N64/PS1/Saturn/DC sales - US NPD

[gamevet]

By 97, it's an accepted fact that Saturn wouldn't have much 3rd party support. I think everybody can agree here. But they had plenty of good Japanese games that could have been localized had they still been serious about selling the Saturn. The North American Saturn owners never got the chance to play great titles like Radiant Silvergun, Thunderforce V, Layer Section II, Bulk Slash, Keriotosse!(great 4 player party game), Terra Cresta 3D, G Vector, Anarchy in the Nippon, Savaki. SOA didn't even bother bringing over Deep Fear which was released in Europe. This is a disservice to the faithful Saturn owners and clear evidence that Saturn had plenty of decent titles for the US market had Stolar not killed it officially in 1997. Doing so only sealed the company's fate for good.

The Saturn had pretty good 3rd and 1st party support in 1997. The problem is, that we don't know if 3rd party publishers were going to commit to projects for the next year, before the E3 announcement was ever made. Those decisions are made at least a year before development and the future outlook may have looked pretty bleak for the following year, leading Sega to believe it was over.

http://www.allgame.com/platform.php?id=26&tab=games

Albert Odyssey
Amok
Arcade's Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection
Battle Arena Toshiden URA
Battlesport
Battle Stations
Burning Rangers (1998)
Bust-A-Move 3 (1998)
Command & Conquer
Contra: Legacy of War
Courier Crisis
Crimewave
Croc: Legend of the Gabbos
The Crow: City of Angels
Crypt Killer
CrimeWave
Darklight Conflict
Die Hard Arcade
Die Hard Trilogy
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Enemy Zero
FIFA: Road to World Cup 98
Grand Slam
Herc's Adventures
Hexen
The Incredible Hulk: The Patheon Saga
Independence Day
Last Bronx
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Lunacy
Madden NFL 98
Manx TT SuperBike
Magic Knight Rayearth (1998)
Marvel Super Heroes
Mass Destruction
Maximum Force
Mech Warrior 2
Mega Man X4
Mega Man 8: Anniversary Collector's Edition
Mortal Kombat Trilogy
Nascar 98
NBA Live 98
NBA Action 98
NHL 98
NHL All-Star Hockey 98
Norse by Norsewest: The Return of the Lost Vikings
Panzer Dragoon Saga (1998)
Quake
Rampage World Tour
Resident Evil
Revolution X
Saturn Bomberman
Scud: The Disposable Assassin
Sega Ages
Sega Touring Car Championship
Shining the Holy Ark
Shining Force III (1998)
Sky Target
Sonic Jam
Sonic R
Soviet Strike
Steep Slope Slider
Street Fighter Collection
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Ten Pin Alley
Tunnel B1
WarCraft II: The Dark Saga
Winter Heat
World Series Baseball 98
Worldwide Soccer 98

Specialty stores such as EB, Babbages, Software ETC and Toys R Us would likely have not dropped Sega Saturn if not for the E3 1997 comment by Stolar. As for the other big box stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, Computer City, Walmarts, Kmarts, Targets..Sega could have arranged to have a consignment agreement. In addition to that, offer a $10 spiff to the sales clerks working at the specialty stores for every Saturn they could sell. A small incentive goes a long way towards "influencing" a minimum wage clerk's opinion when asked by customers which system to purchase.

Toys R' Us had Saturn hardware and games much longer than the other stores I had visited. I could have purchased several copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga for $20, but I didn't do so, because there wasn't places like Ebay where I could sell the items at a profit.

I don't recall seeing the Saturn at Walmart, and Target never gave a lot of shelf space for the console. Sega would have had to offer incentives to the stores; there's no way those would have been passed onto the clerks. I've heard on several occasions that retail makes no money from the hardware sales, but they recoup the costs with the software sold.

If Sega was serious about the Saturn, they could have made a Saturn model 2, include the NiGHTS controller with a revised sleeker design and pushed some 15 second commercials on MTV. Sort of a semi-relaunch with many of the titles I mentioned above include Deep Fear, NiGHTS, Keriotosse! as pack ins. BTW, the internet was alive and well by 1997. Sega.com already had a forum for it's products and being a member, I can assure you that everybody who supported that system knew what Bernie said just like they would if he said it today. As for the retailers, they all would have gotten a memo from head office to liquidate Saturn and Saturn related merchandise which means all the employees at EB, Babbages, Software ETC and Toys R Us would have warned prospective buyers to stay clear from the Saturn since these sales clerks didn't work on commission. But again, had Stolar been smart and had some understanding of this business, he'd have offered a small spiff for every Saturn sold to those sales clerks to help keep the system in the running in 97,98 and possibly 99.

The Saturn's hardware had too many parts for it to be streamlined like the Playstation. No amount of cost reductions could have made that console a break-even product for Sega, after the prices had dropped to $149. There comes a time when your hardware gets lost in the shuffle. Sega's own Mark III (Master System) in Japan sold 1 million units within its 1st year, only to see sales drop to nothing once the Famicom established itself in the market.

Either stick around until 1999 or cancel Saturn and call it quits cause there was no point for the Dreamcast after what Stolar said. The mistake with Sega is that they thought they were fighting for their existence with Dreamcast when they were actually in the battle for their future with Saturn.

There's no way that the Saturn was the future of Sega. The Playstation had overtaken the system in Japan by the beginning of 1997 and was obliterating the console in Europe and North America. Sega of America had planned on releasing the DC in 1998, but after seeing the hardware shortages and lack of software for the system in Japan, they held back the launch to ensure that everything was in place.

Some 15 second ads running once or twice a day on MTV, even MTV2 wouldn't put Sega in much more of a hole than they already were by this point. Keep in mind, this is Sega's last real chance in the hardware business. They named it Dreamcast cause they must have been dreaming if they thought they could come back after ditching the Saturn.

Atari was doing that with the 5200 in the 80's and the console still bombed. You have to have the software and pricing that the consumers are interested in.

That's only a testament to the greatness of the Dreamcast and some of the best titles to ever be released on a console in such a short time span. And still, it sold about as bad as the Wii U is doing by early 2000. DC would have gotten much better support had Sega not AWOL from the entire industry for around 2 years. With the games it had, it should have at least sold better than Gamecube. Nobody trusted them after abandoning Saturn only two years into it's life cycle.

The Dreamcast was still selling pretty well in 2000, in North America. The rest of the world saw the console's sales drop dramatically once the PS2 had arrived. If Sony was able to produce more PS2s for the North American audience, the DC would have crumbled much faster. SOJ had laid all of their chips on the North American market, because it was the only one that was succeeding. The dramatic drop of sales in 2001 was the final nail in the console's coffin.

The DC did well in North America, because it had great software, great marketing and solid retail support. The demise of the Saturn had nothing to do with how well the DC performed in North America, much like how the failure of the Master System did not effect the performance of the Genesis in North America.

Uh, didn't Kalinske leave because Sega of Japan had stopped listening to him, so he wanted out because he had no independence anymore? Or something like that. It wasn't exactly just "he chose to leave entirely on his own will". Sega of Japan didn't seem to want him anymore.

He was telling SOJ the same thing that Stolar would later tell them. "The Saturn would not be a profitable product." They wouldn't listen to him and he saw that the future of Sega wasn't good, so he left.

Uh, Saturn sales skyrocketed in Christmas '96 as well... sure, they dropped lower than the others, but that holiday season they went way, way up. Your contention that that just naturally stopped, with Sega having no part in the Saturn's retail failure in 1997, is not credible, at all, in any way.

Skyrocket? Not even close. Skyrocket was what the Playstation and N64 were doing during that holiday season. You know it's pretty bad when you've had your console out for nearly a year and a half, and were already getting passed up by the N64 within 3 or 4 months.

You have no proof to show that the Saturn would have done better, if Sega had laid all of their resources behind the Saturn in 1997. The numbers definitely say that it wasn't going to succeed, and there has never been a console that has fell that far behind the competition (in its region), that eventually led to profitability, or increased sales.

[A Black Falcon]

The Dreamcast was still selling pretty well in 2000, in North America. The rest of the world saw the console's sales drop dramatically once the PS2 had arrived. If Sony was able to produce more PS2s for the North American audience, the DC would have crumbled much faster. SOJ had laid all of their chips on the North American market, because it was the only one that was succeeding. The dramatic drop of sales in 2001 was the final nail in the console's coffin.

The DC did well in North America, because it had great software, great marketing and solid retail support. The demise of the Saturn had nothing to do with how well the DC performed in North America, much like how the failure of the Master System did not effect the performance of the Genesis in North America.

This is totally wrong, as I'll explain below the next quote. In short though, the North American market wasn't succeeding, it was just failing a bit less than the other two markets were. It was, however, still most definitely a failure in 2000, and did not sell anywhere near what Sega wanted, or needed, it to in North America that year. That was one of the main reasons why Sega discontinued the system in early 2001, 2000 sales had not been good enough, and the PS2's launch late that year had been.

The DC did well in North America, because it had great software, great marketing and solid retail support.

The Dreamcast didn't do well in the US. It did better than it did in the other regions, but still was a disappointing failure here, just like it was elsewhere. Once again, Sega failed to sell anywhere near as many Dreamcasts as they were hoping to in the US at Christmas 2000, and that was the final blow to the DC. It wasn't sales in 2001, it was the disappointing, too-low sales in 2000 that did it in. Even Sam Pettus's articles say this, and I don't think that point, at least, has been disproven (unlike some other stuff he said). Remember, the Dreamcast was discontinued very early in 2001. It was killed before 2001 software sales mattered, because sales in 2000 had been worse than expected, in the US and elsewhere.

The demise of the Saturn had nothing to do with how well the DC performed in North America,

If you actually believe this insanity, I think we're done here. The fact that consumer suspicion of Sega, which advanced because Sega abandoned one system after another after another, hurt the Dreamcast, is an inarguable fact. I think the only person who's ever said that that didn't happen was Bernie Stolar himself, and he had good reason to lie to himself about reality (to try to make himself feel better about what he'd done, that is)... you don't.

A lot of people were thinking "Dreamcast? Eh, I don't know, Sega keeps killing systems early... I'll wait and see." after DC was announced. Sega had to work hard to get those people back, and not all of them did come back; plenty just waited for PS2. A Sega which hadn't killed the Saturn early would have had an easier time selling the Dreamcast. This basic fact is one of the most important reasons why Bernie Stolar's decision to kill Saturn early was so terrible -- it played a central role in the death of the Dreamcast too. I don't exactly agree with Vic Ireland that if not for what Bernie did Sega would quite possibly still be making consoles (their small size would probably have seen them forced out at some point), but I think it's inarguable that they would have done better than they did, because you can't do something stupider than leave the industry for several years and then come back and expect people to just accept you. And they didn't.

And once again, if Sega really couldn't afford to support Saturn until it was actually done, then they had no business releasing another console. But I think they could have, and it would have benefitted them overall (including financially).

much like how the failure of the Master System did not effect the performance of the Genesis in North America.

You really can't compare pre-Genesis Sega to post-Genesis Sega. Pre-Genesis, most American gamers knew nothing about Sega. Post-Genesis (or, more accurately, post-Sonic), everyone knew about Sega. So sure, the Master System failed, and was replaced early too (a bit over 3 years, though some software support did continue for two years after that). But very few people cared, because it'd sold badly and Sega's name just wasn't that well known until Sonic came around.

And also, though Sega did release the Genesis only 3 years and 2 months after the SMS, at least the SMS had software support for those additional two years... it outlasted either the Saturn or Dreamcast in the US, actually!

Skyrocket? Not even close. Skyrocket was what the Playstation and N64 were doing during that holiday season. You know it's pretty bad when you've had your console out for nearly a year and a half, and were already getting passed up by the N64 within 3 or 4 months.

Look at the chart in the OP again. That Nov/Dec 1996 holiday bump Sega had is quite the skyrocket compared to the rest of the Saturn's graph. And the idea that they could not have done so again Christmas '97 or even Christmas '98 is absurd. It didn't have to be some weird one-time thing, not if Sega had actually kept trying to sell Saturns, instead of officially giving up on the console. Of course Saturn would have sold significantly better if not for Bernie Stolar; he effectively killed Saturn sales as soon as he arrived, and did nothing worth mentioning to improve them.

And that's where he and Kalinske were different -- Kalinske disliked the Saturn too, but he went out there and did his best to sell the system anyway until the end (him leaving). Stolar did the opposite of Kalinske, and it was one of the stupidest things a major game company head has ever done.

Atari was doing that with the 5200 in the 80's and the console still bombed. You have to have the software and pricing that the consumers are interested in.

Atari releasing three third-gen consoles (5200, 7800, XEGS) was another really, really stupid thing. They needed to hae one console and stick with it, releasing three with similar power was very stupid and confused the market.

Anyway, the 5200 didn't do great, but it did sell a million systems in its two-year life, and the crash took it out more than anything else. Atari's focus on 2600-to-5200 ports definitely hurt it, and probably hastened on the crash, but it was the crash that really took out the 5200; considering how short it was on the market, a million systems sold and 69 games isn't that bad, really.

The Saturn had pretty good 3rd and 1st party support in 1997. The problem is, that we don't know if 3rd party publishers were going to commit to projects for the next year, before the E3 announcement was ever made. Those decisions are made at least a year before development and the future outlook may have looked pretty bleak for the following year, leading Sega to believe it was over.

I'll guess that a disproportionate number of those games (versus other years) were released in the first five months of the year... third party titles particularly.

The Saturn's hardware had too many parts for it to be streamlined like the Playstation. No amount of cost reductions could have made that console a break-even product for Sega, after the prices had dropped to $149. There comes a time when your hardware gets lost in the shuffle. Sega's own Mark III (Master System) in Japan sold 1 million units within its 1st year, only to see sales drop to nothing once the Famicom established itself in the market.

We all do agree that the terribly designed, over-complex Saturn hardware was a major problem, I think, but even third-place consoles can sometimes do okay.

and there has never been a console that has fell that far behind the competition (in its region), that eventually led to profitability, or increased sales.

Uh, actually, I mentioned several examples of profitable third-place consoles in that very post you were replying to, I believe! Once again, the Gamecube and Atari 7800 were profitable, despite finishing in third worldwide. The Sega Master System did tolerably decently in the US too, even though it was in third in the US (7800 finished in 2nd in the US of course, but 3rd worldwide). The SMS may have been a failure in the US, but it did get five years of software support here... and even though as I said earlier most Americans knew little about Sega at any point during its life, it did create the groundwork for the Genesis's success. Of course the 7800's story isn't as successful, as it was Atari's last successful console, but that's not its fault, that's because Atari failed to follow it up properly. During its life, even though the NES probably outsold it ten to one, it was a successful, profitable console.

[gamevet]

This is totally wrong, as I'll explain below the next quote. In short though, the North American market wasn't succeeding, it was just failing a bit less than the other two markets were. It was, however, still most definitely a failure in 2000, and did not sell anywhere near what Sega wanted, or needed, it to in North America that year. That was one of the main reasons why Sega discontinued the system in early 2001, 2000 sales had not been good enough, and the PS2's launch late that year had been.

It had the most successful launch in console history, until the PS2 surpassed it. It had sold as well as the Playstation had within the same time-frame during the first 1.5-2 years it was available in the North America. Compared to the North American sales of the Genesis during it's early years, it was doing just as well, if not better.

The system was discontinued in 2001, because the other markets were failing miserably. SOJ was pretty much asking the North American market to keep the company afloat, and that came to an end once the supply of PS2s could meet customer demand by spring of 2001.

The Dreamcast didn't do well in the US. It did better than it did in the other regions, but still was a disappointing failure here, just like it was elsewhere. Once again, Sega failed to sell anywhere near as many Dreamcasts as they were hoping to in the US at Christmas 2000, and that was the final blow to the DC. It wasn't sales in 2001, it was the disappointing, too-low sales in 2000 that did it in. Even Sam Pettus's articles say this, and I don't think that point, at least, has been disproven (unlike some other stuff he said). Remember, the Dreamcast was discontinued very early in 2001. It was killed before 2001 software sales mattered, because sales in 2000 had been worse than expected, in the US and elsewhere.

See above!

If you actually believe this insanity, I think we're done here. The fact that consumer suspicion of Sega, which advanced because Sega abandoned one system after another after another, hurt the Dreamcast, is an inarguable fact. I think the only person who's ever said that that didn't happen was Bernie Stolar himself, and he had good reason to lie to himself about reality (to try to make himself feel better about what he'd done, that is)... you don't.

That issue came up with the Saturn. Sega's failed Sega CD and complete failure of the 32X brought up those questions early on with the Saturn. The media was already calling the Saturn Sega's last console.

I've said it before, that I had friends and family that didn't know that the Saturn had existed. The only consumers that were turned off by Sega, were the fans of the company that felt burned by their purchases of those consoles.

A lot of people were thinking "Dreamcast? Eh, I don't know, Sega keeps killing systems early... I'll wait and see." after DC was announced. Sega had to work hard to get those people back, and not all of them did come back; plenty just waited for PS2. A Sega which hadn't killed the Saturn early would have had an easier time selling the Dreamcast. This basic fact is one of the most important reasons why Bernie Stolar's decision to kill Saturn early was so terrible -- it played a central role in the death of the Dreamcast too. I don't exactly agree with Vic Ireland that if not for what Bernie did Sega would quite possibly still be making consoles (their small size would probably have seen them forced out at some point), but I think it's inarguable that they would have done better than they did, because you can't do something stupider than leave the industry for several years and then come back and expect people to just accept you. And they didn't.

Stolar did work hard to get retail and 3rd party publishers into believing that the Dreamcast was a viable system. He got Namco and Konami to support the system in North America, as well as retailers that didn't support the Saturn. He even got Imagine publishing to create the Official Dreamcast Magazine. The Dreamcast's failure had more to do with the huge fanbase Sony had established with the Playstation and their want for the PS2 once it had arrived. The Sega brand and has never been as huge as Sony.

The Saturn was not a money maker for Sega and to continue support for that money-pit would have been far more foolish. Yeah, Sega could have continued support for the Saturn, but that would have just led to them being a 3rd party publisher much sooner, and the DC would have never happened.

And once again, if Sega really couldn't afford to support Saturn until it was actually done, then they had no business releasing another console. But I think they could have, and it would have benefitted them overall (including financially).

They couldn't afford the Saturn and they couldn't afford to back the Dreamcast beyond a couple of years. I've already pointed that out with magazine articles stating that Sega should have became a 3rd party publisher, as early as mid-96. I've also said that they couldn't afford to continue support for the Saturn, and you're obviously agreeing with that here.

You really can't compare pre-Genesis Sega to post-Genesis Sega. Pre-Genesis, most American gamers knew nothing about Sega. Post-Genesis (or, more accurately, post-Sonic), everyone knew about Sega. So sure, the Master System failed, and was replaced early too (a bit over 3 years, though some software support did continue for two years after that). But very few people cared, because it'd sold badly and Sega's name just wasn't that well known until Sonic came around.

Bullshit! Sega's arcade heritage was the very reason why I had an interest in Sega as a console manufacturer. Sega's arcade games were the reason why the Saturn was a moderate success in Japan and Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest hit for the console. The failures of the Mega-Drive and Mark III had no ill effects on the Saturn in Japan.

The popularity of the Super Famicom did not translate into solid sales for the N64 in Japan either.

And also, though Sega did release the Genesis only 3 years and 2 months after the SMS, at least the SMS had software support for those additional two years... it outlasted either the Saturn or Dreamcast in the US, actually!

The Saturn got a hell of a lot more titles in North America, than the Master System did.

Look at the chart in the OP again. That Nov/Dec 1996 holiday bump Sega had is quite the skyrocket compared to the rest of the Saturn's graph. And the idea that they could not have done so again Christmas '97 or even Christmas '98 is absurd. It didn't have to be some weird one-time thing, not if Sega had actually kept trying to sell Saturns, instead of officially giving up on the console. Of course Saturn would have sold significantly better if not for Bernie Stolar; he effectively killed Saturn sales as soon as he arrived, and did nothing worth mentioning to improve them.

You need to look at it again. The bump was in December, with November not showing a significant jump. And there's nothing absurd about believing that the Saturn would not have had a another large jump in December of 97. The consumers were already jumping on the Sony and Nintendo consoles and they had very little reason to think of purchasing a Saturn when it had very little consumer awareness. Absurd is believing that selling the Saturn for another year was going to help Sega financially.

And that's where he and Kalinske were different -- Kalinske disliked the Saturn too, but he went out there and did his best to sell the system anyway until the end (him leaving). Stolar did the opposite of Kalinske, and it was one of the stupidest things a major game company head has ever done.

Kalinske put on his salesman face. He had no interest in launching a new console before 1996, because he believed that there was still a market for the 16-bit consoles and Nintendo proved him right with the amazing success of the SNES during that time period. If Kalinske had believed that the Saturn was marketable, he would have stuck it out. Stolar was able to convince SOJ that the product was a failure, while Kalinske's pleas fell on deaf ears.

Atari releasing three third-gen consoles (5200, 7800, XEGS) was another really, really stupid thing. They needed to hae one console and stick with it, releasing three with similar power was very stupid and confused the market.

Anyway, the 5200 didn't do great, but it did sell a million systems in its two-year life, and the crash took it out more than anything else. Atari's focus on 2600-to-5200 ports definitely hurt it, and probably hastened on the crash, but it was the crash that really took out the 5200; considering how short it was on the market, a million systems sold and 69 games isn't that bad, really.

The 5200 was being outsold by the 6 million unit Colecovision. Atari's massive media blitz did not help to sell the console, crash or not. Yeah, Atari was trying to release the 7800 just 2 years after the failed 5200, but that is not relevant to what I was saying.

We all do agree that the terribly designed, over-complex Saturn hardware was a major problem, I think, but even third-place consoles can sometimes do okay.

3rd place consoles that aren't ripping money out of your bank account can do okay. The Master System was built around cheap (established) off-the-shelf parts, while the Saturn had expensive parts that were new to the market. Totally different situation.

Uh, actually, I mentioned several examples of profitable third-place consoles in that very post you were replying to, I believe! Once again, the Gamecube and Atari 7800 were profitable, despite finishing in third worldwide. The Sega Master System did tolerably decently in the US too, even though it was in third in the US (7800 finished in 2nd in the US of course, but 3rd worldwide). The SMS may have been a failure in the US, but it did get five years of software support here... and even though as I said earlier most Americans knew little about Sega at any point during its life, it did create the groundwork for the Genesis's success. Of course the 7800's story isn't as successful, as it was Atari's last successful console, but that's not its fault, that's because Atari failed to follow it up properly. During its life, even though the NES probably outsold it ten to one, it was a successful, profitable console.

How do you figure that the 7800 was profitable?

The Gamecube wasn't way behind the 2nd place console and its numbers weren't a huge step back from their previous console either. Nintendo's console sales have been shrinking with each generation. The Wii probably would have sold a lot worse, had Nintendo came up with the motion control gimmick. The Wii U's lack of sales fit right into line with where their console market was heading.

[Aang]

It had the most successful launch in console history, until the PS2 surpassed it. It had sold as well as the Playstation had within the same time-frame during the first 1.5-2 years it was available in the North America. Compared to the North American sales of the Genesis during it's early years, it was doing just as well, if not better.

The system was discontinued in 2001, because the other markets were failing miserably. SOJ was pretty much asking the North American market to keep the company afloat, and that came to an end once the supply of PS2s could meet customer demand by spring of 2001.

The successful launch was more a testament to the DC's stellar launch lineup, one that is unparalleled in video game history. In addition, the launch had titles that immediately looked next generation, games like Soul Caliber, NFL 2K and Sonic Adventure made the PS1 and N64 look like pong in comparison. But that wasn't sustained even by mid 2000 as I went to local stores, excitement was all but gone. I even remember reading a business article around the time when Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Mar 2000) and MDK 2 were out that was talking about how Dreamcast titles were great and getting stellar reviews but the hardware wasn't moving very fast. And there is no way you can compare DC launch to the early days of Genesis. It took the Genesis 2 years to even carve a large enough niche for itself to be considered a threat. Upon it's US release in 1989, Nintendo had over 90% of the market and would be a representative of the entire industry. People didn't say they were playing a "video game" by that point, they said they were playing "Nintendo". It's name brand was on par with "Xerox" or "Kleenex".

That issue came up with the Saturn. Sega's failed Sega CD and complete failure of the 32X brought up those questions early on with the Saturn. The media was already calling the Saturn Sega's last console.

So on the one hand, you're saying that Saturn's failure was due to the questionable handling of previous Sega consoles like Sega CD and 32X but Dreamcast was in no way affected by the Saturn??? The console that had just proceeded it?? You realize you're contradicting yourself, right?

Stolar did work hard to get retail and 3rd party publishers into believing that the Dreamcast was a viable system. He got Namco and Konami to support the system in North America, as well as retailers that didn't support the Saturn. He even got Imagine publishing to create the Official Dreamcast Magazine. The Dreamcast's failure had more to do with the huge fanbase Sony had established with the Playstation and their want for the PS2 once it had arrived. The Sega brand and has never been as huge as Sony.

Namco's one big title for DC was Soul Caliber. After that they didn't bring anything of value to the system. Konami didn't release any of their key titles like Castlevania, Contra, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, etc.

BTW, Sega was a household name by 1992 and by 1993 Sega was one of the "coolest" brands in the industry. Sonic the Hedgehog had a higher "Q" rating than Mario or even Mickey Mouse. Sony was famous for Trinitron TVs and portable Walkmans. They weren't famous in the video game industry. If name brand was key to success then Panasonic (just as big as Sony in every consumer electronic field) should have had a cakewalk with 3DO once the price came down by 1994. Another thing Sony was famous for was the Betamax failure. So don't make it out to be like Sony had this industry in it's hands the moment it decided to step into the arena.

The Saturn was not a money maker for Sega and to continue support for that money-pit would have been far more foolish. Yeah, Sega could have continued support for the Saturn, but that would have just led to them being a 3rd party publisher much sooner, and the DC would have never happened.

I couldn't agree less. In your own words, Sega's mishandling of the Sega CD and 32X damaged their credibility. Had Sega gone all out, and supported the Saturn for two more years without Stolar's moronic public condemnation of the system it would have instilled more faith in the public when the Dreamcast was on the market. By abandoning the Saturn, they might as well just become a 3rd party developer with SegaSoft in 1997. After abandoning the Saturn and being out of the hardware market for 2 years, the Dreamcast never stood a chance. And I remember playing Vanishing Point for DC at a store, there was a small audience interested enough to watch and once they found out it was running on Dreamcast, they just walked away. The Sega brand was all but decimated.

Bullshit! Sega's arcade heritage was the very reason why I had an interest in Sega as a console manufacturer. Sega's arcade games were the reason why the Saturn was a moderate success in Japan and Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest hit for the console. The failures of the Mega-Drive and Mark III had no ill effects on the Saturn in Japan.

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason that Saturn was Sega's only successful console in Japan was because of the VF craze over there? VF was the Saturn's killer app for that region and SOJ knew it which is the very reason why they shoehorned a 2nd SH2 into the system instead of rebuilding the console from scratch like they should have. If Sega's arcade games, which were always popular around the world, were the reason for Saturn's success then games like Outrun, Hang On, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Galaxy Force, Golden Axe, Power Drift, etc would have been more than enough for the Megadrive and SMS to achieve success in the Japanese market. But VF was huge in Japan, on par with Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat over here.

You need to look at it again. The bump was in December, with November not showing a significant jump. And there's nothing absurd about believing that the Saturn would not have had a another large jump in December of 97. The consumers were already jumping on the Sony and Nintendo consoles and they had very little reason to think of purchasing a Saturn when it had very little consumer awareness. Absurd is believing that selling the Saturn for another year was going to help Sega financially.

This wasn't about turning a profit. By this point it was about whether or not Sega could save their ass as a hardware manufacturer. This was their last chance to prove that they wouldn't abandon another system again. And in doing just that, Sega's reputation as a trustworthy company went straight down the toilet.

Kalinske put on his salesman face. He had no interest in launching a new console before 1996, because he believed that there was still a market for the 16-bit consoles and Nintendo proved him right with the amazing success of the SNES during that time period. If Kalinske had believed that the Saturn was marketable, he would have stuck it out. Stolar was able to convince SOJ that the product was a failure, while Kalinske's pleas fell on deaf ears.

Stolar convinced SOJ of nothing. If anything, he was little more than a yes-man. He had no vision, nor any understanding of video games. He went on record as saying that there wasn't a single good game on the Saturn. It's no wonder Sega dropped him so quick and even before the DC launch. Say what you will about Kalinske, but at least he had the balls to actually stand his ground to SOJ.

The 5200 was being outsold by the 6 million unit Colecovision. Atari's massive media blitz did not help to sell the console, crash or not. Yeah, Atari was trying to release the 7800 just 2 years after the failed 5200, but that is not relevant to what I was saying.

Atari commercials were awful and some even mocked their own products. Like this one:

If you can't see the irony of this commercial, then something is seriously wrong with you. I wouldn't want to buy their new system after seeing this, and I was an owner of 2600 along with Pacman.

The Gamecube wasn't way behind the 2nd place console and its numbers weren't a huge step back from their previous console either. Nintendo's console sales have been shrinking with each generation. The Wii probably would have sold a lot worse, had Nintendo came up with the motion control gimmick. The Wii U's lack of sales fit right into line with where their console market was heading.

[/quote]

Dropping from 33 million units with N64 down to 21 million units for GC is a pretty steep drop. I agree with your points about the Wii and Wii U.

[A Black Falcon]

It had the most successful launch in console history, until the PS2 surpassed it. It had sold as well as the Playstation had within the same time-frame during the first 1.5-2 years it was available in the North America. Compared to the North American sales of the Genesis during it's early years, it was doing just as well, if not better.

The system was discontinued in 2001, because the other markets were failing miserably. SOJ was pretty much asking the North American market to keep the company afloat, and that came to an end once the supply of PS2s could meet customer demand by spring of 2001.

See above!

Hah, almost every major console had the "best launch in history" back then, I think. Given that the videogame industry has continued to grow in size and sales over time, this isn't too surprising. Wasn't the N64 the "best launch in history" too, for instance, among others?

Second, I agreed that the DC had a good 1999 in the US. The problem was that the momentum did not continue strong enough in 2000; sales dropped, monthly sales were low, and I think some games were already being canned even before 2000 was over... it had a great start, but didn't hold up. And as I said, Holiday 2000 sales were not good enough in the US, and that was one of the final things that helped decide Sega towards abandoning the industry.

Of course, the kind of sales Sega needed were very high. They were in deep, deep trouble. Mediocre but not awful sales, like the DC had, were not nearly good enough to save them, in the US or elsewhere. This is where your comparisons to the PS1 and Genesis come in -- both of those systems did not sell very well in their first year and a half on the market. Both did put away a weaker competitor (Saturn and TG16), but still, they were not successful consoles compared to the whole market, which in both cases was still focused on last-gen consoles, as was true with DC too, losing to N64 and PS1 in Holiday 2000 and all. That's what happens when you release a console before the mass market wants to upgrade -- you get mediocre sales. The first year and a half of the PS1 and Genesis isn't exactly something you should be wanting to have; sure, it's better than the TG16 or Saturn by far, but it's still not good. While both systems did start taking off farther into their second year, still, most of the first two years for both of those consoles is not impressive; being first out of two in a small market is a limited success. So yeah, if DC was only selling as well as the PS1 in its first two yeras, that's pretty bad. The PS1 only managed to hold the overall lead in US sales through the generation (after its release) because how long it released before N64, after all; the N64 outsold PS1 for its first 8-10 months, as the chart shows. PS1 only barely held on to the lead, managing to get to the big later 1997 titles which finally started really selling the system before the N64 slowed down due to software droughts and such. And the Genesis ended up losing to the SNES, worldwide at least (in the US no one is sure who won, not really).

That issue came up with the Saturn. Sega's failed Sega CD and complete failure of the 32X brought up those questions early on with the Saturn. The media was already calling the Saturn Sega's last console.

Sure, but those statements got much more prominent with the Dreamcast; with Saturn wasn't it only a relative few saying Saturn would be Sega's last console? With DC though, it was everywhere (and ended up being right, though had a lot of those people bought DCs anyway, maybe they could have survived... ah well).

I've said it before, that I had friends and family that didn't know that the Saturn had existed. The only consumers that were turned off by Sega, were the fans of the company that felt burned by their purchases of those consoles.

Yes, those people, and all of the people they talked to about games, too. So quite a few people.

Stolar did work hard to get retail and 3rd party publishers into believing that the Dreamcast was a viable system. He got Namco and Konami to support the system in North America, as well as retailers that didn't support the Saturn. He even got Imagine publishing to create the Official Dreamcast Magazine. The Dreamcast's failure had more to do with the huge fanbase Sony had established with the Playstation and their want for the PS2 once it had arrived. The Sega brand and has never been as huge as Sony.

Namco and Konami sure stuck with the Dreamcast for a long time... but anyway, sure, those things may have helped the DC a bit, but none helped it as much as killing the Saturn hurt it, I think. It's hard to calculate how huge a problem abandoning the market for two years was.

The Saturn was not a money maker for Sega and to continue support for that money-pit would have been far more foolish. Yeah, Sega could have continued support for the Saturn, but that would have just led to them being a 3rd party publisher much sooner, and the DC would have never happened.

I'm still not sure why you think that Sega would have gone third-party sooner had they actually competently supported the Saturn in 1997-1999, but it doesn't make much sense... it would have brought greater consumer support (fewer angry Sega fans), fewer questions about the Dreamcast's launch, probably more money (if they had managed to sell two or three times more Saturns in the West, you think it'd actually have led to greater losses? Hah!), too.

Bullshit! Sega's arcade heritage was the very reason why I had an interest in Sega as a console manufacturer. Sega's arcade games were the reason why the Saturn was a moderate success in Japan and Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest hit for the console. The failures of the Mega-Drive and Mark III had no ill effects on the Saturn in Japan.

I've already said how Japan seems to have been much more forgiving of failed hardware, and was willing to buy systems even if that same company was releasing other failed things, and that Sega and NEC both benefited from that, but that it wasn't like that at all in the West... and really, before Sonic, Sega the console manufacturer was quite poorly known in the US. People may have known some of their '80s arcade hits, but their consoles? Much less so... until Sonic and EA Sports saved the day.

The popularity of the Super Famicom did not translate into solid sales for the N64 in Japan either.

True. Losing the third parties and RPGs really killed the N64 in Japan. Success is not guaranteed to carry over.

The Saturn got a hell of a lot more titles in North America, than the Master System did.

That is true, but that's probably because the market had grown in the intervening years, so people expected more game releases than they had back in the '80s. The fact remains, even though it had many fewer game releases, the Atari 7800 sold a lot better and lasted longer (in the US) than the Saturn did, and the Master System outlasted it at least, and may have even outsold it (2 million estimate? Saturn is 1.5 million, isn't it...). The Turbografx sold less and also had fewer games, but was supported for longer.

You need to look at it again. The bump was in December, with November not showing a significant jump.

No, November 1996 was the Saturn's third-highest month ever, after only Dec. '95 and Dec. '96. It definitely was a jump up.

And there's nothing absurd about believing that the Saturn would not have had a another large jump in December of 97. The consumers were already jumping on the Sony and Nintendo consoles and they had very little reason to think of purchasing a Saturn when it had very little consumer awareness. Absurd is believing that selling the Saturn for another year was going to help Sega financially.

Sure, but consumers had the same Sony/Nintendo focus in Christmas '96. The situation wasn't THAT much worse in Christmas '97, except for the damage Sega did to itself by abandoning the Saturn. There would have been a bump had Sega still been in the console race, which it wasn't since E3 '97. (And again, not only because of what Bernie Stolar said, but also because of the anti-Saturn policies he put in place that made it clear that he didn't care about Saturn anymore.)

Kalinske put on his salesman face. He had no interest in launching a new console before 1996, because he believed that there was still a market for the 16-bit consoles and Nintendo proved him right with the amazing success of the SNES during that time period. If Kalinske had believed that the Saturn was marketable, he would have stuck it out. Stolar was able to convince SOJ that the product was a failure, while Kalinske's pleas fell on deaf ears.

Yeah, you do a good job here of showing how Kalinske was actually a good businessman, while Stolar was incompetent; Kalinske may have disliked the Saturn, but he did the only thing and sold it anyway. He would not have said "Saturn is not our future" unless Sega actually had something read to release to replace it with, which they didn't, and wouldn't. He wouldn't have tanked his only console either, even if he disliked it. Sane people would never do that (except for Bernie Stolar, obviously, unfortunately).

The 5200 was being outsold by the 6 million unit Colecovision. Atari's massive media blitz did not help to sell the console, crash or not. Yeah, Atari was trying to release the 7800 just 2 years after the failed 5200, but that is not relevant to what I was saying.

Well, Atari had confused the market by continuing to focus on the 2600 way too much, even after the 5200's release... if 5200 sales were weak, a lot of that was because people were still playing, and Atari was still focusing on, their old console. Atari's owner Warner, of course, didn't quite understand the concept of why you needed new consoles and thought it could just sell the 2600 forever, and that was definitely one of the major causes of the crash.

3rd place consoles that aren't ripping money out of your bank account can do okay. The Master System was built around cheap (established) off-the-shelf parts, while the Saturn had expensive parts that were new to the market. Totally different situation.

Sure, but I was saying, you can do alright with a third-place system if it's the right system.

How do you figure that the 7800 was profitable?

Because Atari said it was. Also remember that it sold over 3.5 million systems in the US alone (was it 3.8 million?), and did about as well in Europe too. It was also a cheap, low-cost console, and was solidly profitable despite the small game library and very low-cost games.

The Gamecube wasn't way behind the 2nd place console and its numbers weren't a huge step back from their previous console either. Nintendo's console sales have been shrinking with each generation. The Wii probably would have sold a lot worse, had Nintendo came up with the motion control gimmick. The Wii U's lack of sales fit right into line with where their console market was heading.

Uh, the Gamecube may have not been far behind the 2nd place console, but the 2nd place console was farther behind the 1st place console than any other system ever has been -- the PS2 outsold the GC and Xbox sixfold, a margin twice that of the PS1 to the N64.

Also, Nintendo's sales HAD been shrinking, not have been shrinking. Wii reversed that, and it and the DS are the two best-selling 7th gen video game systems; the DS is only barely short of the PS2's #1-ever worldwide mark, in fact. As for the Wii U, it's way too early to say how it'll sell overall. It is true that the 3DS is not tracking to sell as well as the the original DS did, but still it'll be one of the more successful handhelds... but it is clear that the smartphone revolution has hurt handheld consoles. I mean, last gen the second-place handheld sold over 76 million systems worldwide. Vita... isn't exactly going to get anywhere remotely near that.

[gamevet]

The successful launch was more a testament to the DC's stellar launch lineup, one that is unparalleled in video game history. In addition, the launch had titles that immediately looked next generation, games like Soul Caliber, NFL 2K and Sonic Adventure made the PS1 and N64 look like pong in comparison. But that wasn't sustained even by mid 2000 as I went to local stores, excitement was all but gone. I even remember reading a business article around the time when Rayman 2: The Great Escape (Mar 2000) and MDK 2 were out that was talking about how Dreamcast titles were great and getting stellar reviews but the hardware wasn't moving very fast. And there is no way you can compare DC launch to the early days of Genesis. It took the Genesis 2 years to even carve a large enough niche for itself to be considered a threat. Upon it's US release in 1989, Nintendo had over 90% of the market and would be a representative of the entire industry. People didn't say they were playing a "video game" by that point, they said they were playing "Nintendo". It's name brand was on par with "Xerox" or "Kleenex".

Those titles didn't sell themselves. It took placing kiosks in stores like Babbages and EB games for players to take notice. It took a lot of talking to retailers and publishers to get faith back in Sega. It took getting interviews with magazines to talk about what the Dreamcast could do and what Sega's plans were for the console. They did everything that Sega did not do with the Saturn, during it's 1st year and launch.

If gamers really felt jaded by how the Saturn was handled, would they have bought a 1 million Dreamcasts within 4 months?

So on the one hand, you're saying that Saturn's failure was due to the questionable handling of previous Sega consoles like Sega CD and 32X but Dreamcast was in no way affected by the Saturn??? The console that had just proceeded it?? You realize you're contradicting yourself, right?

I'm not contradicting myself. The image Sega had for its products support was already there before the Saturn. Even if they had continued to push the console into 98, it still would have continued on its downward spiral and very few would have paid attention too it anyways. Sega did not have the same kind of cool image in 1995, that it had in 1993. People were already forgetting about the Sega name, with Nintendo's SNES having hit after hit and Sony bombarding the airwaves with it's propaganda.

Namco's one big title for DC was Soul Caliber. After that they didn't bring anything of value to the system. Konami didn't release any of their key titles like Castlevania, Contra, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, etc.

Namco completely ignored Sega's Saturn, even in Japan. Namco and Konami at least gave Sega a chance with the DC, and it would not have happened without Sega convincing them to give it a try.

BTW, Sega was a household name by 1992 and by 1993 Sega was one of the "coolest" brands in the industry. Sonic the Hedgehog had a higher "Q" rating than Mario or even Mickey Mouse. Sony was famous for Trinitron TVs and portable Walkmans. They weren't famous in the video game industry. If name brand was key to success then Panasonic (just as big as Sony in every consumer electronic field) should have had a cakewalk with 3DO once the price came down by 1994. Another thing Sony was famous for was the Betamax failure. So don't make it out to be like Sony had this industry in it's hands the moment it decided to step into the arena.

Panasonic was always a step behind Sony in the electronics industry. I think the only thing I've ever owned from Panasonic was a VCR, while I've had several CD players, 3 televisions, 2 surround sound tuners and a Walkman from Sony. Sony really was the Apple of the late 80s and early 90s. And not even Sony could sell $700 3DO players.

Yes, Sega was a household name in 1992 and 93, but they squandered that image before the Saturn hit the market in 1995.

I couldn't agree less. In your own words, Sega's mishandling of the Sega CD and 32X damaged their credibility. Had Sega gone all out, and supported the Saturn for two more years without Stolar's moronic public condemnation of the system it would have installed more faith in the public when the Dreamcast was on the market. By abandoning the Saturn, they might as well just become a 3rd party developer with SegaSoft in 1997. After abandoning the Saturn and being out of the hardware market for 2 years, the Dreamcast never stood a chance. And I remember playing Vanishing Point for DC at a store, there was a small audience interested enough to watch and once they found out it was running on Dreamcast, they just walked away. The Sega brand was all but decimated.

The Saturn never gave Sega brand recognition. It was not a cool system for the general public, even though it had cool games. It's really hard to taint the public image of your product, when they really aren't paying attention to it. By the time the Sega Saturn arrived, Sega was thought of as that company that had Sonic and the Sega screams ad, but it did not have a public's attention.

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason that Saturn was Sega's only successful console in Japan was because of the VF craze over there? VF was the Saturn's killer app for that region and SOJ knew it which is the very reason why they shoehorned a 2nd SH2 into the system instead of rebuilding the console from scratch like they should have. If Sega's arcade games, which were always popular around the world, were the reason for Saturn's success then games like Outrun, Hang On, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Galaxy Force, Golden Axe, Power Drift, etc would have been more than enough for the Megadrive and SMS to achieve success in the Japanese market. But VF was huge in Japan, on par with Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat over here.

Did you not read what I had said? I pointed out that the success of the Saturn there was because of Virtua Fighter. Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest selling game for the console in Japan.

Good god man! I said that the Sega name was known long before the Sega Master System, and like Nintendo, its name was established with gamers through the arcades.

This wasn't about turning a profit. By this point it was about whether or not Sega could save their ass as a hardware manufacturer. This was their last chance to prove that they wouldn't abandon another system again. And in doing just that, Sega's reputation as a trustworthy company went straight down the toilet.

Sega's reputation in the west was already gone by the time the Saturn had launched. If consumers really believed in the product, it would have sold much better than it did. It got kicked to the curb by a company that had never made a console before. That should tell you something about the consumer's confidence in the Sega name. Throwing money away on a product that the masses weren't paying attention to, is a worthless investment.

Stolar convinced SOJ of nothing. If anything, he was little more than a yes-man. He had no vision, nor any understanding of video games. He went on record as saying that there wasn't a single good game on the Saturn. It's no wonder Sega dropped him so quick and even before the DC launch. Say what you will about Kalinske, but at least he had the balls to actually stand his ground to SOJ.

He said that the Saturn didn't have fun games. In a way he is right. If the Saturn had games that could be marketed to a much larger audience, then you could say that they had fun games. The arcades were dead in North America and gamers here weren't looking to play that style of game. If you can't convince the average consumer that your console's games are better than the competition, then obviously your games aren't going to be perceived as fun.

They dropped Stolar because he announced the Dreamcast was going to launch in North America for $199. Japan wanted to sell the console for $249 and he refused to sell it at that price. They also didn't want to include a modem with every DC sold. That is not the actions of a yes man; its the actions of a person that is taking charge of the situation. He must have known more than Japan, because his DC vision kicked the crap out of what Japan had done with the console over there.

Atari commercials were awful and some even mocked their own products. Like this one:

If you can't see the irony of this commercial, then something is seriously wrong with you. I wouldn't want to buy their new system after seeing this, and I was an owner of 2600 along with Pacman.

I wanted 5200, but after seeing the games that were on the Colecovision and playing the console at a friend's house, my interest in the 5200 quickly faded.

Dropping from 33 million units with N64 down to 21 million units for GC is a pretty steep drop. I agree with your points about the Wii and Wii U.

It was 22.5 million. The N64's numbers are mostly from the North American market, that bought the console in droves after its release. The Xbox did the same the following 2 generations where it sold more consoles in North America, than it did in the rest of the world.

[A Black Falcon]

It was 22.5 million. The N64's numbers are mostly from the North American market, that bought the console in droves after its release. The Xbox did the same the following 2 generations where it sold more consoles in North America, than it did in the rest of the world.

The N64 to GC drop in North America was huge -- Nintendo went from ~20 million N64s sold in the Americas, down from 23 million Super Nintendos (and maybe more N64s than SNESes in the US alone, because the SNES was apparently more successful than the N64 in Latin America), down to ~12 million Gamecubes. It was a catastrophic drop, almost as bad as the huge plunge Nintendo had suffered in Japan between the SNES and N64. In Europe/PAL and Japan territories the GC was only a slight decline from the N64 -- maybe a million down in each region -- but in the US, Nintendo fell badly. The GC still managed to sell the largest share of its worldwide total in the US, as the N64 had done, but that was from a much smaller total, and it was a smaller percentage than the 2/3rds share the Americas had had on the N64.

Why was that? Well, I'm pretty sure that it's mostly because of Microsoft's entry, as I have surely explained before. On the N64, Nintendo had an "older-gamer" hardcore base on their side, with stuff like Goldeneye, Turok, sports and wrestling games, and the like. However, those people went to the Xbox and bought Halo. They did not get Gamecubes, and Metroid Prime sadly didn't convince them that the GC was something to get over Halo (even though MP is a much better game...). Instead of trying to hold on to the hardcore Western base, Nintendo gave up entirely, abandoned most of its Western partners (Left Field, Silicon Knights, Rare, etc.), and went forthe Wii/DS approach instead. But don't let that fact make you forget that on the N64, Nintendo dominated that group, on the console side (of course many, including lots of FPS fans, were still PC gamers in the '90s, and didn't have a console yet).

[gamevet]

Hah, almost every major console had the "best launch in history" back then, I think. Given that the videogame industry has continued to grow in size and sales over time, this isn't too surprising. Wasn't the N64 the "best launch in history" too, for instance, among others?

I believe the PS2 still holds the record for 1st day sales, so no that is not always true.

Second, I agreed that the DC had a good 1999 in the US. The problem was that the momentum did not continue strong enough in 2000; sales dropped, monthly sales were low, and I think some games were already being canned even before 2000 was over... it had a great start, but didn't hold up. And as I said, Holiday 2000 sales were not good enough in the US, and that was one of the final things that helped decide Sega towards abandoning the industry.

You should look at your chart again. The DC had solid numbers in 2000, but the rest of the world wasn't doing its part to keep Sega out of the red.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dreamcast

We had a tremendous 18 months. Dreamcast was on fire - we really thought that we could do it. But then we had a target from Japan that said we had to make x hundreds of millions of dollars by the holiday season and shift x millions of units of hardware, otherwise we just couldn't sustain the business. So on January 31st 2001 we said Sega is leaving hardware. We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. Somehow I got to make that call, not the Japanese. I had to fire a lot of people; it was not a pleasant day."[30]

Of course, the kind of sales Sega needed were very high. They were in deep, deep trouble. Mediocre but not awful sales, like the DC had, were not nearly good enough to save them, in the US or elsewhere. This is where your comparisons to the PS1 and Genesis come in -- both of those systems did not sell very well in their first year and a half on the market. Both did put away a weaker competitor (Saturn and TG16), but still, they were not successful consoles compared to the whole market, which in both cases was still focused on last-gen consoles, as was true with DC too, losing to N64 and PS1 in Holiday 2000 and all. That's what happens when you release a console before the mass market wants to upgrade -- you get mediocre sales. The first year and a half of the PS1 and Genesis isn't exactly something you should be wanting to have; sure, it's better than the TG16 or Saturn by far, but it's still not good. While both systems did start taking off farther into their second year, still, most of the first two years for both of those consoles is not impressive; being first out of two in a small market is a limited success. So yeah, if DC was only selling as well as the PS1 in its first two yeras, that's pretty bad. The PS1 only managed to hold the overall lead in US sales through the generation (after its release) because how long it released before N64, after all; the N64 outsold PS1 for its first 8-10 months, as the chart shows. PS1 only barely held on to the lead, managing to get to the big later 1997 titles which finally started really selling the system before the N64 slowed down due to software droughts and such. And the Genesis ended up losing to the SNES, worldwide at least (in the US no one is sure who won, not really).

No, most of the people wanted a Playstation, they just didn't want to pay $300 for the console, much like they didn't want to pay $600 for the PS3. The $400 and then $350 for the Saturn was even harder for the consumer to swallow. The N64 benefited from being slightly lower priced and having momentum from the 16-bit market they were dominating from 1994-1996. Playstation was winning the holiday season sales every year after 96 and never lost in sales for a month from September of 97 to March of 2000.

I had read somewhere, that NEC invested over $3.3 billion in R&D for its failed consoles. That is a lot of money!

Sure, but those statements got much more prominent with the Dreamcast; with Saturn wasn't it only a relative few saying Saturn would be Sega's last console? With DC though, it was everywhere (and ended up being right, though had a lot of those people bought DCs anyway, maybe they could have survived... ah well).

I've already posted those articles. The media was already calling the Saturn, Sega's last possible console and the financial situation they were in led them to believe it was time for them to be a 3rd party publisher. Pride is probably the only reason Sega took one more chance with the DC and it was pretty bold for them to think they could sell the console in the numbers they were expecting it to sell within such a short period of time.

Namco and Konami sure stuck with the Dreamcast for a long time... but anyway, sure, those things may have helped the DC a bit, but none helped it as much as killing the Saturn hurt it, I think. It's hard to calculate how huge a problem abandoning the market for two years was.

They only promised to make one game for the console and they did just that.

I'm still not sure why you think that Sega would have gone third-party sooner had they actually competently supported the Saturn in 1997-1999, but it doesn't make much sense... it would have brought greater consumer support (fewer angry Sega fans), fewer questions about the Dreamcast's launch, probably more money (if they had managed to sell two or three times more Saturns in the West, you think it'd actually have led to greater losses? Hah!), too.

You're smoking crack, if you think the Saturn was going to sell 2 to 3 times what it had managed to sell in 2.5 years. There aren't as many Sega fans as you think there are. Just because 20 million bought a Genesis in the West, it does not mean that even half of those people were devoted to Sega, or cared who made the console in the 1st place.

I've already said how Japan seems to have been much more forgiving of failed hardware, and was willing to buy systems even if that same company was releasing other failed things, and that Sega and NEC both benefited from that, but that it wasn't like that at all in the West... and really, before Sonic, Sega the console manufacturer was quite poorly known in the US. People may have known some of their '80s arcade hits, but their consoles? Much less so... until Sonic and EA Sports saved the day.

It doesn't matter. The arcades were still going strong in the 80s. My first experience with Super Mario Bros. was not with the NES. I had first played the game in a pizza joint and it was that experience that led me to believe in the NES. I wouldn't buy the console until the late 80s, but I did so because of how much fun I had playing that game.

My experience with Sega goes back to playing Monaco GP in a bowling alley back in 1979. Then later games like Sub-Roc 3D, Hang-On and Outrun. I thought Sega was pretty cool arcade machine manufacturer, long before I'd seen the Master System.

That is true, but that's probably because the market had grown in the intervening years, so people expected more game releases than they had back in the '80s. The fact remains, even though it had many fewer game releases, the Atari 7800 sold a lot better and lasted longer (in the US) than the Saturn did, and the Master System outlasted it at least, and may have even outsold it (2 million estimate? Saturn is 1.5 million, isn't it...). The Turbografx sold less and also had fewer games, but was supported for longer.

Yeah.....because the N64 was loaded with titles. :rollseyes:

No, November 1996 was the Saturn's third-highest month ever, after only Dec. '95 and Dec. '96. It definitely was a jump up.

It was still less than 80k. That's not impressive for November.

Yeah, you do a good job here of showing how Kalinske was actually a good businessman, while Stolar was incompetent; Kalinske may have disliked the Saturn, but he did the only thing and sold it anyway. He would not have said "Saturn is not our future" unless Sega actually had something read to release to replace it with, which they didn't, and wouldn't. He wouldn't have tanked his only console either, even if he disliked it. Sane people would never do that (except for Bernie Stolar, obviously, unfortunately).

Companies cancel products that aren't creating profits all of the time. Even Sony has cut production of its flat-panel televisions, because the market has become more competitive.

Have you even looked at how many computers Commodore made in the 80s, before they had a hit with the Vic-20 and C-64?

Sane people don't continue to support products that are tanking. Kalinske bailed, because he did not believe in the Sega Saturn. Unlike Stolar, he kept his feelings on the hardware within private circles, and left the company before his reputation became completely tarnished by the Saturn.

[A Black Falcon]

[QUOTE=gamevet;599226]Those titles didn't sell themselves. It took placing kiosks in stores like Babbages and EB games for players to take notice. It took a lot of talking to retailers and publishers to get faith back in Sega. It took getting interviews with magazines to talk about what the Dreamcast could do and what Sega's plans were for the console. They did everything that Sega did not do with the Saturn, during it's 1st year and launch.

If gamers really felt jaded by how the Saturn was handled, would they have bought a 1 million Dreamcasts within 4 months?
Look at the numbers past those first four months to see the real impact. They were, as I've said, not great.

I'm not contradicting myself. The image Sega had for its products support was already there before the Saturn. Even if they had continued to push the console into 98, it still would have continued on its downward spiral and very few would have paid attention too it anyways. Sega did not have the same kind of cool image in 1995, that it had in 1993. People were already forgetting about the Sega name, with Nintendo's SNES having hit after hit and Sony bombarding the airwaves with it's propaganda.

Sure, that's true, but Sega still had a much better name in 1996 than they had by 1998, I think that is inarguable -- and Bernie Stolar is one of the major reasons for that further decline.

Namco completely ignored Sega's Saturn, even in Japan. Namco and Konami at least gave Sega a chance with the DC, and it would not have happened without Sega convincing them to give it a try.

Not much of a chance. I mean, DC Soul Calibur is great, but that's the only great game they got out of either of those companies, and it was an early release.

Panasonic was always a step behind Sony in the electronics industry. I think the only thing I've ever owned from Panasonic was a VCR, while I've had several CD players, 3 televisions, 2 surround sound tuners and a Walkman from Sony. Sony really was the Apple of the late 80s and early 90s. And not even Sony could sell $700 3DO players.

Hah, as if you've seriously forgotten how everyone was overlooking Sony when it got into the videogame industry because it was just yet another electronics company trying a videogame console, like NEC and Panasonic and Phillips and NEC and others before them?

Seriously, until Sony opened its wallet and started paying for games, and luring in developers with low fees and such, no one thought Sony would do any better than the rest of those electronics companies.

Yes, Sega was a household name in 1992 and 93, but they squandered that image before the Saturn hit the market in 1995.

Uh, no. They squandered it WHEN the Saturn hit the market in 1995. The mistakes before that point were real, as was Nintendo's big gain (particularly thanks to DKC), but it was the Saturn release that finished them off in the US market.

The Saturn never gave Sega brand recognition. It was not a cool system for the general public, even though it had cool games. It's really hard to taint the public image of your product, when they really aren't paying attention to it. By the time the Sega Saturn arrived, Sega was thought of as that company that had Sonic and the Sega screams ad, but it did not have a public's attention.

There is some truth to this, but as the 1996 sales figures show, Sega did give a serious try at it that year, and had some success; they were a credible third place system. Then they threw that away for nothing. THey could have held that spot, instead, had they wanted to.

Did you not read what I had said? I pointed out that the success of the Saturn there was because of Virtua Fighter. Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest selling game for the console in Japan.

Yeah, and Sega of Japan's idea that VF would be a similar system-seller here was one of their biggest mistakes, of course (as I said earlier, I think Bug! would have been a MUCH better US packin!).

Good god man! I said that the Sega name was known long before the Sega Master System, and like Nintendo, its name was established with gamers through the arcades.

I don't think I'd ever even HEARD of the Master System when I was a kid... and I'm sure there were a lot of other kids in the US who similarly just never heard of that thing. Sure, Sega arcade games were popular, but their consoles, before Sonic? Not at all. Niche stuff.

Sega's reputation in the west was already gone by the time the Saturn had launched. If consumers really believed in the product, it would have sold much better than it did. It got kicked to the curb by a company that had never made a console before. That should tell you something about the consumer's confidence in the Sega name. Throwing money away on a product that the masses weren't paying attention to, is a worthless investment.

Once again, it was the Saturn's release itself that did that damage, mostly, not the stuff that had come before. And it didn't have to end like it did, had Sega's management (ie Bernie) not been so mind-blowingly incompetent.

He said that the Saturn didn't have fun games. In a way he is right.

No, he isn't, in any imaginable way. What are you, trying to be Bernie Stolar's Baghdad Bob-level shill?

If the Saturn had games that could be marketed to a much larger audience, then you could say that they had fun games. The arcades were dead in North America and gamers here weren't looking to play that style of game. If you can't convince the average consumer that your console's games are better than the competition, then obviously your games aren't going to be perceived as fun.

Not all Saturn games were arcade ports, though... sure, a lot were, but there was some other stuff. You are right that both Saturn (and Dreamcast too!) were hurt by the fact that Sega was still focused on arcade ports and arcade-style games, something Western gamers didn't care as much about as they had before, but that wasn't the totality of releases on the system, certainly.

They dropped Stolar because he announced the Dreamcast was going to launch in North America for $199. Japan wanted to sell the console for $249 and he refused to sell it at that price. They also didn't want to include a modem with every DC sold. That is not the actions of a yes man; its the actions of a person that is taking charge of the situation. He must have known more than Japan, because his DC vision kicked the crap out of what Japan had done with the console over there.

The DC definitely should have launched at $249! The PS2 and Xbox proved that you didn't need the lowest price to sell, and Sega would have lost $50 less on every hardware sale for the first year or something (until a price drop), which would have meant a huge amount less losses. I'm sure sales would have been slightly lower, but not by anywhere remotely near as much as the amount they lost by taking on that additional $50 of losses on every system sold. Including a modem was a good idea though, though kind of pointless at first given that SegaNet wasn't ready for like a year.

So on the one hand, you're saying that Saturn's failure was due to the questionable handling of previous Sega consoles like Sega CD and 32X but Dreamcast was in no way affected by the Saturn??? The console that had just proceeded it?? You realize you're contradicting yourself, right?

I see gamevet's spinning in circles to try to talk his way out of this one, but yeah, the only plausible answer is that yes, of course it did. Good point.

I couldn't agree less. In your own words, Sega's mishandling of the Sega CD and 32X damaged their credibility. Had Sega gone all out, and supported the Saturn for two more years without Stolar's moronic public condemnation of the system it would have instilled more faith in the public when the Dreamcast was on the market. By abandoning the Saturn, they might as well just become a 3rd party developer with SegaSoft in 1997. After abandoning the Saturn and being out of the hardware market for 2 years, the Dreamcast never stood a chance. And I remember playing Vanishing Point for DC at a store, there was a small audience interested enough to watch and once they found out it was running on Dreamcast, they just walked away. The Sega brand was all but decimated.

Indeed, killing Saturn reaffirmed the damage that the 32X-Saturn launch debacle had caused, which proved to be something Sega could not overcome; too many people said "too little, too late" to Dreamcast, it didn't sell anywhere near well enough (in the US or elsewhere) after its launch, and that was it for Sega.

I believe the PS2 still holds the record for 1st day sales, so no that is not always true.

I'd be surprised if that was still actually the case...

You should look at your chart again. The DC had solid numbers in 2000, but the rest of the world wasn't doing its part to keep Sega out of the red.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dreamcast

Uh, Peter Moore there makes it clear that the DC hadn't sold well enough in Holiday 2000 in the US. He needed to sell a certain number for Sega to make it viable, and wasn't able to do that. Simple as that.

Also, please do look at that chart again. Notice how the Dreamcast never clearly beat the Playstation, not one single month of its life, and that's the PS1, never mind the PS2 (which isn't on that chart, sadly). The best the DC would do is pretty much tie the PS1, which it only managed twice, September '99 and November '01. And as for the N64, as of December 2001, the DC had only outsold the N64 five times, in September '99 and March, August, October, and November of '01. The N64 and Playstation both sold better than the Dreamcast in the US in every single month of 2000. That CAN'T have been what Sega wanted to see, that's for sure! As with the Genesis and TG16 in '89-90, or the 3DO, Jaguar, PS1, and Saturn in '93 into '96, most people were still more interested in the last-gen consoles than they were in the next generation yet, so the early next-gen console suffered because of it early on. The problem is, Sega was too broke to get through that phase and get to the time when most people actually cared about 6th gen consoles, and so they inevitably had to give up instead.

On that note, if you're looking for some more systems with lacking holiday bumps, the N64 and DC in December 2001 both show that, for sure... and in both cases, it was because the systems were dying, while PS1 had yet another holiday bump. Anyway though.

Also see Wikipedia:

By September 2000, even before the PlayStation 2 arrived in the United States, the Dreamcast suffered from slowing sales going into the fall season. The Dreamcast's online capabilities through SegaNet, and a price cut from $199 to $149 USD around the second half of 2000 (which made it half the price of the PS2, part of an advertisement campaign to take advantage of PS2 supply shortages) did little to regain sales momentum. At that point, Sega had only sold 2.6 million Dreamcast consoles, far below the 5 million mark which was considered by analysts to be the installed base needed to attract new developers. Sega had lost an estimated $163 million, which was too much to make back on game sales and royalties (despite the Dreamcast having several titles that sold over one million).[1] Observers generally regarded Sega as an underdog against Sony.[18]

Pretty clear there too, DC sales (in the US) in 2000 were slow and not getting better.

No, most of the people wanted a Playstation, they just didn't want to pay $300 for the console, much like they didn't want to pay $600 for the PS3. The $400 and then $350 for the Saturn was even harder for the consumer to swallow. The N64 benefited from being slightly lower priced and having momentum from the 16-bit market they were dominating from 1994-1996.

The PS2's price didn't hurt it much at all. PS3 and Saturn, yes. PS2 and Xbox, no.

[quote]I've already posted those articles. The media was already calling the Saturn, Sega's last possible console and the financial situation they were in led them to believe it was time for them to be a 3rd party publisher. Pride is probably the only reason Sega took one more chance with the DC and it was pretty bold for them to think they could sell the console in the numbers they were expecting it to sell within such a short period of time./

The point is that those calls were a whole lot worse on Dreamcast than on Saturn, and anyway, the Saturn calls only started after its awful launch and the surprise success the Playstation had... I don't think they were saying that in May 1995! May 1996, maybe.

[quoite]They only promised to make one game for the console and they did just that.

What great "partners"...

You're smoking crack, if you think the Saturn was going to sell 2 to 3 times what it had managed to sell in 2.5 years. There aren't as many Sega fans as you think there are. Just because 20 million bought a Genesis in the West, it does not mean that even half of those people were devoted to Sega, or cared who made the console in the 1st place.

1997 (or perhaps Holiday 1996) through 1999 was the core of the 5th generation, sales-wise. December 1998 was the sales peak. Sega gave up in early 1997 (you can probably date it to whichever day in March '97 Bernie Stolar became CEO), right at the beginning of the core of the generation. Had Sega instead actually competed through the core part of the generation, they would have sold systems, quite a few systems. Of course they'd have stayed in third place, but two more holiday seasons with a serious effort, and software library? At least doubling that 1.5 million systems in the US number should have been pretty easy, tripling possible. I'm less sure about Europe, but hopefully the greater success here would have translated over some.

It doesn't matter. The arcades were still going strong in the 80s. My first experience with Super Mario Bros. was not with the NES. I had first played the game in a pizza joint and it was that experience that led me to believe in the NES. I wouldn't buy the console until the late 80s, but I did so because of how much fun I had playing that game.

My experience with Sega goes back to playing Monaco GP in a bowling alley back in 1979. Then later games like Sub-Roc 3D, Hang-On and Outrun. I thought Sega was pretty cool arcade machine manufacturer.

Consoles and arcade games aren't the same thing, though...

Yeah.....because the N64 was loaded with titles. :rollseyes:

I have no idea what you're talking about, but the N64 had ~300 game releases in the US, which is surely more than the Saturn got, and is a lot more than the Master System (110-120 in the US), Turbografx (~90 including CD games), or Atari 7800 (60-something games) got, either... and the "best selling games of the generation" list has a lot of N64 games on it, too. The top N64 games sold very well.

On that note, it's interesting how the Master System had almost twice as many games as the Atari 7800, even though it sold only half as many systems in North America...

It was still less than 80k. That's not impressive for November.

Impressive for the Saturn, and not that bad compared to where the N64 and PS1 were that month...

Companies cancel products that aren't creating profits all of the time. Even Sony has cut production of its flat-panel televisions, because the market has become more competitive.

Have you even looked at how many computers Commodore made in the 80s, before they had a hit with the Vic-20 and C-64?

Sane people don't continue to support products that are tanking. Kalinske bailed, because he did not believe in the Sega Saturn. Unlike Stolar, he kept his feelings on the hardware within private circles, and left the company before his reputation became completely tarnished by the Saturn.

Sane people don't cancel systems when they have nothing to replace them with, and don't cancel systems early too often, because people will stop trusting them to actually support systems in the future.

[gamevet]

Sane people don't cancel systems when they have nothing to replace them with, and don't cancel systems early too often, because people will stop trusting them to actually support systems in the future.

The original plan was to have the DC out in 1998, so the plan made perfect sense.

Killing a console that would have taken Sega completely out of existence made perfect sense. Sane people don't continue to sell a product that would put their company out of business.

Consoles and arcade games aren't the same thing, though...

And this is why I'm going to end this conversation here. You are pretty much Captain Clueless about what is going on.

The conversation was about brand recognition. Sega, the brand, was recognized by gamers that went to the arcades, long before Sega made failed consoles like the Mark III/ Master System.


I implore you to take at least a entry level marketing class, so you have a better understanding of the importance of product awareness and its effects on how your product sells. The level of ignorance here is too much for me to continue with this subject.

[Aang]

Those titles didn't sell themselves. It took placing kiosks in stores like Babbages and EB games for players to take notice. It took a lot of talking to retailers and publishers to get faith back in Sega. It took getting interviews with magazines to talk about what the Dreamcast could do and what Sega's plans were for the console. They did everything that Sega did not do with the Saturn, during it's 1st year and launch.

Considering the catastrophic handling of the Saturn's launch, even a 3rd rate CEO would have done a better job with DC. The titles are really what sold the retailers on Dreamcast. And I'll give Stolar a little credit with getting sports titles like NFL2K out and a stunning Soul Caliber from Namco. But he didn't do anything revolutionary at Sega. It's like rewriting an exam after you failed miserably the first attempt. As for the magazines, Sega was still relevant enough to home video games that they would be interested in keeping the public updated with the Dreamcast. Like you've said earlier, talk of Blackbelt vs Kitana was an active topic even before Stolar dropped his bombshell at the 97 E3. And it's titles were a quantum leap above what PS1 and N64 could achieve that almost all magazines, with possibly the exception of Next Generation who were pro-Sony from the 1st issue, would have given the Dreamcast a very positive preview before 9.9.99.

If gamers really felt jaded by how the Saturn was handled, would they have bought a 1 million Dreamcasts within 4 months?

That's early adopters. And I can tell you that it affected me as I purchased Genesis very close to it's launch back in 1989 and Saturn right on launch day. I even purchased the 32X on it's launch but returned it after discovering how awful the thing was. I was very devoted to Sega and yet I didn't purchase until very late 1999 and was very close to never buying one. The games on my PC with a Voodoo card were already enough to satisfy my gaming needs. I was working at a computer store at the time and discovered a coworker also owned a Dreamcast when I saw him using our shrinkwrap machine to reseal his DC titles. He was one of those 1 million owners but he didn't even have the faith in Sega to stick with his purchases and even told me in no uncertain terms, "when the PS2 is released the DC is finished". It's likely many of those initial DC owners shared that sentiment but purchased the DC as a stop-gap until the PS2 arrived knowing that Sega would abandon the system yet again. Had Sega stuck it out with Saturn for a couple more years, DC owners would have had a lot more faith in their purchase.

I'm not contradicting myself. The image Sega had for its products support was already there before the Saturn. Even if they had continued to push the console into 98, it still would have continued on its downward spiral and very few would have paid attention too it anyways. Sega did not have the same kind of cool image in 1995, that it had in 1993. People were already forgetting about the Sega name, with Nintendo's SNES having hit after hit and Sony bombarding the airwaves with it's propaganda.

There is no doubt that Sega had fallen a few notches by 1995 but working at EB Games that holiday, I can attest to the fact that there were many consumers that were coming to the store asking for advice on which system to purchase. I did my part to give an honest opinion on the plus and minuses of each system but all my co-workers, the manager (who knew nothing about games) and the regional manager that hired me were all pro Sony. But it was this bias at the retail level that convinced many objective customers to go with PS1. Sega Saturn lost many potential supporters due to this attitude. The fact though, that they sought advice is evidence that Sega hadn't become the pariah of the industry yet.

Namco completely ignored Sega's Saturn, even in Japan. Namco and Konami at least gave Sega a chance with the DC, and it would not have happened without Sega convincing them to give it a try.

And they made one major game, a sequel to Soul Blade, for the DC. That was it. It's no secret that Namco and Sega had a bitter rivalry for arcade supremacy in the mid 1990s. Considering that Namco ignored Saturn's strong user base in Japan raises many eye brows. As for Konami, the DC titles they decided to release would offer nothing to it's stellar library.

http://www.gamesradar.com/the-top-7-...alries/?page=5

This contest got started the moment the very first Tekken arrived in arcades. Many Sega fanatics were baffled by its popularity and considered it a pale imitation of Virtua Fighter's 3D fisticuffs. The parallels are quite easy to spot - just look at dead-ringer fighters like Wolf/King and Sarah/Nina. The Sega/Namco feud was further fueled by arcade one-uppings like Virtua Cop/Time Crisis and Daytona/Ridge Racer, making it appear like Namco was just aping Sega's arcade popularity without adding anything to the pile.

Panasonic was always a step behind Sony in the electronics industry. I think the only thing I've ever owned from Panasonic was a VCR, while I've had several CD players, 3 televisions, 2 surround sound tuners and a Walkman from Sony. Sony really was the Apple of the late 80s and early 90s. And not even Sony could sell $700 3DO players.

Panasonic's Gaoo series TV sets were giving Sony XBR series a pretty good run for the money.
http://www.technofile.com/articles/gaoo.html
As for VCRs, Sony was late to the VHS bandwagon with the Betamax failure. I will cede to you that Sony dominated the portable music scene during this period. As for surround sound receivers, Sony's didn't really strike me to be any better than the rest of the consumer electronics industry.
And I was talking about the 3DO when it's price had dropped to $399. Nobody could sell a $700 3DO.

Yes, Sega was a household name in 1992 and 93, but they squandered that image before the Saturn hit the market in 1995.

Their image was damaged, not beyond repair though. Genesis was still selling well along with it's games.

The Saturn never gave Sega brand recognition. It was not a cool system for the general public, even though it had cool games. It's really hard to taint the public image of your product, when they really aren't paying attention to it. By the time the Sega Saturn arrived, Sega was thought of as that company that had Sonic and the Sega screams ad, but it did not have a public's attention.

This system was still receiving lots of attention from all the gaming magazines at the time. It's not as if it's arrival wasn't heavily anticipated. If it's failure was guaranteed, Sony wouldn't need to undercut Sega by releasing the PS1 for $100 less. In fact, if you still have a copy, check out Sega-hating Next Generation's assessment of Saturn's surprise launch. Even NG were quoting Sony stating that the early release was a concern for them but they would have to ride it out. Given that Saturn's Japanese launch outdid PS1's nothing was a given for Sony until Sega barely released any titles the remainder of the summer.

Did you not read what I had said? I pointed out that the success of the Saturn there was because of Virtua Fighter. Virtua Fighter 2 was the biggest selling game for the console in Japan.

Good god man! I said that the Sega name was known long before the Sega Master System, and like Nintendo, its name was established with gamers through the arcades.

No, I stated that VF was a killer app for the Saturn in Japan. I never stated that Sega was a well-known brand, at least not until around 1992. Just because I enjoyed Afterburner or Hang On at the arcades didn't mean I really cared about the company behind those games. And even if arcade gamers did know the brand, that's far from making Sega the household name it would become with Genesis.

Sega's reputation in the west was already gone by the time the Saturn had launched. If consumers really believed in the product, it would have sold much better than it did. It got kicked to the curb by a company that had never made a console before. That should tell you something about the consumer's confidence in the Sega name. Throwing money away on a product that the masses weren't paying attention to, is a worthless investment.

I've already addressed this above. Sega kicked Saturn to the curb. It was their decision, and Stolar's statements ensured that outcome. There was nothing wrong with being on the market another couple of years. Their future as a hardware manufacturer was over the moment Stolar delivered his fatal blow to Saturn.

He said that the Saturn didn't have fun games. In a way he is right. If the Saturn had games that could be marketed to a much larger audience, then you could say that they had fun games. The arcades were dead in North America and gamers here weren't looking to play that style of game. If you can't convince the average consumer that your console's games are better than the competition, then obviously your games aren't going to be perceived as fun.

Arcades were not dead until the late 1990s. In 1995, the arcades I went to were still very busy with Model 2 games sucking up quarters like they were going out of style. I think you would be a in the minority here if you didn't think games such as Wave Runner, Indy 500, House of the Dead, Dead or Alive, Virtua On, Fighting Vipers, Sky Target, etc to be fun games.

They dropped Stolar because he announced the Dreamcast was going to launch in North America for $199. Japan wanted to sell the console for $249 and he refused to sell it at that price. They also didn't want to include a modem with every DC sold. That is not the actions of a yes man; its the actions of a person that is taking charge of the situation. He must have known more than Japan, because his DC vision kicked the crap out of what Japan had done with the console over there.

So they listened to his recommendations but then proceeded to drop him. How does that make any sense? The Saturn was still a strong No.2 in Japan in 1997, what he did pretty much killed any chance for Shenmue to be released to a much larger user base in Japan. If I was a Japanese gamer, who finally gave Sega a chance and purchased their system only to see the American CEO announce it was dead after being on the market for 3 years, I'd be hesitant to invest in their next system too.

I wanted 5200, but after seeing the games that were on the Colecovision and playing the console at a friend's house, my interest in the 5200 quickly faded.

I never wanted a 5200. Colecovision, I'd have considered if not for the crash of 84.

[A Black Falcon]

The original plan was to have the DC out in 1998, so the plan made perfect sense.

No it didn't. Even had they been releasing DC in the US in late 1998, saying "Saturn is not our future" a year and a half before that is stupid.

And plus, as I've said repeatedly now, releasing DC in the US in 1998 probably wouldn't have sold anyway. It'd have pushed up an already too-early generation launch even earlier, which would have done little; people would still have criticized Sega for killing Saturn too early, etc. Sure, it'd have gotten rid of 9 months of the gap between consoles, but you'd still have had that year and a half gap from "Saturn is not our future" until the half-baked, far too early launch a 1998 US Dreamcast would surely have had (even had they delayed it in Japan instead, which they should have done anyway).

Seriously, trying to start the next console generation before teh current one has even peaked never works, at least not in the Western markets it doesn't. It didn't work for the Genesis and TG16 (1991 was when that generation caught on), it didn't work for the 3DO and Jaguar (they didn't make it to when the generation finally caught on in 1996-1997...), it didn't work for the Saturn (early launch was a disaster in part because of this, people didn't really care yet and it was way too expensive and had few games anyway), and it didn't work for Dreamcast either, even in its 1999 date. Release the Dreamcast in 1998 and I think things would have been pretty much just as they are now, just with that early, no-good Dreamcast launch being in the US, instead of in Japan. Maybe it'd have never have recovered here, like how it never recovered from its awful 1998 launch in Japan? Who knows. And anyway, PS1/N64 sales didn't peak until December 1998. Trying to release a new console against that would have been suicide. Sega's problem was that they had messed things up so badly between 1994-1998 that they felt they had to start the next generation early, and had to have a hit system because of their financial hole, but had set themselves up in a situation where taht success was near-impossible, with a console releasing before the mass market cared about the new generation, and in a market where most people who did know about Sega were skeptical or unwilling to fall for Sega's "we kill systems early" tricks again.

That they managed to sell 10.5 million Dreamcasts, despite those challenges, says a lot for how great the DC's software library is, but no, releasing in 1998 would not have saved the system in the US. Stolar's idea that Sega had to jump to the next generation early was a flawed one. The best thing he could have done was try to salvage as much consumer confidence in Sega as he could through two more years of pushing the Saturn, then try his best to get more people to buy the Dreamcast once it launched, probably in late 1999. That would still be too early of course, for the market, compared to what Sega needed to sell, but in order to try to fix that one you have to go back to 1994, not 1997 (ie, to redo the disastrous Saturn launch year).

Killing a console that would have taken Sega completely out of existence made perfect sense. Sane people don't continue to sell a product that would put their company out of business.

Continuing to support the Saturn would not ever possibly have put Sega out of business. Releasing Dreamcast as they did managed to do that, though. The situation was unsalvageable. The Stolar plan is the one that happened, and it failed and Sega left the hardware business. It was not the best Sega could have done, even only looking at 1997-1999. If we believe you, we'd have to believe that by 1997, it was impossible to save Sega's hardware business, because the Stolar plan inevitably led to defeat. I think that it was certainly very hard to save Sega's hardware business by 1997, but I don't think it was impossible, and that's where we clearly disagree -- I think that maybe, just maybe, had they done things better, maybe Sega the hardware maker could have been saved. Probably not... but you never know. But the point is, what they did didn't work, and Stolar's plan is what they did. We know that it's a failure, that is historical fact. So, what could Sega have done to do things better from that point on? Most obviously, reverse Stolar's most hated move, killing the Saturn before its time.

And this is why I'm going to end this conversation here. You are pretty much Captain Clueless about what is going on.

You're making one of the stupidest arguments ever, and actually say that I] am the one being stupid? Hah... There are gaping holes in your arguments and virtually no serious point other than "everything Bernie did was great even if 99% of people who know anything about the subject despise him because of what he did", and I'm the one with the stupid argument?

The conversation was about brand recognition. Sega, the brand, was recognized by gamers that went to the arcades, long before Sega made failed consoles like the Mark III/ Master System.

I'm sorry, but arcade and home brand recognition really are not the same thing. Some of Sega's Saturn/DC-era arcade games were moderately successful here, but that wasn't enough to make them a success... and even though arcades were more popular then, the same is true with the Master System and Genesis. None of Sega's systems succeeded in the US because of arcade ports. It was original titles, most notably Sonic 1 and 2 and the EA Sports titles, that made the Genesis a success. FMV games led the Sega CD to be Sega's second-best selling piece of console hardware in the US. Numerous original titles sold the Game Gear. NiGHTS was the biggest system seller the US Saturn probably had, and Sonic Adventure was top on the Dreamcast, really. Arcade ports helped Sega certainly, with stuff like Outrun, After Burner, later on Crazy Taxi, and such, but in the US, the top system-sellers were not arcade ports.

Of course their arcade ports gave them brand recognition, but having brand recognition is not the same thing as convincing people to buy your home console. Spending a quarter (or a dollar) on an arcade game, and spending hundreds on a home console, are very different things.

I implore you to take at least a entry level marketing class, so you have a better understanding of the importance of product awareness and its effects on how your product sells. The level of ignorance here is too much for me to continue with this subject.

All we need to do is look at what happened to know that what Bernie did was one of the worst possible things Sega could have done. The record stands for itself: he plan failed. As with the US Saturn launch in 1995, as with the decision to release the 32X, the decision to kill the Saturn early was one of the top key decisions that led to Sega being forced to leave the hardware business.

I mean, I hope that "don't utterly destroy the public image of your company and make most of your most loyal, dedicated fans and supporters hate you and the company you are a part of" would be a part of Marketing 101, but that was what Bernie did. And you're defending him. It's impossible to understand. The fact that so many Sega fans, or people who like Sega, hate Bernie so much doesn't clue you in to the fact that he messed up very badly? Pretending that the opinions of the hardcore don't matter is a lie, they do. The hardcore may be small in number, but they are vocal, and get attention. This was as true in the late '90s as it is now, and yes, the internet was a definite part of that; internet usership grew exponentially over the second half of the '90s. In order for your "Bernie was right all along" case to be even the slightest bit plausible, the opinions of the hardcore, who have overall despised him, would have to be irrelevant, and their influence nonexistent. Of course hated CEOs can be successful -- look at Activision's Bobby Kotick, still there after 22 years (yes, he's been Activision's CEO that long!) despite long being one of the more hated figures around, particularly in recent years -- but it definitely isn't helpful, and of course Activision-Blizzard has a strong record of success and good sales, something Sega didn't have after the Genesis. Bernie Stolar, of course, made Sega's already bad situation worse. Not exactly comparable. And Sega may have gotten rid of Bernie in '99, but the damage had already been done, and it was too late at that point to reverse it.

I'm sure Bernie was thinking that he could just hit reset and people would forgive Sega for all its wrongs if they released a great product, but it isn't happen. Dreamcast sales slowed down badly after the initial few great first months -- again, look at the sales charts, and how Dreamcast finished behind the PS1 and N64 every single month from October 1999 to February 2001! "Too little, too late, we won't get fooled again Sega" was the common thought, and anyone not buying a DC thinking that ended up being entirely correct, because of course DC did end up being one final Sega console which died too early.

[gamevet]

What part of "I'm going to end this conversation" did you not get?

[A Black Falcon]

The fact that that post raised many important points. Most notably, that we KNOW the result of Bernie Stolar's plan: it's what happened, and it led to Sega's inevitable failure as a hardware manufacturer.

So, the question is, what should Sega have done to avoid that? "Not kill the Saturn early" is one potential answer to that.

[gamevet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness

Brand Awareness is the extent to which a brand is recognized by potential customers, and is correctly associated with a particular product. Expressed usually as a percentage of target market, brand awareness is the primary goal of advertising in the early months or years of a product's introduction.[1]

Brand awareness plays a major role in a consumer’s buying decision process. The knowledge of an acquaintance or friend having used the product in the past or a high recognition of the product through constant advertisements and associations coaxes the person to make his decision in the favour of the brand.

The eventual goal of most businesses is to make profits and increase sales. Businesses intend to increase their consumer pool and encourage repeat purchases. Apple is a brilliant example of how there is a very high recognition of the brand logo and high anticipation of a new product being released by the company. An iPod is the first thing that pops into our minds when we think of purchasing an mp3 player. iPod is used as a replaceable noun to describe an mp3 player. Finally, high brand awareness about a product suggests that the brand is easily recognizable and accepted by the market in a way that the brand is differentiated from similar products and other competitors. Brand building also helps in improving brand loyalty.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/adver...use-36750.html

Advertising helps to make consumers aware of a product and aims to build preference for that product over its competitors. If advertising succeeds in those two tasks, consumers will choose the advertised product when they make their next purchase. However, building awareness and preference through advertising is a cumulative process. A single campaign only raises awareness for a short period, so it is important to allocate the budget for advertising over a period of time to sustain high levels of awareness and use.


Awareness and preference increase or decrease over time, depending on the weight and frequency of advertising, according to David W. Olson in an article for "Advances in Consumer Research." Frequent advertising can build the level of awareness from recognition of some elements of a product through to detailed understanding of the nature of the product and its benefits. Levels of awareness and preference can decline if you do not continue to advertise or if competitors increase their weight of advertising compared to yours.