Is Sega the Next Atari?

donniebaseball23 writes As CEO of Sega of America in the early 1990s, Tom Kalinske oversaw the company during its glory days, when all eyes in the industry were glued to the titanic struggle for console superiority between the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Times have changed, to put it mildly, and Sega is now a shell of its former self. Where did things go wrong? According to Kalinske, Sega's downfall was failing to partner with Sony on a new platform, and the bad decisions kept piling on from there. Sega's exit from hardware "could have been avoided if they had made the right decisions going back literally 20 years ago. But they seem to have made the wrong decisions for 20 years."

Comments

Here's what happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Sega blew it with the Saturn. That's where it all went wrong. People will say that it started to go wrong with the 32X, but the 32X was never taken seriously, and sold very few units. Yeah, it was stupid, but it wasn't really important, either.

The Saturn, though...basically Sega missed the boat on 3D, and the Playstation didn't. That was the beginning of the end. Then Sega had the Dreamcast, which was a great system hardware-wise, but they failed to get third-parties on board, and they didn't have enough games/momentum by the time the PS2 was announced. If the Dreamcast had come out a year earlier, it would've had a nice pile of games by the time the PS2 arrived, and they would've been in a better position.

Essentially Sega moved too slowly in the mid-to-late 90s. I don't know if you can actually say they did anything *wrong*...they just didn't do a good enough job.

Sega isn't Sega anymore, literally

[Kuukai]

In 2004, Sega was merged into Sammy, a gambling/arcade machine company, which then all but renamed itself to Sega. They have totally different business goals from the previous Sega. Any discussion about the direction Sega is going now should be framed in that context. Current Sega is working a different market. Nintendo is doing about as well at arcades as Sega is doing at console hardware. But it is interesting to consider what happened long before the merger with the Dreamcast and how it could have been prevented.