[HN Gopher] Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the s...
___________________________________________________________________
Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console
war to Sony
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 275 points
Date : 2023-07-05 16:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Sony kept innovating
|
| PS1, you could play your CD musics and play games
|
| PS2, you could play your DVD movies, play games and play online!
|
| PSP, you could browse the internet, watch movies, listen to music
| and play games on the go!
|
| Sony kept innovating and that helped the industry move forward
|
| Now they are exploring with VR..
|
| What the competition been doing during that time other than
| complain?
|
| You see that kind of similar success with Nintendo and the Wii,
| they innovated and attracted the mass, and they repeated it with
| the Switch
|
| Sony gets lot of unfair criticism in my opinion, Apple did the
| same with the iPhone, they offered something unique that people
| wanted
|
| If Microsoft wants to turn the table, they'll have to offer
| something interesting, 2 console with different specs just aint
| it
| Solvency wrote:
| Sega Genesis had X-Band. Literally internet on a cartridge-
| based console.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| It wasn't a Sega product and was also available on the NES,
| internet in the 90's was very niche
|
| What's funny is the NES was a personal computer in Japan
| (Famikon - Family Computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nin
| tendo_Entertainment_System#...
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| PlayStation demolished everyone. The biggest blow was that Sony
| managed to take Japan- the home market of Nintendo and Sega.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But sony is also japanese.
| goosedragons wrote:
| And arguably more Japanese than Sega which traces its routes
| back to the US and was owned by an American company for many
| years.
| dangus wrote:
| By this time that's about as relevant as calling Nintendo a
| playing card company.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Eh, the chairman of Sega at the time the PlayStation
| launched was American.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Sega of America, yes. Hayao Nakayama was CEO of Sega of
| Japan from 1983-1999.
| gryson wrote:
| The chairman of Sega Enterprises was Isao Okawa (founder
| and president of CSK, majority owner of Sega). The
| president of Sega Enterprises was Hayao Nakayama.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Incidentally, Playstation is primarily an American endeavor
| now. Sony Interactive Entertainment and Playstation Studios
| are now based out of California. Most of the first and
| second party developers are American or European.
| Playstation owns just one Japanese developer. Some claim
| that this western shift has compromised the "quirky" aspect
| of the Playstation brand. Look at the PS1 lineup and you
| will find so many oddball games that became classics, or at
| least cult classics. I would not disagree. Playstation has
| an amazing track record of releasing games, but from a
| wider view the games do look homogenous.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| Well, it started with a coop with Nintendo and Sony:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM
| DeathArrow wrote:
| And after that, Xbox appeared. :)
| pjmlp wrote:
| And after that, in typical Microsoft's mismanagement, Xbox
| One happened and they haven't recover ever since.
| apple4ever wrote:
| Sony tried hard to mismanage too, especially around cross
| platform play. It's why I was glad I stuck with the Xbox.
| dylan604 wrote:
| As an example, the PSP's UMD format. So much time/effort
| went into that, while at the same time allowing content
| to be read from an SD card. Of course I can only assume
| this was meant as some lame IP protection, and possibly
| an attempt to bring back a format similar to the once
| popular minidisc. Also funny to me was that Blu-ray was
| knock knock knocking already with their Java based
| programming, while the UMD was programmed much more
| similarly to HD-DVDs.
| ppseafield wrote:
| It was because Sony had a ton of mini discs laying around
| since the format didn't take off. The UMD cartridges are
| just mini discs internally.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| Is Xbox doing poorly? I don't know much about the console
| space, but it looks to me like a continued success
| izacus wrote:
| It's doing fine, but Sony is (again) doing a bit beter.
| Although it's a bit of a loaded question here, since
| Microsoft integrated Xbox and Windows gaming ecosystem.
|
| The current situation is actually pretty nice - there are
| three big players with big market shares from which
| neither has a clear monopoly.
|
| Microsoft is seriously thretening to break that by buying
| themself a monopoly in game publishing though.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I hadn't thought much about this, but you're so right,
| it's so refreshing that there is such healthy competition
| in this market.
| pjmlp wrote:
| There were always three big players, previously
| Microsoft's place was owned by SEGA.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Which resonates more than surface level of that statement
| you made. Xbox is pretty much next gen SEGA hardware and
| SEGA was ultimately driven to the ground by a guy that
| kickstarted Xbox (nasty people would say as a prize)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-
| selling_game_co...
|
| Xbox One (2013) sold 50 million Units compared with PS4
| (2013) selling 113 million units.
|
| Xbox X/S, their 4th gen Xbox, has sold less than 21
| million units since 2020, when it was released, compared
| with PS5's 38 million units in the same timeframe.
|
| Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming
| for me, I don't know how others feel.
| Maken wrote:
| This latest generation has been completely dwarfed by the
| Switch.
| donatj wrote:
| To be fair I had been searching for a non-scalped Series
| X since release until finally finding one a couple months
| ago. Stores are continuously sold out, so demand is
| outpacing supply.
|
| The S is pretty readily available but is less powerful
| than the previous mid generation upgrade, the Xbox One X.
| Given that until very recently most games supported both
| generations there was basically no reason to upgrade from
| a One X to a Series S
| mattl wrote:
| I got a Series X via Best Buy through some Citizens Bank
| deal in early 2022. Took me an age to get a PS5 tho.
| Finally got one a few months ago.
| donatj wrote:
| I still have not _seen_ a PS5 in real life, ever. These
| shortages are absurd. Sure I am in my late 30s but I am
| the ONLY person in my friend group that has managed to
| pick up a current-gen system.
| mattl wrote:
| Here in New England I can pick up one in an hour from
| Best Buy.
| guidedlight wrote:
| The console gaming industry has stopped growing. And as a
| result both Microsoft and Sony seem to be now trying to
| cannibalise each other to grow, and it has become a very
| tribal and bitter rivalry.
|
| This graphic from Microsoft shows clearly why the console
| industry is struggling. https://news.microsoft.com/wp-
| content/uploads/prod/sites/642...
| a1o wrote:
| What is the white on the bottom?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Tbh, the latest gen of consoles is pretty underwhelming
| for me, I don't know how others feel.
|
| Practical computing performance plateaued like 10 years
| ago, which is why you're feeling unsatisfied. This
| applies to all markets of computing besides enterprise:
| Desktops/laptops, consoles, phones/tablets, all of it.
|
| Plenty of people refuse to upgrade from their Sandy
| Bridges and Skylakes for Windows 11 because they still
| run everything fine. Plenty of people find smartphone
| upgrade cycles unjustifiably short because upgrades bring
| so little in practice.
|
| As I mentioned earlier, the only computing segment still
| seeing significant leaps in performance to warrant
| constant and frequent upgrades is the enterprise, most
| obvious of which is the current "AI" fad.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| For me the Apple silicon Macs are a real innovation. The
| battery life, size and weight is fantastic.
| RajT88 wrote:
| We are at a level of fidelity where huge graphical
| improvements are not visually that much better than their
| predeccesors. Diminishing returns because of the limits
| of human cognition.
| drannex wrote:
| No personal hit or anything here, but really looking
| forward to how badly this will age in 10-15 years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Xbox One was a big mismanagement as they tried to pivot
| into a multimedia device, with lower focus on gaming and
| they angered the gamer community responsible for the XBox
| 360's success.
|
| They had to back pedal from that, brought in Phil
| Spencer, highly acknowledge in the game industry, he
| rebooted the whole XBox One approach, re-introduced the
| indie development support (yet another thing dropped in
| the meantime) as ID@Xbox program.
|
| The pandemic delivery issues with the Xbox Series X and
| Series S, and the fact that dev teams have to consider
| two different hardware models when targeting the XBox
| made it less atractive than targeting the Playstation or
| Switch.
|
| So even though they managed to recover from the mess with
| the XBox community, the efforts to recover from it have
| left it on a third place in regards to overall sales.
| Narishma wrote:
| Phil Spencer wasn't brought in, he was just promoted. He
| was already head of Microsoft Game Studios.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I stand corrected then.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Xbox 360 was their biggest success (2005), with 84 million
| units.
| LilBytes wrote:
| I wonder if Microsofts PC marker canabilises their Xbox
| market.
|
| I've got a great gaming rig, if I was to get another
| console on top of my switch it would always be a PS.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It kind of does, because with turning XBox into a brand
| for games that can be played anywhere, PC or via
| streaming, it kind of devalues the console itself.
|
| Why bother buying the games console, if the same game is
| available by other mechanisms, the exact same game not a
| port.
| RajT88 wrote:
| It boggles my mind that Microsoft of all companies cannot
| seem to understand that building a software ecosystem
| requires first attracting developers to a platform. Make
| that platform attractive and remove friction.
|
| They manage to screw it up more often than not, and then
| wonder why nobody buys a Zune or a WMR headset or a Windows
| phone or an Xbox...
| josephd79 wrote:
| If they haven't figured that out by now, they never will.
| mackrevinack wrote:
| or in the case of the zune, only making it available for
| sale in 1 country when the ipod was being sold in most
| major countries. i had to buy my zune hd off of ebay. its
| not really surprising it didn't do as well as the ipod
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Interestingly, Sega was founded by Americans, but by the 90s
| Sega of Japan was in full control of the company.
| gryson wrote:
| There is no "Sega of Japan."
|
| Sega Enterprises is a Japanese company that founded the
| subsidiary Sega of America to market its products in North
| America. Sega Enterprises can trace its origins to Americans
| such as David Rosen who were in Japan after the war.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Sega went through a number of buyouts and merges and
| renames and spinoffs over the decades so it's a pretty
| complex history to follow as it alternated between American
| and Japanese ownership.
|
| By the mid 80s, CSK, a Japanese software firm, purchased
| the company from Gulf and Western, the American owners at
| the time. They then established Sega of America, so I say
| "of Japan" to distinguish the Japanese office.
|
| The name Sega, is derived from Service Games of Japan, the
| name in the 1950s.
| kraig911 wrote:
| That era of gaming so many people fail to see why marketing was
| super important because the games all were pretty good. It's
| important to remember that before the cd/dvd era console
| manufacturers made money off the cartridge sales, so the
| commission was high. When sony was using CD's they took way less
| I think 15-20% vs 50 or something compared to nintendo. And even
| still nintendo/sega couldn't make the medium as fast as sony.
| Sony could mint cds for a fraction of the cost of making
| cartridges. As well if Namco wanted to order 1,000,000 cds for a
| special launch date, sony could. Nintendo/Sega couldn't.
| mirchiseth wrote:
| "La Zona Blanca" ad [1] mentioned in the article is funny. But I
| do agree with the note "When did we decide on Hare Krishna cult
| members?" There must be better ways to spend the ad money OR may
| be Sega marketing was using Hare Krishna members as purple cows
| [2]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-XXTobhao4 [2]
| https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/d...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Hard disagree. Without the cult members the ad would have lost
| a lot of comedic flair. It would have landed in an uncanny
| valley between serious and not-serious. Kalinske was out of
| line trying to micromanage at that level.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Sega had Sonic Adventure, Soul Caliber, Phantasy Star, Space
| Channel 5, Crazy Taxi. On the gaming front they had everything
| they needed.
|
| On the pricing front though... oh boy. You are not gonna survive
| as a hardware company when Sony jams a DVD player into their
| gaming console and sells at a $100+ dollar loss just to pump up
| the DVD standard
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| They had all those games _after_ the Sega CD, 32x, and Saturn
| failed. The Dreamcast was great but because of prior failures
| they tried to beat Sony to market with in-between specs and
| were therefore easily out-marketed when Sony started hyping
| their PS2 like crazy.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| I've always wondered how much of the success of the PS1 could
| be attributed to the fact that games could be basically free
| because of the CD/DVD medium instead of cartridges, which
| required more dedicated hardware to make "backups".
| MBCook wrote:
| It was huge. Even without piracy, manufacturing cartridges
| was expensive. Nintendo made them all and made you pay for
| the privilege above base costs. The lead time was long and
| you could be screwed due parts shortages. Got a great game
| you want to sell? Sorry, Goldeneye is too popular so we'll
| make more of those first. Good luck waiting.
|
| CDs cost basically nothing. Sony would make them (because of
| the copyright protection) but Sony was a music company. They
| could easily churn out millions of the things a week, or
| maybe a day. So it was possible for them to just make more
| physical product to sell the Nintendo ever could. Far
| cheaper.
|
| Storage size was also a big issue. Full motion video, CD
| quality audio, more levels... The PlayStation could do things
| that the N64 just couldn't do to storage size.
|
| Do you remember the "magazine" PlayStation Underground? You
| would sign up and Sony would send you a disc once a month
| with videos and demos and such.
|
| Something like that is 100% impossible (financially) with
| cartridges.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Especially not when most (all?) of those games were also on the
| playstation.
| brirec wrote:
| All of those games were Sega exclusives (I think even first-
| party Sega IP) until Sega threw in the hardware towel and
| began making games for other platforms.
|
| Edit: Soul Caliber isn't Sega IP, but the rest are
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Most those are first-party Sega games - certainly not
| available in PlayStation until Sega threw in the console
| towel and became a third-party developer.
|
| Also, folks? Soul CalibUr.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| That 3d bar chart is something special. The half-assed 3D effect
| serves only to make it harder to read. I appreciate this is often
| the case with diagrams, but this is an amazing example.
| guidedlight wrote:
| The early 90's were awash with terrible examples of charts.
| Honestly, I think business folk for the first time got the
| tools to create high-quality graphical charts and they went
| nuts without understanding what they were doing -- no doubt,
| trying to out do one another and impress their boss.
| hbn wrote:
| Microsoft's WordArt was too much power for some people
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| People are STILL making shitty charts.
|
| I think the greatest offenders are 3D pie charts. The
| application of perspective skews the apparent size of each
| section, completely defeating the purpose of pie charts.
| lizknope wrote:
| I graduated in 1997 and at my first job we had an engineer
| that loved making Powerpoint presentations. I hated that
| stuff but he used every 3D option, different color palettes
| on every page, etc. We had someone else print up fake
| business cards for him that changed his title to "3D Pie
| Chart Engineer"
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Also, the largest category is labelled "Other".
| snarfy wrote:
| It's the games. It always was the games.
|
| I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for
| Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.
|
| If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would
| have bought it. Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted.
| Marketing and the hardware didn't matter to me. It was the games.
| hoofedear wrote:
| I'm experiencing this feeling right now, I've been considering
| a PS5 just for Final Fantasy XVI. But the smart move would be
| to wait until it's no longer exclusive to that console
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Dreamcast famously had great games but nobody bought it. Most
| people think N64 had better games than PS1, but it was outsold
| 3 to 1.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The n64 having better games I do not think was a most people.
| There are some circles and bubbles, namely Nintendo fans that
| might think that. But outside of a few stand outs like Mario
| 64, Zelda, starfox and party games PlayStation crushed them
| in pure quantity. Psx has dozens of Jrpgs still worth playing
| today. Then you include games like metal gear solid, twisted
| metal, tony hawk. There were probably more great games on psx
| than there were n64 games.
| pipes wrote:
| Tastes vary, but power stone and soul calibur are great (and
| still look great today). Though you are right in a way, it
| didn't really have a recognisable brand game like gran turismo
| or Tekken. (Or goldeneye)
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.
|
| Sometimes I think about how weird it was that a JRPG was
| somehow the most important game launch of its era in America.
| Everyone bought that game and I'm not sure why. It's a fine
| game if you're a JRPG fan, and they did a great job moving it
| away from the usual themes, but it's so weird that it caught on
| with so many people that had never even heard of the genre or
| wouldn't have wanted to play a JRPG before.
|
| Was it the FMVs during summons? Why was that particular FF game
| so culturally relevant unlike any before or after? It was so
| successful that there was a bubble of JRPGs put into the
| mainstream for awhile there in the late 90's.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Because FF7 looked like a cool american game. You had a
| blonde hero with a giant sword, a cool black guy (Mr. T
| knockoff) with a gun arm, and beautiful women in a cyberpunk
| dystopia. It really nailed the zeitgeist at the time.
| intotheabyss wrote:
| And also the storyline, where big corps destroy the planet
| for profit.
| munificent wrote:
| That's weird. I always had the exact opposite impression.
|
| Early JRPGs felt comfortably Western to me because they
| just lifted the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy vibe whole
| cloth.
|
| But FF7 felt like a totally random pastiche of genres that
| were jammed together in such an unusual combination that I
| could only imagine someone from another culture thinking to
| combine them.
|
| Like making an apple pie with hotdogs in it. Yes, nominally
| it would be _super_ American, but no American would ever
| think to put those together in that way.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Certainly once you played it passed a certain point, but
| by that point you bought the game.
| [deleted]
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > it's so weird that it caught on with so many people that
| had never even heard of the genre or wouldn't have wanted to
| play a JRPG before.
|
| Sony threw a truck load of money into marketing.
|
| When I was in high school I recall taking a bus to school
| once and the entire bus was covered in a FF7 advertisement.
| colecut wrote:
| Do you remember what games were part of that "bubble" after
| ff7? I was a huge fan of JRPGs at the time and a few years
| prior on the SNES... FF2 and FF3, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound,
| Secret of Mana..
|
| FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept everything
| good about the gameplay.. I didn't play it until it was
| ported to PC, and the 3d accelerated video cards made it look
| much nicer than it even did on the PSX. It was a masterpiece
| of a game, the character development was extremely engaging
| and memorable. And the cinematics of Aerith dying, or
| Sephiroth walking through the flames... I had never seen
| anything like that up to that point.
|
| FF7 and Zelda64 (ocarina of time) were the last games I
| really got into before I shifted to wasting all of my time on
| the internet instead of video games. I feel like games
| haven't been as good since that era, but it's probably mostly
| me that has changed.
| nemo44x wrote:
| So many that would have been published in Japan but
| probably not the USA. Star Ocean, Xenogears, Suikoden,
| Vagrant Story, Breath of Fire, Dragon Warrior 7 or
| something, Brave Fencer, and adjacent ones like Parasite
| Even and even Bushido Blade. These are just off the top of
| my head.
|
| > FF7 took it to the next level graphically but kept
| everything good about the gameplay
|
| Respectfully disagree. FF7 is not an S-tier JRPG by any
| means. It was a regression from FF6 in that it was linear,
| had very 2D characters, inferior story and boss, and the
| fighting system was really basic and lame. But it turned a
| generation onto the genre and I played it recently and it
| has aged well in some ways. The Chocobo stuff was great and
| Golden Saucer for its time was amazing. So a good game but
| not a great one. Even in the list above quite a few are
| better. Xenogears in particular.
|
| FF7 is iconic though and easily the most important game in
| the fanchise. Cloud is iconic even if he's sort of lame
| IMO.
|
| > I feel like games haven't been as good since that era,
| but it's probably mostly me that has changed.
|
| I'd agree that Ocarina of Time was probably the most
| anticipated game I've ever had. But modern games are
| amazing. They're just better in every way. I don't play
| nearly as much as I used to but games are just so refined
| and built on so many years of knowledge now.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Obviously tastes vary but it does stand out to me more
| now just how much 7 is an iteration on 6, despite the big
| change to 3D.
|
| The menus and ATB are obviously basically a straight port
| over, materia are pretty much an adjustment of the
| similar re-slottable espers from 6 that taught magic,
| characters' limit breaks from 7 are sometimes clearly
| based on the unique abilities from 6 (Tifa's for example
| basically combining Setzer's slots with references to
| Sabin's martial arts), limit breaks themselves being an
| evolution of 6's desperation attacks..., even some really
| specific stuff like the opera house rafters vs. Aerith's
| chapel.
| alexandre_m wrote:
| Marketing mostly.
|
| Final Fantasy was already a guaranteed hit in Japan, but the
| success in the west can be greatly attributed to a successful
| marketing campaign by Sony.
|
| Additionally, the non-medieval theme really helped setting it
| apart. There were guns, cars, televisions, and motorcycles!
|
| It's fascinating to recall the TV commercial in North America
| featuring the motorcycle cinematic scene, which, ironically,
| constituted only 2 minutes of the game 50+ hours of gameplay.
|
| Regardless, FF7 was an exceptional game that truly showcased
| the remarkable progress in video game development, appealing
| to a wider audience.
|
| I still have goosebumps thinking about the first chapter of
| the game. It really was something when it came out.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| It's also the price. Saturn was $399 on release, Playstation
| was $299.
|
| Without Sony's big name and 3D graphics, $299 would have
| spelled doom ($199 was the standard price before).
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a
| Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in
| hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games
| to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer.
|
| 32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre.
| They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a
| Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third
| parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64,
| had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).
|
| In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every
| genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something
| commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take
| care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it
| generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we
| in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want
| more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna
| buy a PlayStation.'
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising
| considering that both before and after that generation the
| RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior,
| Chronotrigger... the greats.
| danbolt wrote:
| I'm convinced that if Falcom had reworked _Popful Mail_ for
| the Nintendo 64 (with Working Design 's 90's anime dub) it
| could have been a surprise hit with the preteens that only
| had _Ocarina of Time_ and _Ogre Battle_ on the system.
| lizardking wrote:
| Japanese RPGs were largely transforming into interactive
| movies by that generation, which didn't lend itself well to
| the cartridge format.
| gota wrote:
| Super Mario RPG! By Nintendo itself. How was that not
| ported/sequel'ed into the N64?!
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Super Mario RPG was a collab between Nintendo and Square.
| Square famously jumped ship after Nintendo ditched the CD
| format. As another mentioned, Paper Mario was supposed to
| be the spiritual successor to SMRPG. Even though Paper
| Mario was a modest success, I still consider it a miss on
| matching SMRPG's quality bar for an RPG.
| johnzim wrote:
| In addition, Square still held a bunch of specific legal
| rights around it, which is why Paper Mario was branded as
| being distinct, even if it had a lot of obvious
| commonalities.
| jamie_ca wrote:
| Paper Mario released on N64, picking up the "Mario in an
| RPG" thread and starting a series proper.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Great game (and sequels) but it wasn't released in Europe
| for example. Nintendo always did these strange business
| moves that made no sense yet they always prevailed. For
| example they had everything needed to connect DS and Wii
| - never did. Online shop? Dead for years, etc.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship
| to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's
| memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they
| wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right
| --Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across
| three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's
| assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2
| N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with
| a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio
| and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
| Macha wrote:
| A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune,
| and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between
| them
|
| The problem is worse than that:
|
| 1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x
| that, so imagine 30 carts
|
| 2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the
| same data. Think character models and attack animations
| for your party members, locations you can revisit at any
| time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The
| disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and
| event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for
| the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only
| would you have to swap discs at certain points in the
| story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g.
| because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell
| from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent
| from your party and insert cartridge 2.
| bandrami wrote:
| Is Ocarina not an RPG? (Serious question; I'm not much of a
| gamer.)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was
| the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic
| experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format
| was large enough to support that.
|
| The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game
| cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers,
| while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they
| had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of
| that.
|
| What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to
| simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved
| quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would
| have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then
| was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| > What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64
| chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era
| with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-
| like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I
| think the belief back then was that everything had to be
| 3D and cutting edge to sell.
|
| I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight,
| but hard to justify at the time.
|
| The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest
| technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge
| amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And
| while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the
| time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES
| and Genesis were also too recent to really have any
| nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or
| "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably
| have felt cheap and dated at the time.
|
| Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d
| titles during the N64 generation. They just released them
| for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There
| wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on
| the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really
| well.
| error503 wrote:
| > What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64
| chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era
| with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-
| like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I
| think the belief back then was that everything had to be
| 3D and cutting edge to sell.
|
| I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers
| a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG
| experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based
| graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like
| the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves
| slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or
| low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was
| really not designed for this type of game, so few were
| made.
|
| Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games
| was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware
| being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant
| that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but
| impractical.
| codexb wrote:
| Eh, they had great games on the _genesis_ , not much after
| that. When Dreamcast released it was mostly hit-or-miss
| arcade ports.
| slothtrop wrote:
| > Sega had plenty of great games.
|
| Not the ones kids wanted most.
| db48x wrote:
| Which means it was really just advertising, not games.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES
| as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got.
| Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked
| everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn.
|
| I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and
| the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a
| shmup. I was not enamored.
|
| The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive.
| The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding
| to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles
| (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I
| went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive
| catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a
| GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo,
| but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| I played Soul Caliber on a friend's DC. There was also a
| great tennis game.
| paulcole wrote:
| Not to be flippant, but so what?
|
| I'd rather be the creator of the worst thing that people
| want to buy than the best thing that nobody's ever heard
| of.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster
| movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the
| films they want to make. This is why the critically
| "best" movies every year always go under the radar with
| relatively few ticket sales.
|
| This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the
| universal one.
| db48x wrote:
| That's not really what I was getting at (although it is
| generally true, and it is the original meaning of the
| phrase "the customer is always right"). My point was that
| advertising steers people's opinions all the time. Better
| advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the
| games that Sega would actually have.
|
| Although I will also say that they must have known that a
| lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not
| having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer
| people's opinions if they are already in a convenient
| place.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| This is a bad take. Sega actually had incredible
| advertising campaigns in the 90s. That iconic "SEGA!"
| yell was addictive and memeable. Advertising/marketing
| was never a problem for Sega.
|
| Sega also had tons of mindshare. They fumbled the ball
| and Sony ran with it for a touchdown. End of story.
| mathgeek wrote:
| As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings
| true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great
| titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose
| from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and
| DC rolled around, "what the kids want" was clearly moving
| away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the
| genre was and is a gift since.
| deaddodo wrote:
| While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more
| niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding
| on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't
| until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all
| but dead (outside of Japan).
| nsxwolf wrote:
| If you were into the 2D fighting games from the late 90s
| arcade scene, the Saturn was your system.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Very true! I was more into the early-to-mid 90s fighters
| (MK, SF2) but the Saturn had a solid lineup there as
| well.
| hparadiz wrote:
| The first two years for PS1 was insane. A true outlier.
|
| Tekken, Rayman, Road Rash, Twisted Metal
|
| Even random racing games were for the first time rendered
| in 3D so it was really mind blowing going from sprites to
| that.
|
| The opening line up is god tier by modern standards
|
| https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-
| ps1...
| dayvid wrote:
| The demo discs were clutch. I didn't have much money and
| would play the heck out of demo discs until I could save
| enough money to buy a game. Saturn didn't seem to have
| enough titles and PS was spitting them out like crazy.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah hard to describe probably to anyone growing up in a
| post-YouTube, post-Steam, post-Playstation store era, but
| getting a video or playable demo of like 20 or 30 games
| on a demo disc that was sometimes packaged in with a
| magazine you'd buy in the store was incredible.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yeah I don't think a console has come close since, and
| this always makes launches feel very lackluster to me.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year
| before it came out and I'm confident first-party
| developers could already work on games for the platform,
| but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the
| first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform
| titles.
|
| Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up
| with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet
| need exclusives to sell the console.
|
| But a better launch lineup would've been nice.
| autoexec wrote:
| Are there a bunch of PS5 exclusives now? Last I checked
| it was all PC ports and PS3/4 remakes. What are the must
| have PS5-only games right now?
| hbn wrote:
| PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting
| one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later.
|
| I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position
| ever since they started releasing PC versions of
| basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm
| complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's
| zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's
| still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the
| exclusives.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been
| one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's
| an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold
| onto it as long as possible.
| adamc wrote:
| Fading? Vs. Linux, maybe. Mac OS is still a bad platform
| for games.
| incahoots wrote:
| Not sure if that stance is going to be relevant much
| longer. I recall Apple releasing a new framework that
| actually had some substance during their last keynote. I
| think Linus did a segment, they were running cyberpunk on
| Mac at 30FPS, not ideal sure, but it's a big step up.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/games/
| adamc wrote:
| I don't know. I can hope for the best, but when they
| killed 32-bit apps and with them a ton of classic games,
| I gave up on Apple.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Yeah I meant vs. linux. True that it should continue to
| be a motivator for potential Mac switchers.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Heh, possibly. My brother won't touch a PC game unless it
| runs on Steam Proton in Linux.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Man, that is hooey, if we're talking _launch_ (day one)
| titles. The US Dreamcast launch lineup was _spectacular._
|
| Leading the way was Soul Calibur, one of a handful of
| games to earn a perfect score from Famitsu[1] and it
| actually blew away the arcade version (!)
|
| NFL2K was also a launch title and while I'm sure a lot of
| the HN crowd is allergic to sports titles, it was far
| superior to contemporary versions of Madden... got
| correspondingly high reviews as well
|
| Sonic Adventure was pretty spectacular too I thought, I
| would call that an 8.5 or 9/10 (like a lot of 3D
| platformers it maybe hasn't "aged well" but at the time,
| I thought it was spectacular and it was well reviewed)
|
| Power Stone was a blast too.... Hydro Thunder.... bunch
| of other solid ones. Day one.
|
| https://www.mobygames.com/group/13786/launch-title-
| dreamcast...
|
| Here was the PS1 launch lineup. Ridge Racer is the only
| really good title here, excluding previous-gen ports like
| NBA Jam and Rayman. Toshinden was obviously mindblowing
| as the first polygon fighter many played but it's sort of
| a notoriously bad game.
|
| https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/06/playstation-launch-
| titles/
|
| But in some ways that just shows Dreamcast had already
| lost the war before it launched. Sega did everything
| right and hit the ground running with what many consider
| the greatest launch title lineup in history, but their
| rep was too tarnished.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famitsu_scores
| slothtrop wrote:
| I remember the launch being as attractive as you
| described (I was always lukewarm on Sonic, though). A few
| years later when the parents finally agreed to buy me
| that gen's console, I still went for the PS2 because of
| the catalog and DVD player, after a long streak of only
| buying Nintendo consoles. I borrowed a few other the
| years, but never the DC.
|
| Competition was fierce. I like the arcade-Sega style of
| games and enjoyed the DC titles when I got my hands on
| them, but that was as far as I went.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| DVD player
|
| Yeah. This was really a "killer app" for the PS2. That,
| plus Sega's self-destroyed reputation thanks to the
| SegaCD/32X/Saturn fiascos.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Almost every single game during the PS1 launch was a
| killer app because every single one was a novel new
| experience in a 3D rendered space. Dreamcast showed up
| way too late to compare.
|
| The PS1 also launched several novel IPs.
|
| Dreamcast was years after PS1 when 3D games were a dime a
| dozen and no one cared by that point. That's why Sonic
| Adventure and Hydro Thunder are forgettable where Tekken
| and Rayman are not.
| missblit wrote:
| The Dreamcast wasn't competing against the Playstation 1,
| the Sega Saturn was. And price and game library aside it
| had the hardware to back it up. You can see this in
| gameplay videos of, say, Nights into Dreams or Tomb
| Raider.
|
| If anything the Dreamcast was competing against the PS2
| and Gamecube (despite coming out at an awkward time
| significantly earlier than the competition)
| pipes wrote:
| Was soul calibur a launch title? I bought power stone
| with mine on launch day and remember getting soul calibur
| much later, though this was in the UK
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Dreamcast had terrible timing, in my opinion. That, and
| the controller was obnoxious. But wrt timing, the
| Dreamcast launched in between generations. Console
| generations tend to last at least 5 years. It was harder
| for people to afford multiple consoles back then, and if
| you had purchased an N64 or a PS1 in '96-'98, it was
| probably too soon to buy a second or third console in
| 1999, when Dreamcast launched. It had far too little time
| as the best hardware before PS2 and Xbox both launched in
| the following year and a half with better graphics and
| DVD support, leapfrogging it in the process.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It had far too little time as the best hardware before
| PS2
|
| It didn't matter because Sony had already won the hype
| war, EA forsook the DC, and the built in DVD player was
| something of a killer app itself.
|
| BUT If you go back and look at the first year or two of
| PS2 titles, they were not technically superior to the
| Dreamcast.
|
| IMO the Dreamcast had 1-2 years as the best hardware on
| the market, and another 1-2 years on par with the PS2.
|
| PS2 was far superior "on paper" but in reality, the
| difference was not as large as the numbers suggested at a
| glance. The Dreamcast did two things the PS2 didn't:
|
| - Hidden face removal, making it vastly more efficient
| than the PS2 (most polygons in a scene are actually
| hidden by other polygons, so if you avoid rendering them
| that's an enormous win [1]
|
| - Free hardware texture decompression, so it needed much
| less video memory [2]
|
| Those points were subtle, though. The gaming press and
| internet chatter at the time was largely (and
| understandably) oblivious to tech subtleties like that.
|
| In the end, obviously, the PS2 actually _was_ superior
| once developers (and particularly middleware developers)
| mastered its tricky CPU. But I didn 't consider it to
| really surpass the DC for a while. That,
| and the controller was obnoxious.
|
| I liked the controller unlike many, but the failure to
| include a second analog stick was a real miss. The sad
| thing is, the DC's controller protocol had support for
| dual analog inputs. They just didn't forsee the need.
|
| ___
|
| [1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/
|
| [2]
| https://dcemulation.org/index.php?title=Texture_Formats
| toast0 wrote:
| I kind of totally missed the PS1 launch, but it would
| have had the advantage that most of the titles being
| worked on didn't have anywhere else to go, really.
|
| It you're working on a maybe PS5 launch title, you can
| relatively easily decide to release it for PS4 instead.
|
| Most PS1 titles are tied to a cd-rom, and maybe some of
| the other hardware, and would have been tough to release
| elsewhere. Sega CD and 3DO didn't have much traction,
| TG16-CD and Jag-CD even less, Saturn vs PS1 vs PC was the
| relevant choice, and I think Sony was better at
| attracting developers at the time.
|
| Although, it should be pointed out Road Rash was widely
| ported, launching on 3DO, later releasing on Sega CD,
| PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason.
|
| The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that.
| Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat
| niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary
| to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no
| Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first
| party titles.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth.
|
| Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan
| to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales
| darling.
|
| Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs
| (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
|
| The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your
| favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side].
|
| Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a
| sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and
| 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D
| games that were becoming less popular.
|
| The result is that they had a system that had lots of good
| games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars
| the market was looking for.
|
| If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace
| up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things
| would have been different, but that didn't happen.
| slothtrop wrote:
| That's how I remember it. When I tried someone's console,
| they had on hand: FMV games (which were terrible), and
| shmups. I was not sold.
| baanlox wrote:
| I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience
| was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it
| felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua
| Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long.
|
| I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was
| $399, $790 adjusted for inflation.
|
| It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in
| terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not
| playing it a few months after. I had no other games but
| Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my
| interest in gaming.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs
| (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no.
|
| One of the best selling games of that generation was a
| JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre.
| Interest in it didn't begin waning until the _next_
| generation.
|
| > The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your
| favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation
| side].
|
| There were _hundreds_ of "tent-pole 3D" games released
| for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or
| so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were
| _very_ popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a
| mainstream..."genre".
|
| Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic.
| The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed
| because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third
| party developers away) and (as you touched on), the
| majority of the best ones never left Japan.
| spaceprison wrote:
| From what I recall the marketing for the saturn tried to make
| the knights game 'the new sonic' and it looked dumb.
|
| I also remember wanting to know what a 'panzer dragoon' was but
| a lot of the commercials made it seem like you should already
| be aware and they may have just misspelled dragon.
|
| Virtua fighter was a fine game in the arcade but none of my
| friends were going to buy a saturn for one game they could play
| at the arcade or some weird flying sonic game.
|
| When playstation came out, battle arena toshinden felt fast and
| the characters looked cooler. Ridge Racer felt Way faster than
| Daytona the music was great and the textures blew my mind.
|
| So even though saturn had a earlier launch the Playstation came
| to the party with more to offer.
| vikingerik wrote:
| It took me a while to understand what you meant - it's not
| "knights", the title is Nights Into Dreams.
|
| But yeah, having that as a launch title was a big mistake.
| The gameplay is a weird and unapproachable genre, and the
| characters flopped as mascots. It was actually made to show
| off the then-new analog 360o control stick (the "3d control
| pad"), but nobody cared about that.
|
| The Saturn needed Sonic and didn't have it, and everything
| else from there was deck chairs on the Titanic.
| missblit wrote:
| Nights into dreams was my favorite game as a kid. The
| graphics were just mind-blowingly pretty at the time to the
| point where I had dreams about visiting dreamland.
|
| Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on
| Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn
| was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too
| quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a
| system seller.
|
| Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.
| [deleted]
| atentaten wrote:
| I always thought Sega had the better games and hardware. I had
| all of these consoles. Playstation always felt like an imposter
| back then, but I was a Sega fan and Nintendo secondarily.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| > Hindsight suggests none of those really worked and that Sega's
| other primary obsession, lowering hardware costs after its
| launch, both for competition and margins, backfired. The retail
| margin on a core $250 Saturn system, without pack-in games, was 6
| percent, or $15, while Sony seemed to be offering 10 percent
| core, 15 percent pack-in.
|
| > "How Did Sony Do it?" one slide rhetorically asks. The answer,
| according to Sega, is that it was perceived to be cheaper, its
| software "looks better than ours," that Sega "equity has been
| damaged by 32x and Sega CD," and that Sony has "effectively
| leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics."
| All Sega had to do, according to the next slide, was improve its
| software, get pricing advantage, improve its advertising, spend
| better on TV advertising, and "dramatically improve" its game
| timing. Simple enough.
| dangus wrote:
| I highly recommend the movie/documentary "Console Wars" as it
| touches on this subject.
|
| The success of the Genesis especially in the United States, at
| least according to this movie, came from a "dream team" when it
| came to marketing and promotion. This team included Tom
| Kalinske, former CEO of Mattel.
|
| For a time, this team at Sega of America held the parent
| company's ear, and it led to the Genesis breaking Nintendo's
| monopolistic stranglehold on the game industry. The Genesis
| succeeded because of some pretty amazing marketing and the
| success of Sonic the Hedgehog.
|
| By the time the Sega Saturn came along, this team was gone, and
| I think it shows.
| gryson wrote:
| Console Wars leaves a lot out. For one, Sega of America was
| in financial trouble as early as the 2nd half of 1993 when
| revenues nosedived. The company ended up laying off 70% of
| its 900-member workforce by the end of 1995. Despite having
| one of the largest game development divisions in the world,
| it utterly failed to consistently release hit titles (its
| internal studio, STI, was infamous for having more unreleased
| than released games).
|
| The CEO of Sega of America, Tom Kalinske, was strongly
| against marketing the Saturn in North America due to its
| expected high price tag. He persuaded the parent company to
| develop and release the ill-fated 32X, and then he put most
| of the company's resources into supporting it. When the 32X
| bombed upon release, the decision was quickly made to bump up
| the release of the Saturn, but Sega of America had almost no
| software in the pipeline. Ironically, in the end, the Saturn
| matched the PlayStation in price for most of its life.
|
| A few articles on the topic for anyone who's interested:
|
| https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-
| an-a...
|
| https://mdshock.com/2022/05/09/a-second-atari-shock-the-
| decl...
|
| https://mdshock.com/2022/08/16/a-cloud-appears-over-sega-
| of-...
| jsnell wrote:
| Unsurprisingly when ex-Sega America employees are one's
| only sources, the story ends up with Sega America marketing
| people as the heroes of the story :)
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Worse, the book Console Wars doesn't have any in-text
| citations. So, you never know who's perspective you are
| getting.
| bitwize wrote:
| The success of the Genesis in the west had a lot more to do
| with the fact that Mortal Kombat on the Genesis had blood.
|
| Slick marketing and Sonic made the Genny a contender. Lax
| content restrictions at a time when gamers were thirsty for
| more mature content put it over the top.
| jonhohle wrote:
| While I think that was a cool factor, the Genesis became
| the sports console and really dominated with annual sports
| titles (especially from EA). That also targeted a
| demographic willing to spend money on games: 16-30yo guys.
| Those are the same people who would buy Mortal Kombat
| (especially since it was the edgier version).
|
| Mortal Kombat made a lot of headlines and sold a lot of
| copies, but I've never seen stats that suggested it drove
| console sales one way or another.
| delusional wrote:
| I'm always dubious of these claims. For some reason the
| marketing guys are always the key to the success, and nothing
| else barely matters. In these "documentaries" the hardware
| could have been terrible, hell they could have been selling
| bananas, but if the marketing would have just been tweaked a
| bit, it would all have worked out.
|
| It's not surprising that the marketing guys market themselves
| the best and therefore end up with the more compelling story.
| It's just boring and trite. Tell me the story of their
| hardware. The ups and downs of developing games for a
| platform that wasn't done. The stories of turmoil, as the
| executives started demanding more features to match the
| competition.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| You're not wrong. The Genesis shipped with fairly 'boring'
| but powerful hardware for the time - an M68K, a Yamaha
| synth, and a PPU-style video scanout chip. In contrast the
| Saturn was a kitchen sink of novel ideas that developers
| struggled to work with. Two CPUs, a polygon rasterizer[0],
| a sound system with an M68K _inside_ , _AND_ a DSP with a
| VLIW instruction set.
|
| At the same time I'm not convinced that these failures are
| entirely orthogonal. Developer marketing _is still
| marketing_. At some point during the Saturn 's development
| someone should have said "hey, maybe we shouldn't make
| developers juggle five CPUs to get decent performance."
| Letting the system engineers go wild with power is how you
| wind up shipping a system that looks really powerful on
| paper but nobody can actually develop games for. See also:
| the PlayStation 3.
|
| [0] Which itself wasn't even as functional as the
| PlayStation's. If I remember correctly, rendering to a
| texture was either impossible or merely very difficult.
| SEGA _also_ stuck a PPU in there as well which you could
| use for some effects but it didn 't make up for those
| missing features.
| corysama wrote:
| The Saturn hardware was a mess because of last-minute
| additions welded on in response to their "Oh Crap!"
| moment of seeing what the PS1 could do.
|
| The Saturn was made to be the ultimate 2D games machine.
| It had incredibly powerful 2D sprite hardware. But, then
| the PS1 announced it was all about 3D! Suddenly the
| hardware engineers were ordered to retrofit 3D into their
| 2D beast. So, they tacked on a second CPU and some other
| chips as fast as they could. If you open one up, you'll
| see wires haphazardly stretched across the boards
| connecting the extra hardware to the original design.
|
| The Saturn's "3D rendering" was a clever desperation
| move. Turns out, with powerful enough 2D sprite rendering
| hardware, you can scale, rotate and shear a square 2D
| sprite into the distorted configuration that is
| equivalent to an 3D transformed rectangle viewed in
| perspective.... So, just tell the game developers to
| build their 3D scenes out of sprites instead of
| triangles!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Indeed. The Saturn didn't REALLY render "quads", but just
| transformed and translated sprites. That lead to all
| sorts of strange concepts. You didn't have UVs; a "quad"
| "texture" covered the entire quad from corner to corner
| and you couldn't change that. That lead to situations
| like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ where
| the programmer wanted a simple environment mapping
| effect, but it was impossible with the Saturn hardware so
| he ended up writing a 3D rasterizer in software to enable
| the effect on the start screen.
| fredoralive wrote:
| As far as I know no Saturns have "wires stretched
| haphazardly across the board", at least mine don't.
| Perhaps really early Japanese models, but random bodge
| wires tend to get fixed pretty quickly for later
| revisions of PCBs, and like most games consoles the
| Saturn has quite a few variants through its production
| run.
|
| For example very first revision of the Mega Drive in
| Japan did have an extra PCB and wires to fix a bug
| though. But only the first revision, it went away by the
| second.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I worked with the DreamCast dev hardware for a time back
| then. The rendering hardware was definitely rather
| different than typical triangle-based approaches. IIRC,
| polygonal shapes were defined by means of multiple
| intersecting planes. I also seem to recall that it was
| capable of unusually high frame rates (for the time).
| Narishma wrote:
| Are you perharps mixing up the Dreamcast and the Saturn?
| The Dreamcast had a fairly standard PowerVR GPU.
| usefulcat wrote:
| This was in 1999, and definitely the DreamCast. I was
| using one of the Katana dev kits. But I may be
| misremembering about the the plane-based rendering; I
| can't seem to find any references to that now.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Yes, the Saturn was a different beast. The Saturn also
| suffered from the PS2 problem, not having a decent
| developer toolkit. I think the PS2 was floundering hard
| but the hype was unreal and the dreamcast could not match
| the PS2 hardware. The dreamcast did offer Windows CE and
| as such, Microsoft's DirectX APIs.. but at the time PC
| gaming wasn't as big and console-only developers did not
| see value in porting between the two. IIRC only a handful
| of third party games relied on CE. There's probably a lot
| more I'm glossing over.
| bluGill wrote:
| Success needs great vision of what can be in the near
| future, and carefully pushing that as far as possible but
| not letting "feature bloat" push it too far out. You can
| find this vision in both marketing and in engineering
| teams. If you are great at engineering (likely if you are
| reading this here), then you can hire people in marketing
| to sell whatever you create; while if you are great in
| marketing you can hire engineers to create your vision.
| Either works.
|
| That the vision seems to have been in marketing in Sega's
| case shouldn't take away from all the engineering effort
| that went in as well, but the vision, and thus credit, is
| on marketing making the right decisions. There are plenty
| of other engineering companies that likewise have a good
| vision.
| gryson wrote:
| The argument is that Sega's global success with the
| Genesis came from its products - not the marketing
| (despite what the marketers say). One piece of support
| for that is that the console succeeded against Nintendo
| in most territories, despite all being under different
| marketing leadership and following different strategies.
|
| When the Sega of America marketers were put in charge of
| product development and stopped relying on Japanese
| products, they were unable to replicate their success.
| They followed questionable practices derived from the toy
| industry (from where CEO Tom Kalinske emerged), such as a
| heavy emphasis on expensive licensed titles over original
| franchises.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >For some reason the marketing guys are always the key to
| the success,
|
| I think this has a lot to do with the personality types
| that are attracted to sales/marketing vs hardware/software
| developers. One group is typically outgoing, bombastic, in
| your face, talk your ear off, no problems bending the truth
| to fit the narrative while the other group is not. (care to
| guess my sentiments on marketing/sales types ;-)
|
| The number of passionate developers that can talk about
| their project in compelling way to make the average person
| interested is pretty small compared to the number sales
| people that will make you absolutely want to buy something
| while at the same time have little to no actual
| understanding of what they are selling or care to.
| bityard wrote:
| If you want to succeed in consumer electronics (or consumer
| anything), you need a great product AND great marketing.
| There are plenty of examples of failed consoles that lacked
| one or both.
|
| For example: The Turbografx-16 was a pretty nice system
| with awesome games that did well in Japan but had next to
| no presence in the US. Very few people owned one as their
| only system, so it was mostly bought by video game
| aficionados who had to have every system. (And I guess
| reviewers for video game magazines.)
|
| The 3DO by contrast had great marketing (lots of
| commercials, ads in every magazine) but had expensive,
| lackluster hardware and only a few decent titles. Although
| to be fair it had higher ambitions than just being a video
| game console, so that identity crisis was one of its major
| struggles.
| tivert wrote:
| > I'm always dubious of these claims. For some reason the
| marketing guys are always the key to the success, and
| nothing else barely matters. In these "documentaries" the
| hardware could have been terrible, hell they could have
| been selling bananas, but if the marketing would have just
| been tweaked a bit, it would all have worked out.
|
| IMHO, there can be multiple "keys" to success. The hardware
| has to be _at least_ adequate (and IIRC, the Genesis beat
| the SNES to market by _a couple years_ ), and so does the
| marketing.
|
| I've never seen that documentary, but it's possible Sega's
| marketing for the Genesis was relatively better than
| average, compared to the hardware.
| progre wrote:
| "299"
| MBCook wrote:
| That was BRUTAL.
|
| For those who don't know what this refers to, Sega showed off
| the Saturn at CES (?), announced it was launching that same
| day, and would cost $399. That's $800 converted to todays
| dollars.
|
| Sony had their presentation later that day. The Sony gentleman
| got on stage, said '299', and walked off. That was it.
|
| Sony got ALL the news. The Saturn immediately seemed overpriced
| and had to prove it was worth the extra money, which they were
| unable to do enough to succeed.
|
| Additionally, because Sega bumped their launch up by months
| WITHOUT telling many partners, they pissed a bunch of them off.
| Huge important retailers like KB Toys who didn't get early
| stock not only refused to carry the console, they pulled all
| existing Sega stuff off the shelves too. Game developers were
| caught flat-footed too and didn't have their games ready.
|
| Sega basically botched the entire launch in the US thing. And
| it came back to bite them when the Dreamcast came out.
| neilv wrote:
| What's the ethics of a third party publishing alleged leaked
| documents like this?
|
| There's an arguable public interest, if the documents are genuine
| (less if genuine but cherry-picked), but does that override
| respect for the IP of the company and privacy of named people?
| LocalH wrote:
| Major rightsholders don't respect _our_ rights with regards to
| copyright (eroding /harming fair use, copyright extensions,
| etc) so fuck 'em. This is historical sales data. This isn't
| anything current or sensitive to today. Why are you defending a
| company that couldn't give two shits less about you, me, or our
| legal rights?
| toyg wrote:
| It's been 25 years; by now these materials can be considered
| historical documents of public interest, which trumps
| copyright.
| neilv wrote:
| Is this your gut feel, or some accepted journalistic
| standard?
| toyg wrote:
| Journalistic standard. Typically, anything over 15-20 years
| is considered fair game; even earlier than that, eminent
| public interest can trump everything else (depending on
| state legislation and circumstance), but when it's so old
| there is basically zero chance that anyone will contest
| reporting on the basis of commercial sensitivity and win in
| court.
|
| Note this applies to news organizations. Individuals under
| private agreements (NDA) are a different matter.
| bowsamic wrote:
| "accepted journalistic standard" has nothing to do with my
| ethics
| allarm wrote:
| What's your opinion on this?
|
| 25 years is quite a common timeframe for declassification.
| I would assume that's quite reasonable timeframe for
| journalistic standards as well.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/decl
| a...
|
| https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-
| pro...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification
| neilv wrote:
| IIUC, declassification concerns checks&balances upon
| powers given to a government that is responsible to
| citizens.
|
| Sega documents, on the other hand, seem more like fodder
| for an MBA student's case study, and anecdotes to drop in
| popular business books. Which seems much lower public
| interest, to plug into whatever cost:benefit calculation.
|
| I don't have a good sense of what should be done about
| the Sega documents. (Hypothetically, were I a journalist
| but knowing only what I do now, and the documents had
| been leaked to me only, I'd probably try to authenticate
| them and determine the motives of the leaker, and then
| I'd have to get advice from others.)
|
| Not specific to the Sega documents, I'm frequently
| concerned when I see some kind of information
| leaked/stolen, and the appearance is that everyone
| automatically considers it free-game for all purposes.
|
| That appearance might only come from a vocal minority,
| but when no one questions or objects, it looks universal,
| and like a sociopathic culture.
| bityard wrote:
| It varies by country but here in the US, we have a long and
| proud tradition of publishing newsworthy leaks in the media.
|
| > does that override respect for the IP of the company
|
| There are no issues here since US copyright explicitly allows
| for fair use of copyrighted materials for the purposes of
| criticism, comment, and news reporting in particular.
|
| > and privacy of named people?
|
| Work-related creations and communications are not personal
| private information as health records are. Without getting into
| the espionage and hacking tangents, by and large, if the
| company can't safeguard its internal output, that's on the
| company.
| coldpie wrote:
| I'm sad this was downvoted. It's a good question and worthy of
| discussion. It might be interesting to hear how other similar
| leaks have been received & treated by journalists in the past.
| Is there some pattern based on the age of the documents?
| droptablemain wrote:
| I found a reference to a game called "Duke Newcomb 3D" in this
| document. Gave me a nice laugh.
| brightlancer wrote:
| I stopped buying console games after ~1993 until sometime in the
| 2010s, so my experience with the Playstation and such was
| visiting friends who had them. It was pretty cool, but I think
| Sega was doomed in North America before that.
|
| Sega released the (backwards compatible) Genesis two years before
| Nintendo released the Super NES -- anecdotally, I knew far more
| folks with SNES than the Genesis, and my impression was that was
| true all over NA.
|
| Again, Sega released the (backwards compatible) Saturn two years
| before Nintendo released the N64, but I didn't know anyone at the
| time who had a Saturn and a few who had the N64.
|
| My recollection was that Nintendo kept promising their console
| "tomorrow tomorrow" so that folks wouldn't buy the Sega consoles.
| And I think it worked.
|
| I don't know if this played out in Japan and Europe, but in NA I
| think Sega was doomed long before the original PS.
| wk_end wrote:
| In North America, the Genesis was actually more popular than
| the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era - 1994 or
| so. By that point the Genny's paltry colour palette (64 on-
| screen 9-bit colours) was starting to look really dated - not
| just next to the new 32-bit consoles but even next to the SNES,
| as devs started to learn how to make it sing (see: Donkey Kong
| Country). And the bungling of the Sega CD and especially the
| 32X really did a number on their brand. When all is said and
| done they ended up pretty much neck-and-neck, with Nintendo
| pulling ahead a little bit, but any way you slice it, with 18M
| units sold in NA, the Genesis was an enormously successful
| product.
|
| The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the Playstation,
| so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's delays.
|
| In Europe, the Genesis (and Master System!) were even bigger
| than they were in North America, but the Saturn still bombed
| and Sony still ruled the next gen.
|
| In Japan, the Saturn was actually quite successful - more
| popular than the N64 actually - whereas Sega's previous systems
| never really caught on. But, again, it still lived in the
| shadow of the mighty Playstation.
|
| And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible. The
| Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil cared
| about the Master System.
| brightlancer wrote:
| > In North America, the Genesis was actually more popular
| than the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era
|
| I've heard this but IME "everyone" had an SNES while only a
| few people had a Sega Genesis -- and many of them also had an
| SNES. Maybe it was just folks I knew, but I went to college
| in a different state and SNES was much more popular among
| them.
|
| So I know what I've read but it's so far off from my (pretty
| broad) experience that I wonder if the stats are misleading.
|
| > The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the
| Playstation, so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's
| delays.
|
| I think Sega got caught in the middle between Sony and
| Nintendo (they're completely different markets now) and many
| folks who would have bought a Saturn instead held out for
| Tomorrow Tomorrow on the N64, which was what I anecdotally
| saw with the Genesis vs SNES.
|
| > And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible.
|
| The NA Saturn could play Genesis games. I didn't own one so I
| couldn't test if it played Master System games.
|
| > The Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil
| cared about the Master System.
|
| I feel personally attacked. ;) I don't remember why I got the
| Sega Master System over an NES, but it may have been for
| Phantasy Star.
|
| To the original post, I agree the Sony Playstation hurt Sega
| significantly, but I think Sega was in trouble before the PS
| hit the shelves (in part because of the issues w/ the SegaCD
| and 32x, as you said).
| Grazester wrote:
| You cannot play Genesis games on the Saturn. That cartridge
| port on the Saturn was for a memory cart or a Ram cart for
| 2d mostly Capcom games.
|
| Edit:// I actually own nearly all of Sega's consoles
| Grazester wrote:
| What do you mean backwards compatible? The Saturn is NOT
| backwards compatible with anything!
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I loved the Dreamcast. It had superior specs, lesser loadtimes
| than PS2. But lacking in multiplayer games.
| lizardking wrote:
| Which specs? Seems like PS2 had quite a bit more power on
| paper.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Technical_specificat...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2#Technical_specif...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Is there a tl;dr?
| Dwedit wrote:
| Sega Arrogant
| ranting-moth wrote:
| Any ponders what that post it note means? It was stuck on the
| "Brand Strategy" folder.
|
| "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97". There is a text above
| it, "Be the" ?
|
| "RR - What were F?96 SW s? limitations"
|
| "RPG's most messea?"
|
| "Stupid approach"
| davb wrote:
| It looks like the top line is "Screw better technology" (with
| the r dropped off).
|
| "RR - What were FY96 [Financial Year '96] SW sampling
| limitations"
|
| "RPG's most messy" (with a superfluous letter in there).
| groovy2shoes wrote:
| This looks good to me.
|
| And the last line reads "STUDIO APPROACH".
| _notreallyme_ wrote:
| I read "Be He", not "Be the"
|
| "sampling limitations"
|
| "Studio APPROVED"
|
| I can't work out "F?96" and "messea"...
| ndiddy wrote:
| "Bootleg" refers to the "Bootleg Sampler" series of demo discs
| that got packaged with Saturn consoles.
| geswit2x wrote:
| Sthoic approach
| stevehawk wrote:
| Studio approach
| mkjonesuk wrote:
| I was in my mid-teens and a big gamer when Sony entered the ring
| with the PlayStation and I still cannot to this day get over the
| fact that they actually did it and became the dominant force in
| gaming.
|
| I remember thinking it was just another fad like the Minidisc and
| because they had no clear mascot like Mario or Sonic it was bound
| to fail.
|
| Next thing I knew the Saturn was a joke and everyone I knew had a
| PlayStation. The ads were EVERYWHERE and people I knew who had
| never even owned a games console were buying the PS1.
|
| When the PS2 was announced I was also blindly convinced the
| Dreamcast would compete but the PS2 just DOMINATED. Literally
| everyone I knew had one (not me sadly) it was a stunning thing to
| behold. When games like GTA3 hit I knew Sega were done for.
|
| I personally only connected with the Sony handheld unit owning a
| PSP and I also eventually got a Vita. Other than UMD they were
| (still are) awesome little devices to play with.
| nitrofire69 wrote:
| PS2 also being a DVD player sealed the deal. For a while there
| it was one of the cheaper options for a DVD player, and if you
| bought a PS2 to play DVDs, might as well buy some games too.
| p1necone wrote:
| I know people that bought a PS3 on launch for the same
| reason. They didn't play any games, but it was a cheap Blu-
| Ray player.
| tokai wrote:
| That and being easy to pirate the games.
| nekoashide wrote:
| People in the scene thought the DMCA was a joke back in
| 2000, then they ended up behind bars.
| Macha wrote:
| From what I remember, the OG Xbox had way more piracy in my
| circles than the PS2.
|
| The PS1 on the other hand, I think everyone I knew had
| theirs chipped by the end.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Though it was _really_ easy to pirate on the Dreamcast.
| asciimov wrote:
| By the time it was really easy to pirate Dreamcast, the
| consoles were being clearanced out for $99.
| Grazester wrote:
| Someone took a hard look at the numbers and determined
| that even with piracy there was no uptick in units sold
| which means people were just not interested in the
| Dreamcasts unfortunately and it was piracy that killed
| it.
|
| But then again people who knows Segas history wouldn't
| draw this conclusion anyway. The Dreamcasts didn't have a
| chance with Segas past and Sony Playstation 2 hype and
| money
| grepfru_it wrote:
| The load times bro, I could not get on the CD based bandwagon.
| I played Sewer Shark on the Sega CD and the load times where
| miserable. I even thought the resolution was abysmal (compared
| to my PC at the time). No way it would win, I thought. By
| christmas of 97 I had a PS1 and spent all day playing Tomb
| Raider. The hardware was beyond any other console and the
| design was slick and new. And while Sony won, and my Saturn sat
| in the corner collecting dust, the N64 was the only system that
| came out when my friends came over. Nothing could compete with
| 4 player mario kart or starfox. Sega was dead before the
| dreamcast even came out.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > I played Sewer Shark on the Sega CD
|
| six - six - niner - six ugh, that game kinda sucked. Never
| hit that million pounds of tube steak high score.
|
| What a weird time for gaming. FMV games were something that
| looked like the future to a little kid but once you played
| them they were awful. The video padded out boring interactive
| game play like shooting the rats in Sewer Shark or the
| shooting galleries of Ground Zero: Texas. I remember Night
| Trap being highly controversial at the time for sexual an
| violence themes and I only knew one kid who had it and his
| mother threw the game out so I never got to play it.
| autoexec wrote:
| > FMV games were something that looked like the future to a
| little kid but once you played them they were awful.
|
| I still have a certain amount of love for the genre and I'm
| secretly hoping they make a comeback someday without many
| of the limitations they had at the time.
|
| Phantasmagoria was a gem if you've never tried it. Night
| Trap is just awkward to play, and didn't deserve the moral
| panic, but at least those kids can emulate it now. You'd be
| better off just watching it on youtube though.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive were
| really goofy but kinda fun adventure games.
| autoexec wrote:
| Both on GOG too! I'll have to check them out
| sublinear wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > "equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD," and that Sony
| has "effectively leveraged their considerable equity from
| consumer electronics."
|
| The second part is exactly it.
|
| Sony was, and still is, in the best position to license 3rd
| party games for their consoles because of their extensive
| partnerships across several industries.
|
| Even today Nintendo is left to survive off their own 1st party
| games.
|
| I don't agree the 32x or Sega CD were ever the problem. Sure
| they lost money on those products, but they still had a very
| strong brand. I think they knew at the time that wasn't going
| to be enough to continue in this space and they just weren't
| going to beat Sony on 3rd party and Nintendo on 1st party on
| their home consoles which is why they started cutting costs.
| Today they are very far from a failed business and made a good
| call.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The SegaCD and 32x were most assuredly problems for Sega.
| They were both problematic with third party developers
| because their low sales made for a small addressable market.
| The 32x especially burned third party devs because the Saturn
| was announced right as the 32x was released.
|
| If you were mid-development of a 32x game in November of 1994
| you just found out a lot of the money you'd spend had been
| wasted. You'll either be releasing a game in a few months on
| a system with no future (32x) or have to spend extra money to
| port and release it on the Saturn.
|
| The Saturn never got the sort of third party support that the
| PlayStation did. Square and Konami released system-selling
| games with Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. That was in
| addition to second party games like Gran Tourismo which was a
| system seller as well.
| isk517 wrote:
| The Vita was a great handheld, my only two complaints about it
| is they went with a expansive Sony memory format instead of SD
| card, and they did not include the ability to output to TV like
| the PSP Go had. Incidentally I was not surprised at the success
| Nintendo had when they released their own take on the Vita with
| those two issues fixed.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Nintendo happened to release one of the best games of all
| time at the launch of the switch. That had a huge amount to
| do with it.
| isk517 wrote:
| It did without a doubt, but that same game was also
| available for the Wii U, which was easier to find and
| costed significantly less than the Switch. Having a killer
| app helped generate interest, but people actually liking
| the gimmick is ultimately why the Switch succeeded.
| Lammy wrote:
| > The ads were EVERYWHERE and people I knew who had never even
| owned a games console were buying the PS1.
|
| https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/06/06/the-sucking-or...
|
| "When we saw the first commercials for the Playstation --
| glitzy, MTV style affairs that spoke to the sort of people we
| weren't -- we began to worry. They were selling our heritage to
| the same fucking guys who used to beat us up in P.E.!"
| rovolo wrote:
| > Our heritage
|
| Wow, that's quite the historical artifact. I can't get back
| into the headspace where people like PA thought they "owned"
| the concept of video games.
| TSUTiger wrote:
| PS1: $299
|
| PS2: Backwards-compatibility and built-in DVD player for less
| than a standalone DVD player at the time.
| p3rls wrote:
| Dreamcast was just too ahead of for its time is what I tell
| myself
| giantrobot wrote:
| The Dreamcast as a console was fine. The Dreamcast as a
| console _made by Sega_ was problematic. Sega had been burning
| bridges with third party developers for a majority of the
| decade by the time the Dreamcast was released. There was
| nobody left to make software for it.
| lizardking wrote:
| It was! The graphical leap from the PS1 to the Dreamcast
| still appears to me to be the starkest of the 3d era. And it
| had online connectivity, out of the box, from day one. Very
| impressive for the (very late) 1990's.
| pipes wrote:
| I bought a DC on launch day, and still have one (my
| original died). I honestly think ridge Racer 5 looked like
| something the DC couldn't do. Even more so gran turismo 3,
| which still looks great. That said the DC is contender for
| my favourite console of all time, the PS2 isn't. Oh and the
| DC still looks great on modern displays, the PS2 looks
| pretty awful (I'm play on an oled through an ossc).
| mdasen wrote:
| I can believe Sony did it. The PlayStation hit a lot of the
| right buttons at the right time.
|
| Sega was dead by the time the Saturn landed. Sega burnt too
| many fans when they launched the Sega CD and 32X just to
| abandon them nearly immediately. Parents didn't want to hear
| that Sega was launching yet another system. Sega launched 3
| consoles in 2.5 years in North America. Sega burnt all their
| goodwill.
|
| Video games can be an industry of momentum and trust. If you
| keep launching and abandoning products, you lost the trust and
| momentum. Developers don't want to commit to a system you'll
| abandon. Gamers don't want to buy a system you're going to
| abandon. Sega had shown that it would abandon systems at the
| first hiccup - and try to get you to buy junk.
|
| Sega's Saturn was also a weird system. It decided to use
| quadrilaterals instead of triangles and was complex which makes
| it harder to use effectively.
|
| Nintendo's N64 would be launching a year after the PlayStation.
| While the N64 might have had more 3D capabilities, many of the
| games on the system didn't look as good and the 3D gameplay
| wasn't as compelling as the PlayStation's.
|
| Not only that, PlayStation games were so much cheaper! At
| $50/game, it was just a ton more affordable than the $70 that
| N64 games were going for. By the time that the N64 came out,
| the PlayStation had a huge library of excellent games that were
| cheap. You even started to see older games for $25.
|
| Sony's brand at the time was like gold. Everyone wanted
| anything with the Sony label on it. It can be hard to remember
| what a dominant force Sony was in consumer electronics. They
| were like Apple back then. When people heard that Sony was
| coming out with a video game system, everyone would think that
| it would be the best just based on the brand. Parents would
| hear the Sony name and think quality and reliability.
| Especially if they had been burned by Sega, the PlayStation
| from Sony seemed like buying the best product that would last.
|
| Nintendo still did well. They have their niche. Sega had
| destroyed their reputation while Sony was the most admired
| electronics company out there. The PlayStation offered people a
| non-Nintendo system that they didn't feel would be abandoned
| and by the time the N64 came out it was established with an
| amazing game library that the N64 couldn't match.
| space_ghost wrote:
| My parents bought a PS1 shortly after they were available. We
| very much enjoyed it, but I _distinctly_ remember each time
| my friend brought over his N64 and copy of Goldeneye. The PS1
| may have been the superior console, but Goldeneye was the
| superior game.
| mdasen wrote:
| Oh, Goldeneye was amazing. I think that the N64 just didn't
| have as many great games as the PS1. But Goldeneye was such
| a truly amazing game.
|
| I wouldn't even totally argue that the PS1 was the superior
| console. It came out first and the fact that it used CDs
| meant cheaper, larger games. That gave it big advantages.
| The N64 did tend to have more immersive worlds. Mario 64
| was a totally different game from Crash Bandicoot. Crash
| was great, but didn't have the open-world feeling of Mario
| 64.
|
| They were very different feeling consoles. I think that's
| where Nintendo has carved its niche: making something
| different. Sega was still trying to make the same system
| and they were no match for Sony. Nintendo has kept trying
| to do things a tad different from the Wii and motion
| control to the Switch and its portability. I think Nintendo
| knows that it succeeds when it can find something unique
| and different and fails when it produces the same thing
| others can make.
|
| But the PS1's game library was just so extensive and cheap.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| PS1 was easier to pirate games than n64
| Grazester wrote:
| Well this about sums up Sega's situation.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Sony also made the right choice in the PS1 design by
| basically asking developers what they wanted WRT to hardware.
| Developers didn't want the wacky-ass designs of the Saturn or
| Jaguar. They didn't want to have to orchestrate multiple CPUs
| or a bunch of proprietary peripheral chips to get optimal
| performance. Developers wanted a sane hardware design and
| good developer tools.
| mdasen wrote:
| Totally! Too often console makers went with wacky things
| that developers didn't know how to get performance out of.
| Though that sanity was short-lived for Sony. The
| PlayStation 2 was a complex design that was a pain for
| developers.
|
| As much of a success as the PS2 was, it probably left the
| door open for Microsoft. The Xbox had a normal x86
| processor and normal Nvidia GPU (and the GameCube had a
| normal PowerPC/ATI GPU combo). The PS2 was a huge success,
| but I think a lot of it was built off the momentum of the
| PS1, the fact that it was backward compatible, and its DVD
| player. If the PS2 had been Sony's first console, they
| probably would have lost. Developers would have considered
| it a pain to develop for and Microsoft would have had a
| more powerful Xbox with an easier development platform.
|
| I think the PS2 does show that developers will accommodate
| (if hate) wacky-ass designs if there's momentum. However,
| Sega had killed their momentum with the Sega CD and 32X
| with both developers and gamers so the Saturn's wacky
| design was the final nail in the coffin. Atari had been out
| of the console game for nearly a decade when they launched
| the Jaguar so they also did't have the momentum.
|
| The PS2 was a bit pushed by momentum. Developers knew that
| gamers would buy it because Sony's brand in gaming was
| amazing at the time and it offered a DVD player so they put
| up with it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Yeah Sony caught the vacuum just right. Big players mistakes
| and delays gave the PSX a boulevard to run int.
|
| I found the console pretty lame, no special design, but a few
| cult games and you settle yourself culturally.
| pipes wrote:
| GTA 3 was going to come to the Dreamcast first at one point. Or
| at least I'm sure I read that somewhere.
| zerr wrote:
| Can we say that it is actually a zero-sum game?
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