This explains it more fully. This was why Saturn was so rabidly popular in Japan, but was a meager also-ran in every other region. The japanese management fought for supremacy and won, but instead of their victory uniting the company, they just left the other branches out in the cold to suffer while they had fun back home.

Stronger American management, like Peter Moore, helped the Dreamcast be a console for every region, but by then it was too late for Sega to make a difference.

Exactly.

However even without the worst management in history sega had some issues.

Sega had a mentality of "Company cant be standing still on a moving train market"...so their R&D was always busy with ways to reinvent the wheel. Turns out the round wheel works just fine...and all they had to do is ride out the Genesis success and gracefully migrate to Saturn in 1995.

Retarded add-ons, surprise launches, canceled games (still waiting for eternal champions, Streets of rage and Sonic Xtreeme), pulling console support early...all weren't necessary. Sega had amazing arcade division and great internal software division as well that at its prime rivaled nintendo. On top of that, they were more inventive than nintendo and showed they can lead with ideas such as online play and voice chat.

I still think that fracturing their fanbase by releasing the Saturn with few good games during the height of the SNES' popularity was what killed Sega. They should have waited till the SNES was on the decline before finalizing the designs for the Saturn and putting it into production.

The Xbox's first game was a revolutionary game for one of the largest genres in existence. Now, anyway. So, Halo would be my answer.

I'll jump in the bandwagon that Sonic was the lesser mascot c ompared to Halo. I mean, I love Sonic, but he just lost the mass appeal whereas MS had Halo, a powerful icon in videogame history!

Technically speaking sonic at its prime was just as big as Halo. Alone it went against the nintendo empire with astonishign results. Sega just let it die a slow and painful death...

Also halo is 8 years old where sonic is 18. MC has plenty of time to become washed up in 10 years... I love both, just saying.

Yeah to me the only time money became an issue in the fall of Sega, was when they couldn't wait out the Dreamcast picking up any longer. The piss poor management towards the end of the Genesis era was the start...They wanted the Genesis to hold on longer then it should with useless add-on's and the like...

JINX!!! ...Kinda wish I read the thread further before I said basically the same thing...

Seems to me that Sony killed Sega off because of $$$ and now gradually maybe Microsoft are doing the same to Sony. If this is the case then why are there so many Sega fans backing Microsoft to kill off Sony. I wont name names but i think i know a few off the top of my head. Maybe they have a deep hatred of Sony but surley they are massivly hipocritical?

The correct answer would be they are the richest company in the world, and can absorb humogous epic fails like putting aside one billion to make up for a poorly designed machine. Sega could not have done that, but Sega never had that problem. MS also bought a lot of games to be either exclusive or taking them away from possible Sony exclusivity. Again, Sega could not have done this, but again, they didnt have this problem either as they had great exclusives en masse. Sega didnt seem like a very unified company, and had advertising problems. MS doesn't have this problem to a large extent methinks. The major difference is very very deep pockets.