| Nem said: The saturn alone wasnt the problem. The problem was also the mega drive peripherals they launched and stop supporting within 6 months to a year. That pissed off customers to begin with. Come the saturn, they stealth launched the console and also proceeded to quickly drop support once they werent happy with it. That was the biggest mistake of them all. After all that burning and with the Playstation offering a strong alternative, by the time the Dreamcast came out, no one (in a general sense) cared anymore. I perfectly remember that i was the first person to buy a Dreamcast in Portugal and it was a complete stealth affair. When the same happened with the Playstation 2, the person was on national news. SEGA dropped the ball when they couldnt have (aswell as Nintendo) and opened the door for the Playstation to be a sucess. |
Check out this thread for exact details on what happened
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=191592&page=1#
Its pretty clear that...
- Sega of america had major success with the Genesis and wanted to keep it alive as long as possible
At the same time
- Sega of America did not support the Saturn as they knew it was a nightmare to program for and was looking for a different console to launch
But...
- Sega of Japan turned down consoles from SGI (Nintendo 64) and joint console with Sony (Sega Playstation?) in order to build and launch the Saturn
meanwhile...
- Sega of Japan didn't support the 32X at all despite promissing games and they cut all Genesis support early in 1996 to push the Saturn
finally...
- Sega of Japan took full control from Sega of America in 1995 and forced them to launch the Saturn early despite lack of games
Everyone always keeps asking "why launch 32X when Saturn is around the corner?". The answer is beacuse half of the company doesn't believe in the Saturn and wants to keep pushing the Genesis well in to the 32 bit era. This may not have been a bad strategy if the whole company was behind it...but sadly the dominant part of the company didn't see it that way.
