dijonketchup

dijonketchup

@dijonketchup

Some weird girl on the internet

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Alison

Valkyrie with The RPG Valkyries
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Lizstar
@Lizstar
mneko
@mneko

Just for the record...

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).

Kinsie
@Kinsie

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.

Lizstar
@Lizstar

Saturn Crash

Another big reason the Saturn flopped so hard in America is because of the early release date.

They had plans to release it Sep 2 1995, "Saturnday", a very SoA branding, but then at E3, the SoJ president was like "tell them its releasing tomorrow they'll love it it'll drum up so much support"

Tom Kalinske: "What? No, we have no games and we already had plans for-"

"I am the boss."

So they released it. The plan was it was released like, that day, to only select stores: Toys R Us, Babbages, Software Etc, and Electronics Boutique. It was in short supply, and expensive, but people were mildly impressed. Then, minutes later, the Sony rep walked on stage, after having thrown out his planned speech, said "299" and no one was caring about the Sega Saturn at E3.

The planned 20 game launch lineup was reduced to 6. Three sports games no one cares about, clockwork knight, panzer dragoon, and virtua fighter. Fine games, but... no 3rd party support. And the Saturn is infamously impossible to program for, those 3rd party games would take some time to get here. And then the biggest deathknell hit.

You'll notice literally none of the stores up there I mentioned still exist. How about the stores that didnt get the Saturn, felt betrayed, and literally refused to sell it?? Walmart. Target. KB Toys. They dropped Sega all together. Forever. KB Toys didnt even sell the Dreamcast, years later. This could have killed it alone in America. As a kid, I remember having to beg my parents to drive 45 minutes to Toys R Us to get games, when a few years prior Walmart was fine, and I could easily go to Walmart and see the shiny new Mario 64 systems. They of course rarely took me there.

The Saturn is the best selling Sega console in Japan, but SoJ really only seemed to care about that number. And they paid the price, hard. Things between SoJ and SoA were terrible, lots of rivalry, and the Saturn was the casualty. My favorite game console, reduced to a joke, or a footnote.

dijonketchup
@dijonketchup

Third party developers were also pissed off by the surprise release. Those games that didn't make the launch window because of the sudden drop affected their plans greatly and soured the devs relationship with Sega from day one. None of them were told in advance, and even if they were, they were in no position to get their games done in time. So Sega struggled with third party support in the US for the Saturn.

Also, technically Babbages, Software Etc, and Electronics Boutique still exist, they're all just GameStop now. But I wouldn't expect that to last much longer.

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TremiRodomi
@TremiRodomi

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

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