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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."
How does a single company make bad decision after bad decision so persistently?
A conundrum for the ages to be sure, but my humble opinion?
Ahem... A company that makes bad decision after bad decision does not understand the difference between a good decision and a bad decision.
Do I win a prize?
That is all.
I beg to differ, Segas 1st party titles during the Dreamcast era were at the top of their game and produced titles and franchises that are STILL making them money re-selling on different platforms as many of them have become cult-classics. Crazy Taxi, House of the Dead 2, Jet Set Radio, Panzer Dragoon, Virtual On OT, Space Channel 5, Chu Chu Rocket, Shenmue, etc. Even their flagship driving game Metropolis Street Racer when on to spawn 4 sequels in the Form of Project Gotham Racing and was the Xbox's flagship driving game until Microsoft introduced Forza.
The Sonic games released on the Dreamcast were actually rated fairly well and fairly well received by fans. Most consider them to be the first 3D Sonic titles made by Sega that didn't suck.
Sonic Adventure on GameRankings scores an 86: http://www.gamerankings.com/dr...
Sonic Adventure 2 scores an 89 on MetaCritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game...
Collector's Edition
You should totally write a book. You'll make millions!
It seems like a lot of people in upper management get so caught up in trying to figure out how to extract money for their customers rather than intently focusing on a product that people will willingly part with their money to obtain. Lenovo is a great recent example. Contrast that with Apple, who's customers often display an incredible amount of brand loyalty, despite the premium price of their products.
Not too surprisingly, the top leadership of Sega Japan was largely made up of old men who probably didn't actually play videogames themselves. I don't see how you can make good decisions for a game development company if you don't play videogames yourself, or at the very least, if you don't really listen to people within your company that do. It's pretty obvious that didn't happen enough.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I wouldn't be so quick to write Nintendo off just yet.
If we look at the 1998 .. 2010 year data from this console profit table
While everyone else was losing money HARD (especially Microsoft), Nintendo was laughing all the way to the bank.
$24,072,504,822
Nintendo doesn't have to worry about the short term for quite a while.
And moreover partnering with Sony WOULD NOT HAVE SAVED THEM as they had burned their customers over and over AND OVER for the better part of 5 years. Nobody was gonna buy Sega hardware even if they came out with the baddest console in the history of the universe!
The reason Sega died was threefold, 1.- They royally fucked their retail partners on the Saturn by doing a "sneak launch" that left several 800 pound gorillas like Walmart out in the cold. this pissed off those retailers so badly that many of them swore to never carry another piece of Sega hardware, this crippled their retail channel overnight and it never recovered.
2.-The thing that put the first nails in the coffin though was the fact that SOA and SOJ weren't even on speaking terms, with things getting so bad that SOJ would even make announcements that would hamstring SOA! From what I read SOJ was a bunch of elitist pricks with a serious case of NIH so they treated SOA like a red headed stepchild and kept them out of the loop on what they had in the pipe.Depending on how you view 3 this can be seen as justified, though it still crippled the company.
3.- But what ultimately destroyed their sales was the fact that SOA simply refused to let go off the Genesis and launched one failed add-on after another, all of which left the consumer feeling like they got scammed as they spent hundreds of dollars (nearly $700 if they bought a Genesis, Sega-CD, and 32x at launch) and all they got was piss poor support, lousy titles, and in the case of the 32x a device that was dying less than 90 days after launch!
Many blame the fact that the Saturn was really designed to be a 2D gaming monster that had badly supported 3D just bolted on at the last minute but I would argue that by that time they were already dying. I was a HARDCORE Sega fan at the time but after getting burnt on the Sega-CD (I picked up a 32x when they hit $25 with 3 games but we all knew it was a dead system by then) I was just fucking done with the company,after seeing the incredible promise of Sega-CD just thrown away (anybody who says it couldn't be a great system really should play Lunar) I honestly didn't trust the company not to abandon their hardware before enough decent games came out to justify the expense. I avoided the Saturn altogether for the PlayStation, grabbed a Dreamcast when it hit $75 (and the pirates had already cracked it, makes a great NES/Genesis emulator box) and then went PC and never looked back.
At the time I was big into IRC and all I heard from the Sega channels was the same story, guys that got burnt on Sega-CD/32X that refused to give the company another shot, a few picked up Saturn only to see SOA refuse to import the best titles thanks to their pissing contest with SOJ, instead sticking with frankly shitty western games (most guys forget that before the big 3D shooter and RPG craze on PC that western game developers were REALLY piss poor compared to their eastern counterparts. Bad controls, lousy levels, and lame graphics were standard for western made games by and large) and leaving the best titles for the system overseas. By the time the Dreamcast came around? Even the most hardcore fanboys just had had enough, they had a shitload of hardware with little to no decent games and felt ripped off. You have to remember they hyped the shit out of Sega-CD/32X so a LOT of guys (myself included) got taken and when you sank nearly $500 and could count the good games on 2 hands with fingers left over? That is NOT a good sign!
So no Sony could not have saved them, they were already dying by that point. They should have never released the CD/32X or at least committed to giving them 3 years of game support, even if it meant dropping the royalties to nothing just to get devs on board,if they would have done that along with a promise of 3 years on Saturn? Then they might have made it, at least built enough good will to get their fanbase to get on board with Dreamcast which really was a kick ass piece of hardware, but shitty management, too many pieces of worthless hardware, and too much infighting had them dead by 2K and nothing would have saved them at that point.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is a solid comment. I agree with all of it, but I wish you had emphasized how very ludicrous their hardware marketing was. As a gamer at the time (Nintendo), I was extraordinarily puzzled at the amount of hoops it took to even understand what the various Sega hardware was. It was extremely silly to assume that everyone had infinite space under their TV and tolerance for hardware outlays, CD/32-X were confusing anyway. Expensive hardware addon is always a risky play, because it means that any game made for it is just for the subsection of players that bought your base hardware and then bought your hardware addon, and those hardware addons NEVER seemed to be inexpensive in the first place.
The other reason that it hurt them so bad was the social aspect. If you had decided you weren't going to buy the Genesis (and if you were a kid, that decision was mostly made by asking your parents for a DIFFERENT system to begin with), then you were already committed to not owning a Genesis. If you launch a fresh piece of hardware, you might grab the Nintendo guy for that generation, but if you keep building on the one he already chose, then he's already well into cognitive dissonance land- you would need to dominate the field so hard with technical expertise that no one could ignore you, and that just didn't happen.
Also... I always found their marketing ludicrous. Console wars were always clannish, but Sega couldn't seem to stop insulting Nintendo players with their attitude of "play us and be cool, play them and be drool". "Personally insulting your potential customers based on their current console" definitely looked like it was their strategy for awhile. I never see this come up in any discussion, but it really did feel real at the time.