Masakuni

You do have some good points here, but a lot of these are lies or half-truths spread around by former SoA members butthurt that part of the reason the Saturn flopped was their fault. I don't blame you whatsoever however, as a lot of these weren't even fact checked until recently. Lemme go through each point one by one:

• Tom Kalinske's marketing strategies, particularly the razor and blade strategy, worked pretty well at first, but they weren't sustainable and after a while changes need to be made since they were selling hardware at a severe loss due to this. I don't blame the SoJ guys for feeling this way. I also don't blame them for going with their own design in the end rather than SGI's, as I'll get to later.

• Ditto as above.

• True, but only in the US. In Japan, the Saturn was actually SLIGHTLY cheaper than the PlayStation when you consider the fact that it was bundled with Virtua Fighter (45000 yen for a Saturn + Virtua Fighter vs 39800 yen for the PlayStation alone, you needed to buy the games separately, where games were 5000-8000yen). Sony still sold the system at a massive loss at first but made up with software sales in the end and massively paid off anyways considering the success of the system. Not to mention, the "$299" guy as well as the rest of the people involved with the US PlayStation launch was fired pretty shortly after.

• True, at least in the US. That was entirely SoJ's fault.

• Eh. Weird advertising, but I suppose it's subjective in some ways.

• A total lie. There's magazine coverage as far back as September '93 that stated the system was developed to handle 3D from the start, months before the PlayStation as we knew it was publicly unveiled. True, it was a bit of a nightmare to develop for, but consider this - Sega was doing 3D arcade games using their own specialized hardware and chip designs as far back as Space Harrier. And this design philosophy carried over to the Saturn, mostly so that their own internal teams can develop for the system without much trouble, and indeed they were used to it. American devs weren't used to the design of this compared to the more standard main CPU, sub CPU, everything else hardware design so naturally they bitched about it and made it about them. Some Japanese devs weren't fond either but it was the exception to the norm, where most figured it out fine. 3D was becoming an emerging thing at the time of it's development so naturally there weren't standards made yet for this sort of thing. It would have been unwise to put such a significant feature in shortly before development was all said and done. Besides, Sega using their arcade hardware as a base for their console hardware isn't entirely unfounded, given their arcade pedigree (the Master System being partly based on the System 2, the Mega Drive/Genesis is partly based on their System 16, etc).

• True, with a big BUT. Much like the Saturn itself, Sonic X-Treme's main failing was Sega's hyper mismanagement at the time. It killed itself in the end more than anything, especially with it's ambitious yet sadly incompetent team. Yuji Naka is a bit of an ass, but him killing it due to him not liking them using NiGHT's engine is a total falsehood along with a lot of his other "horror stories". Not only has he came out and refuted that claim of them ever using the NiGHTS engine, Chris Senn has also stated he doesn't recall anything like that happening. Not to mention, NiGHTS was done in pure assembly while X-Treme was done in C++. It would have taken them a while to get back on track anyways given the differences between those two codebases, something they couldn't really afford given they were already well behind schedule anyways.

• Partly true. They put out more then they could chew, especially overseas. Also consider this - the 32X was entirely SoA's idea. Whoops. Also, SoA rode on the Genesis for far too long, even as late as 1998. They had a whole warehouse of them, that they had to completely write off. That's partly why they had a massive loss that year!

• True. His (and SoA in general, to be frank) xenophobia towards Japanese games further twisted the knife in the Saturn's already dead overseas scene, especially when games like Final Fantasy VII were proven to be massive hits and overseas Saturns could have used an RPG boost in that regard when Japan was tripping over those. Also the whole "not our future" ordeal was very rash and not well thought out especially considering this point.

• True.

• Very true. I wish more cared about imports at the time, since it took a bafflingly long time for people to realize that's where the good shit is.

While it's not unreasonable to call the Saturn a failure in the end, it's not for the reasons people keep parroting. There's a wild amount of misinformation surrounding it and it's not as simple as pinning the blame on one entity or corporation. SoA, SoJ, Bernie Stolar all sucked in this regard but it's unfair to blame it fully on any of them. It was a symptom of Sega's intense mismanagement in that time rather than the cause of it and I wish a lot more could actually look at the bigger picture of this rather than accept American-centric misinformation that has been well debunked. In general said mismanagement has been better documented recently and I'm glad more people are realizing the state of Sega then, including me. It's a real shame, because the Saturn is probably my favorite console of that generation and it makes me sad to see people still unjustly dunk on it.

The below video I have linked is a pretty good watch and will probably change how you see the Saturn, as well as going over some of what I said in further detail. Pandamonium's vids are pretty good on this subject as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVhAKctnoJo

Imagine trying to explain the difference between Sega Genesis, 32X, Saturn, CD, and GameGear to parents that called every game a Nintendo (aka mine 😅).