after the Genesis hit big in 1991. Prior to that it made sense with the SG-1000 to Mk.II to Mk.III to SMS to MD to MCD to Saturn, though one thing they never had done up to then was release 2 at once like 32x and Saturn and that really is quite odd. (they quite often had parallel designs in development that they would select one from to go forward with -Team Andromeda brought that up in the context of Mars and Saturn, but they always dropped 1 in favor of another or spaced them out by at least 2 years other than minor upgrades like the Mk.II and FM add-on)

So it was a mess yes, and as I've said time and again, I don't think the 32x should have been released at all, but I also maintain that there's a lot of other problems tying into that that made things much worse than the 32x alone ever could have.
I will also maintain that the Saturn alone would be better than the 32x alone, but the 32x alone would be better than having both like they did and better than doing nothing at all up to 1998 (as some claim would be better).
Though ideally, from the western standpoint, they should have delayed the Saturn's development to make a more advanced and cost-optimized system released 6 months to a year later. (ie mid/late '95 in Japan and early/mid '96 in the US)

And knowingly or not, you perpetuate it whenever you push the idea of the 32X "not being given a chance" or being a minor bump in the road leading to Sega's fall of the cliff.

Yes, the release of the 32x was the start of that path going the wrong way, releasing the Saturn too early made it worse, and then pulling support for all products in favor of Saturn made things even worse (dumping the 32x instead of more gradually discontinuing it lost more money on dumped prices and made for bad PR while the Genesis and GG should not have been discontinued as such at all). So it was a culmination of things that hurt them time after time.
The launch of the 32x was a road bump, the announcement of the Saturn's Japanese release was a giant pothole, the US release of the Saturn was a ditch, and what followed that with pulling support for all but Saturn followed by pulling support for Saturn put them half way off the edge of a cliff. (they should have launched the Saturn in September, should have dropped the 32x as quietly as possible while still officially supporting it for a good while longer and similarly discontinuing the CD while the Genesis lived on shifting to the budget market alongside the SNES and the GG maintained its niche as sole major competition to the GB with tons of potential to expand with newer revisions and updates -especially those whidh would allow competitive battery life)

Here's the context: they turned down a chipset that Nintendo ran with, selling more than 30 million units at a cost-effective and largely profit-ridden ratio, while Sega lost over a billion dollars on Saturn to sell under ten million.

Here's the context: SoJ rejected a chipset that SoA was gung-ho for and after 2 consecutive revisions to the prototypes SGI was working on.]Had Sega of Japan thought it would take until 1996 to complete they'd have not even considered it.
As it was SoJ could have done better than the N64 in terms of cost effectiveness had the Saturn been aimed at that, but it wasn't at all, so the point is moot. (had they gone that route, development would have shifted in mid 1993 to a major long-term redesign of the Saturn with consolidation, added features and namely heavy buffering of the chipset to allow a single system bus design -like the Jaguar or N64- while stripping out unnecessary frills... I've brought that up several times before in the context of something more like the DC, but made in 1995 hardware terms)
Specificlaly I've addressed that here: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread....386#post307386

and earlier: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread....618#post295618

And Ablackfalcon was pushing that POV very strongly.

And yes, if SoJ were focused on doing right by the west they'd have pushed for a later design in general and I agree, perhaps not as late as the N64, but somewhat later.
Of course, anything with a CD drive and anywhere close to the hardware of the N64 or PSX would be more expensive than the PSX... the N64 was cheap because of carts, otherwise it would likely been $250-300 at its 1996 release and following Nintendo's selling for profit market model (they cut to very slim profits as it was at $200 from the planned $250) so Sega would need to focus on an even more cost optimized design than the N64 or simply push a higher price unless they were willing to take losses more than Sony did. (Sony had the in-house advantage not only of money, but of vertical integration and owning key patents and licenses that others had to go through more overhead for: everything surrounding CD-ROM, the R3000A CPU, producing all their own custom chips, general economy of scale, etc, etc -something no other company on the market had and something Sony had with DVDs as well -though the inefficent PS2 hardware at least gave grounds to exploit there -odd that the GC didn't use full-sized discs though, even if it wasn't going to be DVD video compatible)

As it was, the N64 had some pretty noticeable bottlenecks and quirks and problematic support from Nintendo. (namely access latency from the CPU and issues tied to limited support for RSP microcoding among other things, plus the use of carts of course)

How about some context?

The context in which SGI's chipset was presented to SoA in 1993... it would be very interesting to know more though. Joe miller would be wonderful to interview on the subject and dispel idle speculation. Kalinske's non-technical context provides little info.
But in any case, SoJ likely could have beaten SGI's design given the amount of time and talent they had. If Atari's very limited funding and staf or a couple (very talented) engineers with Flare was enough to create a successor to the Jaguar by 1996 (ant it seems the Jaguar II might have made its 1996 date) with similar low-cost emphasis and quite competitive and flexible capabilities (and the limit of maintaining full backwards compatibility), I'm sure Sega could have done better with their talent and resources. (unless Flare was an even more exceptional case than I thought)

Of course there's the equally interesting prospect of Sega collaborating with Sony as Kalinske also initiated and SoJ rejected. (I think that was riskier though as there's no telling what might have happened to Sega... other than perhaps getting shafted by SOny or becoming an extremely successful 3rd party developer)

So Nintendo can get the price down on a superior chipset (SGI), while Sega drives it way up on an inferior one (Saturn Project).

No they didn't get the price down necessarily, they took years to develop it with SGI and a year longer than they'd originally thought, plus they didn't have the in-house designers of Sega: Why would Sega have to go 3rd party when they could do better in-house without the overhead? (they didn't, but they could have)

Honestly though, it might have been pretty productive at the time to allow SoA to manage a competing design with SGI against SoJ's project (as with with Katana and Black belt) except SGI would probably not be comfortable working on such with no promise of a buyer... unless they got their money either way (and Sega could afford that then far more than with the DC). And keeping the 2 teams secret would have been a set-up for a mess as with Black Belt...

Basically your argument is that Sega Corporate was retarded. Logically extrapolated, at least.

No, but they were segmented and had communication and dual management problems and related conflicts.
Prior to the 32x SoA and SoA just took what SoJ gave them with limited input for anything but that done in the west, especially on hardware.

The full context of the 32x's development and release still seems in question to me: is it true that SoA was expressly ordered to produce Mars and were they also ignorant of SoJ's own plans?

In that context we agree on the method of Sega's madness, and the fallout, far more than you may think.

The method to their madness made sense up to 1991 and nothing major happened until mid 1994, and that's where that methodology became misplaced as their position on the market was not what it had been prior to that with constant struggling.

What's wrong with releasing late?

The tech leapfrogged both the Playstation and Saturn. Timing didn't kill it. Rather, the cart did.

In practice the N64 was not much better (and worse in many cases) than the PSX and Saturn... though some of that was artificial limits imposed by the lack of CD-ROM and Nintendo's policies, but I seem to be the exception of recognizing that while almost all other retro fans seem to complain about the "vasaline" low-res textures and lower polygon counts...
But Sega probably wouldn't have done things that way, be it with the SGI chipset OR with a superior chipset of their own.
The audio hardware is inferior no doubt about that, but that's something that Nintendo got right: all you needed was sample playback and not much else, just DMA audio nothing super fancy other than compression support (in software or hardware) vs the PSX, DC, and PS2 pushing pretty substantial audio subsystems. (albeit at least the sound CPUs could be used as general purpose CPUs as well in the Saturn and DC and allow more flexibility, but the N64 and all post PS2 systems broke from that -rather ironic that the N64 did it when it actually needed synth power more than others, but since PCM/ADPCM was the main method for that it was fine. (the amiga got it right and they just needed to build on that simple set-up -but that's a mistake that most hardware manufacturers made from the late 80s to the end of the 90s: SNES's audio hardware was overpowered and underused and Nintendo could have done quite well at much lower cost and no dependence on Sony with Ricoh's 8-channel PCM chip in place of the SPC unit -it even had the advantage of hardware stereo panning)

So? I'm supposed to think that the Saturn -- in its messy application, design and launch -- was superior to the N64 chipset because it may have cost only slightly more to manufacture than the latter if they were both CD-ROM?

No that the N64 might have been more expensive and wasn't that superior in most peoples eyes. (though there's people who think the PS2 was generally better than the DC...)
The main cost difference would be with the PCB, otherwise the N64 would eb more expensive with quire high-end and exotic RAM and large chips with large heat sinks. (the Saturn had slightly more RAM but it was all cheaper than the N64, so gettign the PCB more consolidated was the main issue)

I think the N64 was significantly better, but noone else willing to discuss the topic seems to agree other than you and blackfalcon. (short of asking Nintendo fans) Though, again, Sega didn't need SGI to maek a machine as good or better than the N64, they just needed to aim in that direction. (even building on the Saturn hardware as a starting point could have helped a lot)

And also remember that while the hardware didn't help, a big part of it was software: Sega had Psygnosis develop a killer dev kit and set of libraries for the PSX, Sega provided minimalistic (and somewhat incomplete) low-level documentation more like previous generations. (ironically the exact opposite of the DC and PS2 -except the PS2 was far tougher to work with)


You know, I think a lot of this argument is me playing devil's advocate with myself. It's a habbit of mine that I like to look at things from wvery angle and either accept the areas with too little data as total unknowns (and thus simply say both sides of an argument at false do to lack of real information), or play along with the speculation and delve into the pros and cons of both sides (or often more than 2 views)... obviously I tend to go for the latter more often.

There's too many people who want to blame things on one specific cause in any case: some expressly blame Kalinske for what happened (I don't), many blame Stolar as having a big hand in it (from all I've seen, farily justified), or SoJ screwing things up in general (also justified), but I think in the latter case: not only was it SoJlooking to its own interests, but poorly comunicating those things to the west.

Even if SoA was stuck with what SoJ decided to do, at least if they were well-informed SoA could manage thigns accordingly and make the best of it. (one of the key things for development of the Saturn would be emphasizing development of good tools: the Saturn may never have been as efficient as the PSX, but beign reasonably competitive as well as giving full low-level support would go a long way in retaining the strong developer support they had in '95 and most of '96)
That and promote the strong poitns of the architecture to allow things the PSX couldn't do: not just 2D but general types of renderign the Saturn could do in software that the PSX couldn't do in hardware and had less CPU resource to manage in software: like height map engines or hybrid engines using height maps as well as polygons and scaled "sprites" (somethign the Jaguar really should have aimed at from the start... imagien cybermorph with a voxel landscape and higher framerate) -and VDP2 effects, another exceptional strongpoint the Saturn coudl exploit for flat ground and water effects -while height mappign could be used for terrain and some buildings within the limits of such a ray-casting engine -the pinnacle of that is Outcast on the PC, one of the last, if not THE last PC game to push for a CPU only renderer -Amok is another example of a mixed renderer and they back much further with things like Commanche) Hell, most people would probably think Doom or Duke 3D were "real 3D" had the sprites been replaced with polygonal models. (the whole environment would still be using a height-map ray-casting engine though, technically 2D representing 3D space, though it's arguable in general -a big benefit over polygons in addition to speed of rendering is complete lack of texture warping due to the column based rendering vs line based rendering and "constant Z" texture rendering)

Technically you didn't need the flexibility of a CPU to push that sort of rendering: a flexible DSP or similar coprocessor aimed at such would be more cost-effective (like modern GPUs and the Jaguar's RISC GPU in the "TOM" ASIC and even the N64's RSP to a fair extent -it's more or less a R4000 CPU core modified to more DSP like functionality and soem other specific hardware additions, I think with some programmability in microcode): Sega could have used an off-the-shelf DSP to facilitate that (the low-cost SSP-1601 used in the SVP might be a candidate), a more general purpose CPU even (less cost effective), but a fully custom chip would be ideal. (had they tied such a DSP or one of the SH2s directly to the video bus, that might have made for some very interesting possibilities... actually that might not have been a bad idea: one main CPU and one sharing the bus with VDP1 -doing that for VDP2 would make less sense)

Of course, in hindsight, with Sony pushing polygons so hard that aiming at better, more flexible rendering at the time (voxels/height maps in general had a ton of applications that could be better than polys but supplemented with polygons when necessary). Unless Sega's push and the continued push from a significant amount PC developers actually induced graphics accelerators and APIs for the PC to shift towards that flexibility. (something that might have happened had Sony not appeared)
Quads for 3D probably wouldn't happen as well before the PSX (in software rendering) triangles were common and quads were more the exception if used at all, but polygon rendering was just one facet and as it was the PSX was the only system on the market that was really focused on that as such until about 1998. (3DO sucked at pretty much anything but polygonal -quad- 3D too as it lacked the CPU resource to do much else, but the Jaguar, N64, PCs, and Saturn all could have catered to a broader array of more flexible and better looking rendering techniques )

And yet you just argued that Sega may have been contextually (there's that word) right to pass up the N64 chipset because...of a need to rush the Saturn hardware to market.

I was speaking of SoJ's need to push it to the market in Japan, but rushing it to the US and goign all-in too soon. You could argue that they should have doen right by the west and sacrificed Japan (if that would have even been the case had they waited a year), but even with the Japanese release of the Saturn: holding back in the west longer would have been healthier in general. (with or without the 32x, but especially with the 32x) Putting only enough resources in to really push it in Japan but not sacrifice the Genesis or GG in the west (or their South American niche) and make the best of the Sega CD and even 32x. (it shouldn't have been IMO, but they could have made the best of it rather than making rash actions that confused things more)

Your narrative is all over the place. Are there POV shifts that I should be aware of? Because it appears that the same thing you were defending/advertising in the positive is a paragraph or two later something you find critically flawed.

Yes, I'm not arguing one thing, I'm pointing out the possible sense of certain contextual PoVs and what I think would have made the msot sense under those conditions as well as what I think would/should have been the best overall course.

I said the 32x shouldn't have been, but I also said that wasn't the big picture either and in several P'sOV explained.

The Saturn's developer support sucked.

Not in 1995 though mid 1996. marketing and supply of certain games may have, but the libraries of both were very strong (if not better on the Saturn) up to fall of 1996. However, they could have been even stronger with better development support and getting general tools out a bit earlier. (32x might have hindered that but it's not totally clear when SoA even got the raw documents to be translated) Beyond translation they needed full and detailed low-level documentation of the entire system and all errata and bugs so that they could address all that in a good general SDK that would be improved as time went on. (investing in creating an actual API would be critical, but short of that being ready from the start, at least good C support for the CPUs -which Hitachi should provide- and comprehensive and complete low-level support for the rest would be necessary -and general purpose tools for using the sound system, etc)

Everybody has said this. Their SDKs were complete shit for the Saturn, and completely backward compared to the Playstation's trailblazing.

Not trailblazing, but conformity of a growing trend vs traditionalism (which Sony oddly shifted from drastically in the PS2).
The 3DO was the real trailblazer there, that and PC APIs, but in the case of 3DO they went TOO far by totally lockign developers out of any low-level access or even high-level programming customized by developers: only allowing 3DO's OS and libraries to be used, preventing tweaks and optimization. (done to facilitate backwards compatibility of the successor ironically enough and allow some varying hardware configurations: the PSX had the same problem early on but Sony eventually relented to complains about lack of low-level support -something they took to heart too strongly with the PS2... low level access to a high-level optimized machine is very different than a fully low-level optimized machine with tons of bottlenecks and lack of high-level support in general )

And no, Sega did eventually correct the tools, but it came too late. (I believe late 1996, but I forget the details -it came up with a former Saturn developer before on Atariage; that discussion also mentioned the later inclusion of proper documentation for the DSP coprocessor intended for vertex math: no wonder it was rarely used by 3rd parties as there wasn't even good low-level docs on ti in the early tools)

So yeah, a TON of problems tied to software tools alone. That DSP could have boosted general performance significantly, especially in the context of using triangle rendering (offsetting the CPU resource used for 3D math and allowing full force software rendering -even more so if much of the game engine was moved onto the 68k -sound CPU, but fully general purpose and capable of acting as the main CPU, unlike the Jaguar, it had a nice dedicated bus with work RAM too -the Jaguar would have been far more capable if that had been the case)

As for superior software...no.

Certainly not for marketing purposes, diversity and third party output. Much of that due to the Saturn's messy innards.

Looking at all the games up through mid 1996, the Saturn was exceptionally competitive in general. Only that fall did they really fall behind and more so with Sony literally buying up exclusivity. (something Sega's problems did make easier, of course) Tomb Raider, one of the biggest early killer apps for the PSX, was possibly superior on the Saturn, but it didn't get the marketing push needed. (it was out ahead of the PSX in Europe -where it launched- but a couple days after the PSX version came out in the US)

Games after that dropped more in frequency of release than quality.

No. No it didn't. Especially not internally.

And whatever it did get from third parties, was usually late.

It does seem like SGI wasn't pushing it so much, but then again they had a lot of Genesis work they were still doing and that got convoluted by the pull back of funding for all but Saturn.
There was a fairly strong push for PC development at STI too, and the more successful end of Sonic Xtreme had been initially for the PC alone and later merged with the one successful aspect of the Saturn team's engine.

'Quake' released for Saturn in 1997.

Yeah, a shame they couldn't push hard in '97, that's when the market really exploded... And Quake was only out in 1996 on the PC (as with Amok), so they couldn't go a whole lot faster.
But you're right: neither was going to get big-time 3rd party support until late '96/97 so they needed to have 1st/2nd party stuff pushing it early on. (really though, fall of 1996 was THE hinging point for being really big or falling into a niche, at least for the US...)

Sega lost the battle in 1995/96.

1995 barely mattered (or rather should have taken much lower priority in terms of marketing push and release timeline), late 1996 is when they had to make their move, but the mistakes in '95 heavily hindered that. For all the criticism Nights gets, they had a massive campaign lined up for August that cot cut at the last minute (supposedly due to funding shortages), so they burned out (apparently) at a critical time in general. Of course Tomb Raider would have been a major one to hype as well and had things gone more smoothly they could have made the 1996 release of Sonic Xtreme even.

So 1995 mattered, but it mattered because they tried too hard too early. The 32x shouldn't have been there and it should have been primarly 16-bit mass market focus for the majority of 1995 and hype build-up through the Summer culminating with the September launch of the Saturn. (and the hype and general market/media interest would have been the big point to get, stay competitive in the public eye against Sony, but also focus strongly on maintaining a competitive edge in the true mass-market with 16-bit games until the shift in late 1996/1997 really pushed that into the budget market like the NES in 1991)

What are you talking about?

VF was always a big title in Japan, and it helped to keep the Saturn either in the lead or in competition with the Playstation early on.

This is well-documented.

I need to dig it up again, but there was a bigger push for VFII, though of course VF was the main reason the Saturn actually made it early on in Japan with little else.
And no, I don't think it had a significant lead over the PSX in Japan in market share (maybe in overall sales early on due to the small head-start, but market share was always close from what I understand and Sony took a noticeable lead in 1996), of course the SFC was still ahead of both up to 1996 as well. (1997 with FFVII destroyed the Saturn's market share though)

Case in point: I mentioned 'Tekken'. And other Playstation arcade ports.

Anything by Namco or Psygnosis wouldn't count as those were 1st/2nd party developers (and any other developer Sony specifically commissioned or bought exclusivity for).
So that's Sony's 1st party stuff so to speak. Sega had strong 1st party Arcade stuff too obviously, but it apparently didn't sell as well in general, or at least wasn't marketed right.

In the context of being big on Western appeal. Something that could not be said for Sega's side to nearly the same degree.

So it was luck then that Sega managed such a strong western appeal with their games in the previous generation?
Sure the later western stuff had an impact (mainly sports games, some arcade games, plus some filler and some good exclusive and multiplatform stuff in general), but many of the killer games were from Japan, just like with the SNES.
Same for the PSX with their early stuff, but they were also pouring hundreds of millions into software development alone (200 million was their initial bid for entry in the industry). Could Sega have competed directly with that kind of money?

The 32x may have hurt their image, but it had next to nothing to do with limiting the Saturn's software, and the Saturn's architecture wasn't directly to blame either in many respects, though documentation could be. (even while learning some specifics of the architecture, the hardware was powerful enough to "take it easy" and go for a more software oriented approach and/or stick to VDP1 in general -you'd need software rasterization for triangles or a game designed for quad models -in the latter case, some arcade games and all 3DO games would be easier to directly port to the Saturn)
It's really odd that more of the early 32x games weren't ported to Saturn (even with minimal enhancement -any game on the 32x could automatically run faster and smoother on the Saturn due to CPU speed and RAM speed -the latter manly in the case of textures being read from fast RAM vs slow ROM, and much more so with the Saturn's graphics acceleration actually being utilized, but the more you got away from simple ports, the more work would be done -for 3D stuff it would probably be best to use VDP1 purely for shading and texture mapping and not any rasterization -for Doom all it would be useful for is scaling sprites and shading/lighting as the texture mapping would be useless for such an engine -the PSX port totally rewrote the game to render with polygons)

Some have suggested Sony had something to do with restricting the release of Doom on the Saturn, but I'm not sure. (it would have been a big fumble nonetheless as it should have been quite straightforward to port the renderer and engine to the Saturn -even the 68k stuff could be moved onto the 68k in the Saturn and you'd have a lot more resource to work with -probably managing full-screen and possibly high-detail mode rendering along with at least as much content as the 3DO game and probably highcolor shading and full animation)
So yeah, that shouldn't have been limited no matter how bare-bones the Saturn docs were as source ports from the 32x should have been pretty feasible in general. (with Doom and some others you didn't even have Genesis BG stuff to worry about, so not even having to deal with using VDP2)

Note that you ignored this, and simply ventured off into some pedagogic rant about arcade ports. Redundant. And oblivious to the real point.

I'd argue the point (the game was unique to Sony's side, atmospheric, WESTERN, and a blast with friends), except you're again missing it altogether.

I like it OK, kind of feels like Cell Damage, but it's no Mario Kart (even the SNES version's battle mode is more fun in some ways -namely the controls, I'm not even going to mention MK64 ).
However, it seems like it was not well liked at all in Europe, so not west, but just the US (maybe NA).

And of course it was unique to Sony, that was among the many games they put those 200 million into for exclusives.

The point was marketing in 1995 of Western-appeal product. Yet you reply with some left-field (of a separate stadium, on the opposite coast) pedantry about the N64's release list.

In 1995 it was a good strong mix, but that was a hype and high-end only market at the time, so PR is all that mattered (which Sega screwed up), mid/late 1996 was when they had to really have things in gear and followed through in 1997. And as to the N64, yes that was a critical competitor in the US market and a major factor to consider. (in the EU side though Sega possibly could have managed 2nd as it was, and obviously in Japan)

I'm gettign mixed information, but it seems like the Saturn was OUTSELING the PSX up to 1996 or at least very close to it until that fall.
But there's lots of mixed info. (one 2.8 million claim by the first quarter of '97 vs 1.1 million for the Saturn or another than claims the PSX took over a year to hit 1 million, etc)
In any case, you could still argue that Sega needed to keep things as good as possible early on to not lose out.

Sony released 'NFL Gameday' in 1995, a critical hit for them that helped establish the Playstation as the new sports system in the West.

Hmm, who was handling Sega Sports at that time? Blue Sky seemed to taper off from that by '94 in general and Clockwork Tortoise had only done that one (though ver impressive) game on the CD with Joe Montana NFL.

So what happened with that? Did Bluesky get sidetracked or something else? (they were busy with several non-sports genesis games at the time too)

So thanks for pointing that out, but it's still confusing. (it's not like the Genesis or 32x were getting those resources as Sega Sports hadn't released a football game in '95 at all, or even late '94 from what I can find, though EA was quite active on the Genesis still in '95 and '96)
They had farshight studios and Spectacular Games coming out with Football games in '96 and '97 for the Genesis, but again nothing in '95 at all. (NFL Prime Time '98 being among the very few late games released on the Genesis and just before Sega actually ran out of hardware after SoJ cut production in '96 -before Majesco offered to pick things up)

You excoriated Stolar on PR, yet now it's beside the point?

Also, PR was the point of the post you replied to. Really.

Yes, that was significant, but more for Sega as a whole, and not for the Saturn, but I missed the point on NFL Prime Time, so that changes things in general...
And Sega did have bigger problems with PR to deal with anyway, but I agree on that point, it would have been significant for that alone. (but they needed to pace things so they could have their strength when push came to shove in late '96 and '97) And in terms of bad PR, the 32x certainly was a bigger issue. (and the way to deal with the -be it carefully managed phase out or even a longer mass market push, needed to be executed expertly to fix the problem created by the confusion of 1994... releasing the Saturn in September alone would have gone a long way towards that though -while keeping the 32x on the market, even with very limited 1st party software -updated 3rd party dev kits would have helped a ton -and something very simple unlike translating the Saturn docs, in fact all they needed to do was provide info on the DMA audio and some sample code)

As far as EA, they were producing a 'Madden', first for Playstation, but they got spooked when Sony unveiled 'Gameday' and canned both the Playstation and Saturn revs.

So yes, Sony stuck to PC and 16-bit consoles until '96...

And of course, you again flunk history and the attendant context -- both broadly and in your direct reply to my statements -- as sports truly took off with Genesis, creating a huge market sector for Sega.

One they ignored when releasing Saturn, and which Sony catered to.

Do you know how or just why Sega deliberately did those things or id there's more to it than "SoJ limited them"?
I think it may have been a good deal more than "ignoring the market" and possibly more to other internal problems confusing priorities, but that's one thing I haven't seen addressed in interviews at all.

And if you recall: Sega had been pushing sports on the Genesis from the start, but more strongly with Baseball releases. The HAD been pushing significantly for a football release since the Genesis's launch, but Mediagenic screwed up (it was supposed to be out by the holiday '89 season) and things strung along until '90 when Sega finally switched to EA. (and Joe Montana got released after Madden as such, with Madden being the very first football game on the Genesis in late '1990)

SO I wonder if SoA really was pushing a game on the Saturn but there were odd delays or some other problems, or if SoJ really was interfering with that as well. (SoA/STI staff didn't get cut-back until '97 with Stolar iirc, though that wouldn't mean much unless STI actually took on development vs the standard of outsourcing their football games)

Who cares? Soccer means jack shit to the American market.

A market that Sega ignored.

My point. Pure.

Again, more details would be really interesting to know. Things are rarely that cut and dry. (it's like people falsely claiming that Jack Tramiel ruined Atari's video games and had no interest in the business -when the opposite is true as he was fully aware and committed to the need of exploiting that market to support the company -there's a lot more to it than that too)
Why did they "ignore" such big things, who made the decisions or was it not something actively decided but delays or other problems in development.

Again it seems odd that the 32x and Genesis (or CD) didn't even get any 1995 football games (unless I'm missing something), so that just thickens the peculiarity.