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The Rise and Fall of Sega
jayintune writes "2old2play has a look into Sega's past, examining where they went wrong in the console wars. What did they do to lose their competitive edge, and how did they fall victim to the PS2 and Xbox?" From the article: "Sega started as a small business from which spawned a gaming giant. As with all great Empires, they eventually rot, crumble, and fall from their own ever-grasping hand. After the Genesis they tried to go in too many directions at once and spread their resources too thin. They knew they would have major competition from other game developers, but I bet when they started, they never imagined they would be their own worst enemy."
The Dreamcast was pretty much a done deal before Xbox hit the market. It sounds like another case of "Oh, Nintendo doesn't matter in the history of video games because they r teh kidd1!" SEGA failed because the PS1 and PS2 overhyped, and Nintendo got out of the CD add-on game early, leaving the SEGA CD to rot in a market that didn't exist: "People who want a $100+ add-on for a system that didn't have Mario RPG, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy and Donkey Kong Country." SEGA then took the rest of their money, and instead of saving it for the next gen, they decided to kick start a new gen early twice in a row with the Saturn and the Dreamcast. These, as I mentioned before, were killed almost exclusively by Sony advertising and promoting the PS1 and PS2 as machines more powerful than God.
Nintendo had their own fanbase that didn't leave them and didn't buy into the "mature games" fad, mostly because they were actually really young, or really liked FPS games, because the N64 basically only had FPS games and kids games, so that's why Nintendo's still here. That and Game Boy. It was just enough to let Nintendo try again with the Cube, where they got more kinds of games, almost killed the kiddy image, and then still got third place thanks to Microsoft who stole all the FPS games other than Timesplitters (because Free Radical are Nintendo fanboys at heart).
Born to Play
I believe that the Saturn was their downfall. The console was excellent and quite powerful. What they failed to do was market it properly. They charged $399 for it and felt that was justified because you also got three games with it. Sony saw an opening and sold their console for much cheaper and people gobbled them up. The Saturn may have been a better system, but it wasn't marketed the right way. The other thing the Saturn suffered from was that it was complicated to port games to it because of the hardware used. Sure, it made it superior in rendering and all that, but it also made it unfriendly to those third party guys writing for it. The Playstation was easier to deal with.
:) Heck, I still have my Genesis!
In the end, Sony took a foothold that eventually crushed Sega. The Sony name became so big in the console world that years later, then the Dreamcast arrived a full year before the PS2, many gamers said, "We'll wait for the PS2." Wow! That shows you how hard Sony got a foothold. And we all know the rest...
Personally, I am sad that Sega isn't in the console wars anymore. I still think they were the best. I still have my Dreamcast and Saturn.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
(Interestingly, some people have not learned this lesson yet; read: Microsoft's Xbox 360's HD-DVD rumored add on).
3 2006/articles/20060507-hddvdexplained.htm
1. It's not rumored, it was offically announced long ago. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/events/e
2. It's a movie addon, not a game addon, so it doesn't matter at all to the overall xbox 360 strategy whether it succeeds or fails. Microsoft has said that they will not have hd-dvd games. Compare it to buying the dvd remote for a ps2 or an xbox 1 (or that whacky silver gamecube put out by some third party which also played dvds), don't compare it to the 32x. It simply allows you to watch hd-dvd movies, nothing more or less.
I'm suprised nobody even mentioned that the Playstation, which was what killed SEGA, was originally a joint project with Nintendo to make a SNES/Super Famicon CD system to compete with SEGA CD. Nintendo saw how bad SEGA CD was doing and bailed on Sony, causing them to lose game developers who had already begun working on games for the new add-on(like Squaresoft's Final Fantasy 7). If SEGA never tried the CD bit then Sony would not be making systems today.