Um...
yeah. Is he living in an alternate reality or just not telling the truth? I'll guess the latter. Maybe he just4 doesn't want to admit his role in Sega's failure...
It's not the lead role or anything, lots of people and many decisions were involved, and it started well before he arrived at Sega in 1995, with the US v. Japan internal fighting within the company. Still, he definitely had a part. I'd particularly mention when he said "Saturn is not out future" in May 1996. Saying something like that two years and four months before your next console was going to come out is unbelievably stupid, no matter how much you like the current one.
But no, he admits nothing here.
I mean, I don't dislike him as much as many Sega fans do, he did plenty of things well... but he made some bad decisions as well,
But didn't yout hear, there wasn't a backlash against Sega at all, the Dreamcast didn't suffer because of Sega's legacy! :lol
Saturn was a trainwreck before he ever arrived at Sega. He really wasn't responsible for that.
He didn't make things BETTER, but I don't know if he made things worse... the system was already doomed when he arrived thanks to all of those mistakes Sega had previously made, really. I mean, he wasn't there at the Saturn's launch, or during its early months when the Saturn sold poorly while PSX sold well... he was in charge of SCEA then. He had nothing to do with the 32X's existence, the Saturn's expensive, overly complex, mashed-together hardware, the launch price, the early launch, etc. Sega of Japan was primarily responsible for those things, with Sega of America being responsible for some as well.
Stolar's task was to try to make the system sell in the US despite its poor start... but he couldn't, Sony was too strong. Was this his fault? I'm not sure, probably partially but not entirely. So he got tired of it early and gave up on the system midlife. And I already said how that was a significant mistake, it confirmed once again everything people had been saying about Sega liking to kill its systems off too early. If he hadn't done such a good job at driving away almost all of Sega's few remaining hardcore fans, there wouldn't have been quite a huge hurdle for the Dreamcast to have to leap... (the few who hadn't left after the messes that were the 32X and the early Saturn days)
But even so, Sega's core problem was that they were losing money on Saturn and Dreamcast. Would these small changes have been enough to turn that around and keep them as a hardware manufacturer for longer? That's the key question that leads me to let Stolar off a bit... I don't think his decisions were actually crucial there. He probably did make things a bit worse, but could anyone have actually pulled Sega out of the hole they were in by the end of 1995, with all of that internal fighting doing major damage?
I mean, one of the most important mistakes Sega made in that period was killing off the Genesis in late 1995, and that was a Sega of Japan decision entirely.
Really, I think that more than anything Sega fans hate him for the no-RPGs policy, which he had also done at SCEA in his time there. The difference is, from 1997 on the PSX began to get huge numbers of RPGs, while Saturn in the US never did. So they blame him... but while it was a bad policy, he probably was right that RPGs didn't sell all that well in the US, before FFVII at least. Americans did prefer other genres more. Still, the hardcore liked them, and angering your hardcore fans that much might not be a good idea... but still, it is true that back then RPGs didn't sell all that well.
Also, ultimately I find it hard to imagine how at the end of 1995 Sega could have gotten out of the mess it had gotten itself in. The Saturn wasn't the right platform, but that was a problem for years earlier... they had it now, dropping it too soon would be an even worse idea, as they would see when they tried it. If you're a PR person, you have to stick with your system and say it's awesome, even when you'd rather get rid of it... he didn't do that, and we saw the results.
But anyway, in the US up until the mid '90s, JRPGs were not a huge sales force. They were frequently passed over, and the majority of the fanbase didn't care much about that. Of course just not knowing they existed was part of that, but particularly on the Genesis, the fanbase just weren't RPG fans, they were sports and action game fans. Sega policy stayed the same on the Saturn, while their few remaining fans gained more interest in RPGs, particularly after FFVII made the genre really popular in the US. Sega policy on them, however, did not change, they (and Stolar in particular) were still opposed. Would things have been different had they pushed them more? Maybe, yeah, if they'd put the PR into it... but would it have been enough to make up for the investment? Was there anything on Saturn that could have fought FFVII? I mean, there wasn't in Japan, in Japan FFVII was one of the key moments in the PSX finally getting ahead of Saturn there... still, of course they should have tried. And that even AFTER FFVII Stolar continued to block RPGs and not make any definitely wasn't exaclty helping (because now he'd given up on the system and wanted to kill it, years before the next system would be ready).
.. But really, to prove that the "no RPGs" thing actually did hurt Saturn in the US, you'd have to show that it actually impacted sales. It seems to me that that was mostly complaining from people who already had the system... if Sega had pushed RPGs more, would it have actually sold many more systems? I doubt that any of the Saturn RPGs they could have ported would have become a FFVII, that's quite unlikely... I mean, yes, Saturn was hurt by all the negative press from its 'fans'. But how much did the lack of RPGs hurt Saturn in the key hardware base building time of its first year or so? Not much, I think, if at all. Playstation didn't have any of them either in its first year and a half, partially thanks to Stolar and partially because there weren't many early on because of how long RPGs take to develop. Playstation won for other reasons entirely unrelated to the RPG genre. Having more RPGs later on would have done nothing to get the Saturn to sell much better, I think. The main thing it would have done would be create a bit more goodwill with those few remaining Sega fans... which is something the company should have cared about. You can't anger your fans again and again and again without there being an impact! Sega went way too far in making its fans mad and suffered rightly for it. But I think that all the aforementioned reasons, like the price, early launch, poor graphics in comparison to Playstation, thin release lineup, and higher devlopment fees were much more important factors in explaining that than a lack of RPGs. Oh, and the 32X fiasco of course.
All in all, given how strong the Playstation was, Saturn was likely never going to do well in the US as it was, but at least they could have tried. Sega didn't. Instead they started with bad ideas (the hardware itself, the early launch, the price), continued with bad ideas (no RPGs, the hardware, the smaller install base), and finished with bad ideas (killing it early). It was a mess from beginning to end, and Stolar was responsible for the middle and latter phases of that, on the US side.
... Or listen to someone who would know.