shikamaru317 said:
I agree with you, sorry, I misspoke before, meant to say they should have released the Saturn later, not the Dreamcast earlier. If they had taken their time with the Saturn's design instead of rushing to beat PS1 to the market, they would have been in alot better position. They could have went with a more powerful single chipset configuration instead of the expensive, difficult to develop for dual chipset configuration. They could have had games ready for release from some of their most popular Genesis series (Sonic, Streets of Rage, Ecco, Phantasy Star, etc.), as well as the some of the new IP's that ended up being popular on Saturn (Virtua Fighter, Sakura Taisen, and Panzer Dragoon). I think their mistake was trying to counter Sony head on, brute force to brute force, that was never going to work, Sony was just too powerful, their name was too well know worldwide, the name "Sony" alone was enough to attract new gamers that had never played games the previous generations. Instead they should have waited and took their time developing Saturn, then released the Saturn around the same time as the N64, battle with Nintendo for 2nd place, because Nintendo was an opponent they knew how to fight, as the Genesis had proven. |
Agreed. This type of approach would have required Sega to be unified and work as one...which was next to impossible when Japan and USA divisions are constantly budding heads.
Also Nvidia really F'd sega over with their 3D technology used for the Saturn. Quads instead of trinagles made Saturn crazy difficult to program for. Devs were just drawing trinagles anyway using 4 side quads and wasting processing power in doing so. Even if sega released the same console but had a different 3D rendering technology, they would have been better of with 3rd party devs.
To make mater worse, Sega kept investing capital in Nvidia and their NV2 technology to be used for "Saturn 2". Nvidia still kept pushing quads and when the chip finally failed, sega had absolutely no 3D technology that they could use. They had to get off the shelf parts for the Dreamcast (3DFX first but then NEC), making the dreamcast not as powerful as it could have been.
Is there a console manufacturer that Nvidia didn't fuck over? Nintendo I guess...
