liquidninja on 13 September 2009
It wasn't as much competition from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or even all the money they lost on the Saturn and Dreamcast as much as it was SEGA's chairman who wanted SEGA to be a software-only company going all the way back to 1997.
I first herd about it in this really recent interview with Bernie Stolar (former SEGA president) who said:
| “When [former Sega President Hayao] Nakayama was pushed out and when I was pushed out, I think what took place was, Mr. [Isao] Okawa, who then became the chairman of the company -- he was an investment banker from CSK [Holdings Corporation].... I don’t believe he was committed to the hardware. He just believed it should be a software company.” |
I later found some quotes of his in a The New York Times article:
| In a recent interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun, Mr. Okawa said the company was likely to abandon the hardware business altogether. ''I have worked in software all my life, and I feel uncomfortable being in the hardware business,'' he told the newspaper. ''In fact, when I became chairman of Sega in 1997, I said we should stop producing hardware.'' |
I also found these quotes on The Register who got them from GamerIntelligence:
| "I will say that the future doesn't necessarily lie in the hardware business," said Okawa. "I think in the future there is the possibility of Sega becoming a software-only company... "Even if Dreamcast does sell, we will make that shift." |
