The 5 Worst Marketing Failures in the History of Video Games

[j_factor]

The Saturn's pre-launch was a management failure, not a marketing failure. And really, it wasn't that big of a deal in the long run. At the end of the year, nobody was saying, "I'm not buying a Saturn because it came out too early and it used to be more expensive."

[Black_Tiger]

I don't know anything about the rest of these product launches, but as bad of an idea as the Saturn pre-launch was in retrospect it was nowhere near the "disaster" it is seen as today back then. I just posted all of the articles on the Saturn from Spring/Summer 1995 in EGM and Gamepro and there isn't even a hint of this now common narrative. Granted, Edge/Next Generation wanted Sega out of the picture from the magazine's inception, but the rest were pronouncing the Saturn's arrival as the beginning of a new era and calling anything released previously "old" "aging" "dated" or some other term designed to get the masses to feel the need to upgrade immediately. This article claiming that the PS1 was $100 cheaper when it and the Saturn was released to full retail is just another symptom of this article's love of journalistic narratives.

The Saturn's pre-launch was such a bad idea that one of my non-gaming friends had his Mom pick one up in May of 1995 and he loved renting games for it and inviting me over. I do think that the Saturn launched too early in the West, but because of the development kits and general status of that hardware generation's sales through 1995.

The whole not-informing-anyone-in-advance aspect of the Saturn's pre-launch was a bad idea, but they had the best commercials I have ever seen for video games, which convinced me to buy a Saturn asap over a 3DO or Playstation. The had raw footage of games running with no bgm and a tiny title of the game in the corner of the screen. Seeing Daytona and WW Soccer in particular in my home many months before I could possibly see anything for PSX in motion made them as appear as impressive as they actually were for the time.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

What hurt Saturn's launch the most was that it was a Surprise i think. If retailers and developers at least knew, that could have helped the launch significantly. But I still think the safest launch would have been in September. They should have at least waited until Virtua Fighter Remix was finished which would have been a stronger Pack-In against PS1's Toshinden and Tekken.

[jerry coeurl]

At the end of the year, nobody was saying, "I'm not buying a Saturn because it came out too early and it used to be more expensive."

Yeah, it was more like, "I'm not buying a Saturn at all."

[j_factor]

Yeah, it was more like, "I'm not buying a Saturn at all."

Well, yeah. The Saturn had plenty of problems. This was a problem at the time, not a lingering one. People had plenty of other reasons to not buy a Saturn.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Honestly, I think by the end of 1995 in the US the Saturn looked more appealing.

By the end of 1995 the Saturn had the following titles:
Daytona USA
Sega Rally Championship
Virtua Fighter
Virtua Fighter Remix
Virtua Fighter 2
Virtua Cop
Clockwork Knight
Astal
Bug!
Panzer Dragoon
Virtua Racing
Cyber Speedway / Gran Chaser
High Velocity
Wing Arms
Solar Eclipse
Shinobi Legions

In Europe and Japan there were even some titles released in 1995 that wouldn't hit the US until 1996 if at all. So I wouldn't say that looked bad at all for the Saturn by the end of 1995. Most of the PS1's launch titles I always thought looked rather poor to be honest. I'd say things didn't start to look hopeless for the Saturn until mid-late 1996. 1997 had some promise with titles like Lunar and the Policenauts on the release calendar, but Bernie Stolar's E3 fiasco pretty much shot that all in the foot.

[Pulstar]

Again with the revisionism. Saturn should have been the de facto 32-bit platform if it hadn't been for Sony's Playstation.

[Gogogadget]

What hurt the Saturn was forcing developers to either rush titles or just wait for what was meant to be the official launch and launching a console with one title that has a single player mode that lasts about 20 minutes.

Also, I wouldn't say "John Romero is gonna make you his bitch" was the nail in the coffin for his mess of a game, but the constant delays and E3 demos that looked shit compared to Quake 2 and Unreal, which would be 2 years old when the game finally hit shelves anyway coupled with the fact that the game was below-average when it finally launched is what killed it eventually.

[NeoVamp]

Personally I'll always feel that what damaged the Saturn launch the most was the lack of familiar titles,
I still remember having to decide between the Saturn or the Playstation back then and just..
not feeling the Sega feel with the Saturn, where was the superior Sonic game?
where was Streets of Rage 4? Phantasy Star 5? Ecco 3?

Sure they would all have been sequels, but as a Sega fan I would have been all like "dayum time to upgrade!"

but now.. I felt like, Clockwork Knight?

So to me the Saturn marketing failure is that Sega forgot the titles that had made Sega well known.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, it was more like, "I'm not buying a Saturn at all."

Yeah. The system got off to a terrible start, between the thin game library and software drought through much of that first year, that few of the games were familiar (I agree, that is an issue; they were almost all original titles, not sequels to anything on the Genesis), that people thought the PS1 had better games that year (I disagree, but that certainly was the popular opinion, backlash against the first version of Virtua Fighter, that price $100 above Sony's launch price, that some retailers didn't stock it for a while because of the surprise launch, etc, and it never recovered, unfortunately.

For sheath, some backup for the fact that the early launch WAS an issue in 1995 too, and isn't just something added later, would be the system's failure. Of course there are more reasons, but that early, expensive, unadvertised launch DID hurt the Saturn. And the results? The PS1 outsold the Saturn in '95 in the US. Despite being on the market for like four months less. And it never looked back. And yes, the early launch was a key part of that. Sure, many of the problems would still have been just as bad had Saturn launched that fall, as originally planned. Most of them would, really. And I don't think it'd have had any impact on the end result. But I do believe that it would have helped a bit, and led to at least slightly more success for the system in the US. (Presuming that this later launch was for $300 and had the "Remix" version of Virtua Fighter from day one, I think; at $400 from launch, it'd still have struggled badly.)

[j_factor]

People always judged the Saturn for what it didn't have, rather than for what it had.

[Hidden_Darkness]

as much as I enjoyed the virtual boy, i'm surprised it wasn't on the list since it was a huge flop for nintendo.

[j_factor]

The problem with Virtual Boy was the product itself, not the marketing.

[Thunderblaze16]

Something I never understood was that Nintendo choose the color red for the Virtual Boy's games as it was the cheapest.

Now how is there a value on color and why is red the cheapest to use for there games?

[gamevet]

The problem with Virtual Boy was the product itself, not the marketing.

Isn't the product, or lack thereof, part of marketing?

Coleco's marketing of the Adam computer has to be near the top. Nearly every unit they shipped failed because of the power supply running through the printer. Obviously, they didn't really test the system before they shipped it out.


http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html