Masakuni

Someone on Reddit asked the question, "Why did the Sega Saturn fail so catastrophically?" And boy, did I have some answers. Answers which I feel are worth repeating here on Cohost, for those interested in that ancient gaming history.

(Previously, I had done a post-mortem of the Saturn in one of my old fanzines, back when people read their news from paper rather than LCD displays. Many of the same points I made in 1998 will be echoed here.)

• Tom Kalinske (arguably the only reason Sega got big in America) left after Sega of Japan started to ignore him. He said, "why don't we go with this SGI-based console instead of the crappy Saturn?" and they said, "Nope, we're doing the Saturn." Nintendo wound up with that SGI-based console, eventually called the Nintendo 64.

• Sony, eager to spite Nintendo after it dropped their CD add-on for the Super NES, offered Sega a chance to get in on the ground floor with the Playstation. Sega said, "Nope, we're doing the Saturn." It's well documented how that turned out.

• Sony, eager to spite SEGA after it spurned the Playstation, waited for the right moment to release its system and offered it for a hundred dollars less.

• The Sega Saturn arrived way too early, with way too high a price. If it tells you anything, there were no third party games for the Saturn at its launch; they just weren't available yet.

• Sega's advertising went from hip and edgy to embarrassingly desperate and weirdly conceptual. One early ad had Devo members and Ku Klux Klansmen as "rods and cones" getting blown away by what they were seeing on the Saturn. Someone thought this was a good idea. They were very, very wrong.

• The Sega Saturn was the wrong console for the wrong time. Any 3D abilities it had were thrown in at the last minute, resulting in a system that was great for 2D gaming but a nightmare to develop for when it came to polygonal games... the games that were fast becoming the industry standard.

• No Sonic games of note. Sonic X-Treme was planned, but ultimately killed by Yuji Naka. The only thing Saturn owners wound up getting are Sonic X-Treme ice pops from ice cream trucks.

• Fans of Sega were becoming former fans, thanks to the fickleness of the company. The average lifespan of a Sega console at the time (be it Sega CD, 32X, Saturn, or Dreamcast) was three years. Gamers knew that Sega consoles were destined to become a dead end and purchased accordingly. If Microsoft ran its gaming division the way Sega did, the Xbox Series S and X would be dead NOW. How would you feel about that as an Xbox owner?

• Bernie Stolar was a moron, and was eager to drive the Saturn into a ditch the moment he took over as CEO of Sega of America. Did it matter that the Saturn was doing reasonably well in Japan? Nah, because SoA and SoJ were at each other's throats and constantly undermined each other at every opportunity.

• Big games came to the Sega Saturn, but their SEQUELS didn't. Saturn owners had Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, but didn't get any of the follow-ups to those two franchises. The writing was already on the wall... the Saturn was already branded a failure, and it made no sense to develop RE2 or TR2 for a system that would fight the development team every step of the way.

• The gaming media of the time had already placed their bets on the Playstation, praising it at every opportunity in early press footage. Famously, Nick "Rox" DesBarres complained that the Saturn version of Street Fighter Alpha was worse than its Playstation counterpart. Why? Because the super move shadows were the wrong color (although the game had an option to change them to more arcade-faithful colors in the options screen, a fact DesBarres either didn't know or cared to divulge with his readers).

Another cause is retail. To put it simply, Sony offered better terms to retailers re: bulk ordering, credit limits, discounts for outlets that sound lots of units etc. etc. than Sega did, causing one more bullethole of many in the corpse of the western Saturn and Dreamcast.

i don't WANT to stream for 15 minutes to at least one viewer. i don't WANT to unlock the Coruscant's Pride Wrap

why is my messaging application pushing Star Wars assault rifle textures for a video game i don't even have installed? well, it's all thanks to a little thing called

Venture Capital

discord, like most modern "free" online platforms which promise no ads, is funded largely through venture capital investments from people or firms seeking increased returns

i wouldn't say there's anything by default morally dubious about taking money from people to fund your startup aside from the usual capitalism stuff; the problem here specifically, is the incentives created by your platform's core funding being pinned to ROI.

i cannot stress this enough: a platform's exponential growth will inevitably, eventually, fail. by definition.

there are only so many humans on the planet. only a small fraction of them will be in a position to use your platform (people with internet access at all). out of them, only a smaller portion still even needs a messaging app

therefor, once the market of Gamers in need of upgrading from Skype is tapped, to give investors their promised increased returns, discord needs New Features™!! monetizable ones!!

so, here's something worth noting about the VC world: because so much of it is rich techbros, born-wealthy manchildren, and other oxymorons gambling on the next Big Thing with stupid amounts of casino chips; a company being absurd is NOT a deterrent

your coffee startup suddenly pivoting to the metaverse or whatever is not going to be enough to shake investors, especially if they've already convinced themselves 'the metaverse' is going to itself be the next Big Thing

i just made up the above scenario as a joke. like jonny frakes.

but uh-oh! i googled "coffee startup metaverse" like a FOOL:

that last one is about a roblox map made to get kids excited about environmental activism.

when i was in middle school, for a class once our teacher literally just had us all play FreeRice for an entire period. i didn't see any articles about Mr. Nolan bringing rice to the metaverse.

(which, at the time, would have been second life. anyways.)

So, when does Discord stop needing funding?

you'd assume all of this investment is to help discord continue to operate for years to come, i mean $15 billion in projected value¹ could keep the lights on for YEARS on such a low-rent platform, right?

they've already done the prerequisites for this kind of sustainability; you have to pay for nitro to upload big-ass files, bandwidth saving measures to kick people from empty calls and consolidate identical chatrooms, etc. i have no issues with this; websites are not free.

but, again, Venture Capitalists care about growth. not sustainability. being unsustainable is the "breaking things" part of "moving fast", in the eyes of a shareholder

let's look at another example, everyone's most tolerated membership platform, Patreon:

as pointed out by excellent documentarian Dan Olson in an equally excellent thread on some weird blogging site called twitter, Patreon is not an expensive platform to maintain, relatively speaking. at least, it didn't used to be.

a text and image based platform for people to ask for money from fans, and allow a standardized, reputable place for both parties to be okay giving out otherwise very personal information. shipping addresses for IRL merch, mailing addresses for newsletters, whatever kinds of fun things creators do over there. i wouldn't know!

(my Patreon account got suspended at some point and i'm not sure why, but in order to get it back they wanted my social security number, so like, no?)

especially not now. Patreon's insistence on consolidating creators' works onto its own servers, despite mediator being separate from the media being a good thing for nearly everyone involved, now means that it costs even more than ever to run the platform, and therefor they must take on more venture capital, and generate more monetizable features, and so on, and so on

until this once extremely profitable and theoretically massively scalable platform is now laying off employees to cut costs

after all, how else will they continue to invent new problems to solve, right jack?

In response to the changing environment, Patreon needs to change the way
we operate. Here’s what that means for us:

• First, we’re going to continue increasing our investments in our product,
engineering, and design teams, so that we can deliver the updates to our
product that our creators and patrons need.

• We’ll also maintain our commitment to outstanding service and support
for creators.

• We will restructure our marketing efforts under a smaller, consolidated
team in the near-term, focused on updating our brand, developing creator
resources, and launching new products.

• We will restructure our Creator Partnerships efforts to take a more scaled
approach with a smaller, consolidated team in the US.

• We will reduce the size of our operations, recruiting, and other internal
support functions to align with the new scale and priorities of the rest of
the company.

     -Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon, 2022

that second bullet point means nothing and is total fluff, but exists to muffle how absurd the idea that they need to scale back in order to "launch new products" is

Patreon doesn't need "new products"! Patreon users don't want new products! they want to continue doing their work in peace while taking contributions, and you guys will keep getting a cut! this is all pointless! absolutely without substance!

bringing it back to Discord: why does my messaging app try to sell me guns?

It's not about sending a message, it's about the money.

dunno about you, but i'm not a fan of typing words, in my word typing program, and having the program overlay the part of the screen where words go with suggestions i instead replace those words with paid symbology.

venture capitalists don't care what the product they're investing in does; they care about how many people are using it, and of those people, how much revenue can be extracted?

so let's think like a VC firm for a second. ew.

Can you sell the user data?

this is a very profitable business, but Discord has, for the time being, been very very insistent they do not sell user data. in researching, i have seen absolutely no credible proof that Discord is lying and doing it anyways. so, at least for the time being, let's be nice and assume they're telling the truth here. after all, data brokering is profitable, but so are a lot of other things

Okay, so then Discord Nitro, how do we make that more profitable?

first of all, get as many people to buy it as possible. so, create a slew of new features to potentially incentivize people who are on the fence, and then offer the original model at a cut rate to catch the poors. what's "great" about this is inflation will cover the difference, given enough time

wait, what was that about youtube bots disappearing? eh, i'm sure its fine.

How dead set are you on that 'no ads' thing?

discord likes to brag about how they don't have ads, which to be fair is a massive plus. ads are terrible.

however... do they not have ads? like, does discord really not have advertisements?

like... is a popup about getting a fortnite skin, or asking me to play halo- are these not ads? are you not advertising a product in exchange for main-stage legitimacy, or is this just called a "collab" or some other euphemism of a sort?

like, a requirement of earning these skins or whatever is that you stream to at least one viewer; you're making your users do the advertising to each other, and, you know, hoping they'll buy nitro for a higher quality stream while they're at it

besides, doesn't this actively work against Discord's rebrand away from being "Gamer Chat"?

then again, that was probably just because selling games was a bad idea. remember that? so, they needed to branch out further, rather than remonetize the already exhausted gamer market they had

now remind me, how dead set is Discord on not selling user data, again?

So what about the usernames thing?

if you're on co-host, i can almost promise you've heard about this, but just in case: discord is changing from having usernames end in a poorly-named 'discriminator' (a series of 4 numbers, especial to the appended handle), to having a core identifying username necessitate uniqueness, with rate-limited change, and an independent nickname tag separately

think of the way old shitty blogs like Twitter do it, your @ isn't the same as your Name, but your @ also cannot be the same as anyone else's @

As Discord has grown and friending has become more popular,
more problems have emerged. The technical and product debt we
incurred years ago caught up with us and small issues that seemed
to impact a few people started affecting tens of millions of people.
The biggest problem: our current usernames can often be too
complicated or obscure for people to remember and share easily.

     -Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO of Discord, May 3rd 2023

as it turns out, many considered this a feature, not a bug.

discord is purportedly a messaging app. i don't want people searching for my @ to talk to me on the platform i use to hang out with my partners, and call my sister to talk about k-pop. i do not want to be easily discoverable there.

this is like saying the problem with phone numbers is they're unique and hard to attribute to the owner, unless said owner writes it down for you. why is this a bad thing?

i'm a niche internet personality, enough to the point of having been recognized a handful of times in real life. i don't want people to easily reverse engineer my personal online messenger handle from my name alone.

the old system incentivized sending fans a link to a server, not a handle. if you wanted to talk to someone one on one, then you could write down your handle like you would a phone number; the more interpersonal the medium, the harder it should be to find it without permission

you know what this new system does do, though?

incentivize people to name-squat, thus increasing your userbase on paper. i'm sure that'll be great news to the VCs next shareholder's meeting

even if a creator online has decided to not use Discord, which they have every right to do, if in the future they are left without a choice as it becomes many users only social media by necessity, if that creator didn't become an "early adopter", their handle will most likely have been taken. by an innocent coincidence, or an active scammer, who knows?

and either way, the idea of discord serving as defacto social media isn't anything new; so if there's a massive shift happening in the """socmede""" world, then who is Discord not to shore themselves up to potentially be the next overbloated, dead platform destroyed by its own needless growth?

Discord is a black hole. It's destroying itself & taking us with it.

a platform can only be so dense. you can only feature creep for so long before you are no longer recognizable for your key functionality.

denser and denser, more and more pointless additions which cost money to develop, cost money to maintain, and thus require further investment. and those investors want their returns to increase every fiscal year, not stagnate. it doesn't matter if the platform has successfully found its audience, if it serves its purpose and will continue to make passive returns for the foreseeable future

what's better than money, to a venture capitalist, than more money?

the closer we get to the centre of this absence of light, the more time stretches and warps. you start to wonder, "has Discord always been like this?", you have trouble even reaching out to people because the app keeps crashing, under the weight of a fifth reinvention of the wheel that is emoji 🎡

the justification for layoffs, for pay cuts and benefit reduction and pivots to so-called "AI", is to facilitate this pointlessness, this growth unwanted and unwarranted. to create new ways to show VCs how you're making their money back for them in a cycle of masqueraded investment debt

Yesterday we made an active shift in the talent needs of our marketing
department to better serve our growing business and future ambitions.
As part of this, some difficult personnel decisions had to be made to
meet these goals.

     -Discord Rep to GamesIndustry.biz in 2019

you could just let us send messages. but where's the money in that?

PART 2: Preemptive-Passive Writing & Discord's Username Update

1. Further clarification on the absurdity of valuation versus true capital.

it's only going to become more evident over time that they should never have been trusted.

i have been warning people against keeping their communities on discord for years. nobody listens, of course, and they're often right not to -- there's no alternatives that adequately fill the niche of "save me from the labor of thinking about it, just give me a chatroom full of people please"

people use discord for a lot of very sensitive communications. this is all in plaintext on discord's servers, and venture capital is going to continue to demand that they do evil things with the trust you gave them to turn a quick buck. they have no reason not to.

I am the sort of psychopath who would actually do this, because I routinely use Discord to stream Fortnite matches in the server me and my friends hang out in anyway.

Tying a bow on all of this: Discord lets you opt out of their data sharing (the thing that feeds their new AI chat bot) but after a friend and I spent nearly an hour and a half streaming Fortnite to each other last night, we got nothing.

Because I opted out of Discord's data sharing.

That shuts the drops off. I didn't get anything for streaming, and my friend did not get anything from me watching his stream, either. He has the data sharing enabled. But I don't, so I don't count as a "real" viewer, apparently.

You HAVE to feed their venture capitalist data harvester in order to get your dumbass Star Wars "freebie", and you have to do it from both ends. I've decided it isn't worth it.

I've been thinking deeply about this for the past few days, and... seriously why? We've had problems like this with Skype, with MSN Messenger, with AIM, etc etc. Why don't we have something that can't be controlled by a singular entity that will pull shit like this?

Uh, turns out we do, it's called XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, formerly called Jabber) and it's an open standard. Mainly used for regular user-to-user instant messaging, there are extensions to add things like chat rooms and voice calling/video streaming. It uses a federated model kind of like Mastodon but running your own server isn't a chaotic nightmare. More deets on the wikipedias

There is a means to share files but it's more Direct Connect-y, rather than Discord's system of being a file and image host on top of being all the other things it does. And there's no way (afaik) to set up a chat room like a Discord guild, with roles and channels and various integrations like Discord has with stuff like Patreon. BUT, the protocol is open and extensible, soo... maybe some bright people could leverage all this to make a client with these missing features? It'd sure as hell be smarter and easier than reinventing the wheel, and hopefully result in something that can't be fucked up.

and most of them aren't tech people and they are on the centralized platform du jour because all their friends are. you fundamentally can't sell migrating to even an objectively better platform without a clear, easily explainable incentive for people who aren't tech enthusiasts to migrate there.

last time i looked into XMPP, there wasn't even a clear answer to what the best server software was for it. I am a VPS haver who keeps node.js up to date and runs multiple instances of ghost and sometimes servers for UT2004, foundry virtual tabletop, and my from-scratch homebrew quiplash clone, and the answer to "what is step 1 to setting this up" was muddy enough I didn't bother.¹

it's entirely possible that there is a good xmpp server app and good clients for web and desktop and mobile, but if it's not crystal clear then it will be impossible to convince anyone to start using them.

i'm sure that like me, bright people have limited time and energy, and i don't know what i can offer them that's a good enough incentive to compete with discord, so for now i just kinda will settle.

1. admittedly i had recently been burned pretty badly at the time by how much of an abject nightmare the official server software for matrix was, and i ended up going back to unrealircd/thelounge from that, so my threshold for effort was not what it often is.

"haha it says PP".

technologies, software, projects, protocols etc. with bad names will not be used by the majority of people in the mainstream.

adopting a brand mindset is not the most difficult thing, but I see so many projects not even try.

They should have just kept the name "Jabber" as it hits all the good points in the list of winners

oughf. i disappear for a few days, but i come back with a precious gift.

i think the fact that bluesky [banned de-boosted] porn in the algo before they banned [or did the same with] nazis speaks volumes lol

[edit: this post was intended to give my two followers a laugh and oversimplified it; please hate bluesky for the more stupid shit they did and not (just) this. they do allow porn, it is apparently just much lower in the algo they have. criticize them for the transphobia or the multiple issues with blocks ty. it was not my mission to spread misinformation on the internet]