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Classified SEGA of America Docs From ~1996 Have Just Been Shared Online
- Thread starter Thick Thighs Save Lives
- Start date
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
How dare they…
In before the pro-ABK acquisition nuts flood in with the "SEE!!? It's OKAY if Microsoft are using all their Azure/Windows/Office money and assets to buy the single-largest 3P publisher in the market!"
Never mind there is a big difference between effectively utilizing resources from other established divisions for a brand new (at the time) division to find its feet and be successful (and that its success came from actually offering a better competitive product. Sony could've thrown all their electronics money at PlayStation the way Microsoft is trying to do with Xbox; it still wouldn't have meant anything without great decision makers at the top leading.
And Psygnosis was worth only 0.0001% of the gaming market's size in 1993 ($20 billion), purchased for $20 million. They were forecasted to have generated around $12 million in revenue for 1993, that's about 1/1666th of the total gaming market revenue in 1993. Conversely, ABK generated $7.53 billion in revenue last year, with market revenue at ~ $202 billion. That's about 1/27th of the total market revenue coming from just ABK alone.
All the more reason the comparisons of ABK deal to Psygonsis are idiotic, disingenuous and from those who should know better, done out of spite to make false narratives. The differences in intent between Sony buying Psygnosis and Microsoft attempting to buy ABK (right after they just purchased Zenimax, BTW) couldn't be more clear.
There is some good stuff in there
Well, Kutaragi wasn't lying. The PS1 WAS easier to develop for. Outside of that, it seems like Sony were more willing to open up to 3P devs & pubs than Sega were.
Technically through Psygonsis Sony also acquired the Psy Q dev kit makers, so they had something in-house of sorts before going to those 3P companies. Still, I think their level of openness was unheard of at the time in the industry, and that caught Sega (and especially Nintendo) off-guard.
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dotnotbot
Member
What I find funny is how "well" educated some of the random green fans are about what happened 30 years ago in gaming. I find it hard to believe that hordes of them wasting so much time on twitter and everywhere are mature boomer gamers who remember that by themselves.
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
They aren't. And if they are old enough, they have goldfish memory. The thing too about Psygonsis is, they still regularly published games on Sega & Nintendo platforms for 5+years until they were fully integrated into Sony's gaming unit.
Even new IP post-acquisition like Wipeout were multiplatform releases, getting installments on Saturn and N64. We're not seeing anything like that with Zenimax and if MS get ABK, we won't see anything like that, either.
Mephisto40
Member
Just had a quick read through it, one part that stood out was that Wipeout was supposed to be releasing on the Saturn
Wonder when Sony got the exclusivity for that
Wonder when Sony got the exclusivity for that
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
True, in overall lifetime sales. However the difference wasn't "significant" and N64 had less time on the Japanese market while still eventually reaching 5 million itself.
So it's possible if the N64 were officially supported for a bit longer, it would have eventually passed Saturn sales in Japan. Again not by a lot, probably only by 100K or something, but it likely would have accomplished that if Nintendo weren't ready to move on to the Gamecube.
SoA's biggest enemy ended up being Bernie Stolar; he's the reason a lot of those Japanese imports and even things like the 4 Meg cart never came to the West.
As for the 4 Meg cart itself...I don't think that would've been a gamechanger for Saturn TBH. It was mainly useful for 2D games but in the West, 2D games were getting ignored and pushed aside for 3D titles. Can't see how the 4 Meg cart would've been of use for 3D titles although I guess it could've been interesting in some cases.
If Sega did a SVP-like cartridge expansion though, but for Saturn, that might've been a bigger deal. They were exploring it at some point for games like VF3 but that was too late.
32X sales collapsed pretty quickly, shortly after Holiday 1994 in fact. Kind of similar to what the Wii U would repeat decades later.
Saturn actually got a decent bump in sales Holiday 1995 due to VF2, Virtua Cop and Sega Rally, plus I think they did a sales promo deal with getting one of those with a new Saturn. It's just that PS1 saw an even bigger bump at the same time and I think the sales gap was at least 2:1 in favor of PS1 that holiday in America, likely more. I think Saturn did 500K during that period, so PS1 would've done at least 1 million.
Heisenberg007
Gold Journalism
Sega: "We are killing Sony."
Chukhopops
Member
WipeOut did release on Saturn but a year after the PSX release.
Reading the document I never realized how much focus Sega put on sports games compared to Nintendo, maybe because I’m from Europe and the marketing was completely different there.
Madden outselling Mortal Kombat 3 was not something I would have expected.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I begged my parents to get me the Saturn for Christmas, instead of the new no named Playstation thing. The next year I ended up giving my Saturn away and begging them for a Playstation lol. I was so amazed at the amount of games on the platform in every store. There was like 8 games on sale for my Saturn, but like 50 for Playstation.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
There is some good stuff in there
Oh bruh! This is LITERALLY THE SAME SONY OF TODAY. Can't you all see that Sony is using the same playbook 30 years later against Microsoft. It's amazing to see even. Reading some of these Sega docs.......just switch out the word "Sega" with "Microsoft" and it would read like something that was said at the FTC vs. Microsoft court case.
RickMasters
Member
For being a sega mage drive kid, and frequent visitor at my local sega world, I went with the Saturn first. But I knew at some point I needed to have a PlayStation. Everybody had one back then. I was the only one of my friends with a Saturn. Then I got my first job working at HMV in 1997 ( they were a huge chain or stores that sold music, movies, games and other stuff) bought my PlayStation 1 and immediately bought ridge racer and tekken 2. I thought sega rally was the pinnacle of racing games on console back then…. And then gran turismo happened. Can’t forget the resident evil games. Anybody remember G- police? Wipeout was new and exciting … oh… and die hard trilogy. Meanwhile I had the Saturn sitting right next to it with the 4MB ram cart and arcade perfect ports of all my fave capcom and SNK and sega games. What a time to be a gamer! Turn on one console…. I’m playing panzer dragoon RPG, burning rangers… dark stalkers 3!…. Turn on the other and I’m playing gran Turismo, ridge racer type 4…. Tekken 3, winner stays on. ISS was a quality footy game series. You really had to own both. And an N64. Consoles were so different to each other back then.
I think that was my fave era for gaming. Probably because I was a carefree teenager. Even though as a 16 year old sega fan it was kind of harsh to watch lose ground. Seeing the machine struggle to run Daytona USA when ridge racer looked so Damn good on the PS1 back in 1995. But there was no denying just how much better the PlayStation was overall compared to the Saturn and N64, in terms of game library and variety. Sega really didn’t prepare for the 3D home gaming revolution, which is strange because they were at the forefront of it in the arcades. But none of that really came home. We got a 2D powerhouse that struggled with most types of 3D rendering. I’ve always said they, if they could have paired that 2D power with a more simplified approach to cpu ( Saturn had two CPUs, which was a nightmare for devs, maybe they should have just deigned a single 60MHz 32-bit cpu) and a dedicated 3D chip like Sony put in the PS, they would have had the better console technically, capable of doing better ports of their arcade games. They should have leveraged their partnership with Lockheed Martin to develop the Saturn 3D graphics capabilities. Because they didn’t they ended up with a machine that killed th in the console biz. Also…. Mega CD and 32X should have never happened. They were to reactionary too everything and everybody. When they should have just focused on leveraging their strengths like Nintendo and eventually Sony.
I still think their exit from the console race would have been inevitable. But they would have put up a much better fight pre Dreamcast, years.
Mephisto40
Member
Seems you're right, never knew it got a Saturn release, looking at footage on youtube the framerate was awful lol
Mephisto40
Member
This part made me laugh in one of the emails at the end
"It seems clear from all that we see in Japan that Nintendo is going to position and advertise Nintendo 64 as "The Ultimate Video Game Experience." Shouldn't we pre-empt this line, claim, in our advertising and PR now"
"It seems clear from all that we see in Japan that Nintendo is going to position and advertise Nintendo 64 as "The Ultimate Video Game Experience." Shouldn't we pre-empt this line, claim, in our advertising and PR now"
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Facts. Even from the get-go, Sony were very pro-3P and willing to work with them, invite them into the process very early, and looking to boost their production capabilities. The funny thing is, if they had Microsoft's mentality, they could have tried buying a lot of those 3P devs and pubs, but when Sega & Nintendo were failing to read the market, and when Sony were already establishing great relationships with 3P without needing to acquire them...why bother?
It just highlights how MS's acquisition strategy is centered on trying to "make up" for failing to provide for 3P the past 10 years. But if they can't organically build up benefits with 3P the way Sony have the past few decades, they (MS) feel the only option is to inorganically purchase those benefits and take them off the open market altogether.
Kilau
Gold Member
Could mean money but I read it as referring to brand equity. Sega damaged their brand with the CD and 32X peripherals while Sony was highly regarded as a consumer electronics manufacturer and that carried over to the PlayStation.
How dare they…
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Plus I'm equally impressed with Sony's economic vision to build the Playstation hardware back then too. It seems outside of the PS3 when Ken Kutargi went nuts, Sony has consistently made sure the Playstation console itself could end up being sold at a profit after some node shrinks and using economies of scale.
It's insane how we are getting an inside view of the same console design philosophy of Sony and how closely Mark Cerny has stuck to that with both the PS4 and PS5. And to find out that both Sega and MS never figured out how to do the same thing with their consoles is just brain-numbing to me.
How long has Mark Cerny been with Sony and do they force their engineers to obey by this Playstation philosophy or something?
Chukhopops
Member
Reading the emails about the Saturn’s planned “Internet accessory” is just suffering, it was waay too early to plan something like that in freaking 1996. They were banking everything on it too as an attempt to look more high-tech than Sony.
It shows all the issues with Sega, the constant miscommunication between SOA and SOJ, the panic because Sony was eating the market, the obsession with killing retailer margins when Sega was already suffering through massive unsold inventories, rushing to market an accessory whose launch app was supposed to be Roach Racer (!?), etc.
Really painful to read.
It shows all the issues with Sega, the constant miscommunication between SOA and SOJ, the panic because Sony was eating the market, the obsession with killing retailer margins when Sega was already suffering through massive unsold inventories, rushing to market an accessory whose launch app was supposed to be Roach Racer (!?), etc.
Really painful to read.
cireza
Member
SEGA put a Master System inside the Game Gear, a hardware from the 80s that was produced and sold until 96.
A Megadrive inside the Nomad. A MegaDrive and a Mega-CD inside the CDX. MegaDrive and Master System had revisions.
MegaDrive was re-using the main processor of the Master System for BC and as a complement. Mega-CD was using the same processor as MegaDrive.
Saturn was re-using the main processor of the MegaDrive for secondary tasks. 32X and Saturn had their main dual-CPUs in common.
Dreamcast was already a small form factor and very well built.
And I am not including the similarities with their arcade hardware.
From my personal point of view, Master System, Game Gear, MegaDrive and Mega-CD are all superbly designed and balanced hardware.
SEGA had been designing hardware for decades and they were excellent at it.
With the exception of the base 360, I would say that Xbox hardware was also well designed and consoles did see revisions.
Sony's designs were certainly good and elaborated (not to say convoluted), but they also had a ton of money to manufacture custom chips specifically for Playstation.
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twilo99
Member
Where did PlayStation get money from besides Sony?
Maybe there was VC money but I doubt it
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
Just crushing PlayStation. They’re flying off the shelves!
Kilau
Gold Member
Of course the money to start PlayStation came from Sony, I’m talking about what the document is referring to in regards to “equity”.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
AFAIK, Cerny's been involved with Sony in one form or another for decades. He was there during PS1 era and IIRC he was involved with Crash Bandicoot, for example. I don't think his involvement got to the level of hardware engineer/architect until the PS4, though, although I wouldn't be surprised if he had some input prior to that on older PS consoles.
I think Sony's time working with Nintendo is why they got an appreciation and focus to design systems that could become profitable shortly after launch with node shrinks and some changes in components. Whereas Nintendo's philosophy was (and still is) to sell at profit from Day 1, and companies like Microsoft (likely due to being so big that losses on gaming would mean nothing to them anyway) have gone in the completely opposite direction designing systems notoriously difficult to cost-reduce on production budgets for, Sony found a means to meet somewhere in the middle.
More impressive IMO is that they've been able to maintain and even improve that strategy with PS4 & PS5, systems with chip designs that weren't fully done in-house, and relying on fab production that isn't in-house, either. The strategy was easier to do with PS1 and PS2 than latter PS systems due to factors like that, yet they've managed to still find ways to make it work.
Tripolygon
Banned
Sony is the parent company of PlayStation, so they get funding from Sony just like every subsidiary of any corporation does.
In this instance, they are talking about brand equity. Sony was a well-established electronics brand, so they were able to leverage that in the consumer space. The equity you are referring to is the value of a company's stock and assets when liabilities are taken into account.
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Kyo
Member
Yeah, that's another bit that really stood out to me. It basically reads like a parody, just comically inept.
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Freelance Yakuza
Member
The craziest thing is that they forgot what happened 10 years ago when a company that never had won any gen tried to force always online and end the used market, and now we have to trust their decisions because Phil said so
Freelance Yakuza
Member
I know he helped somehow with the crash trilogy
Drizzlehell
Banned
So what do they have in there? Proof that aliens visited Earth? Who was responsible for Max Headroom incident? EL CHUPACABRA?
No? Then who tf cares, lol. This shit is about as relevant today as the coiled turd that I flushed this morning.
No? Then who tf cares, lol. This shit is about as relevant today as the coiled turd that I flushed this morning.
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Pandamonium Sega Documents Stream
Just in case any here are interested; great Sega Saturn channel, they're going through all the pages in the document.
I'm on the part where they go through Sega CD, Saturn, etc. hardware and software stocks vs. orders and...oh my goodness...Sega were struggling badly in 1996 to move new units of console hardware and software :/
Just in case any here are interested; great Sega Saturn channel, they're going through all the pages in the document.
I'm on the part where they go through Sega CD, Saturn, etc. hardware and software stocks vs. orders and...oh my goodness...Sega were struggling badly in 1996 to move new units of console hardware and software :/
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
At that time, Sega had so many products (and arcade too!) it made no sense why the company spread itself so thin. But it sure seemed everything got green lit in the boardroom like money was no object. I guess Sega was one of those companies where the R&D dept rules the roost. Nintendo has had a console and a handheld for most of it's existence. One for home, one for the road. Ok, Virtual Boy was terrible, but they never really deviated from that strategy. They even condensed it to Switch in modern day.
Around that time, Sega had:
- Arcade
- Genesis
- Sega CD
- Game Gear
- 32X
- Saturn
- Nomad
- CDX (added in as an edit)
- PC ports of some games
- Even Sega Pico toys for kids
What they should had done is focus on arcade gaming, a good home console for ports, and maybe if the market had enough juice in it, tag along a Game Gear as second fiddle to Gameboy. Or just quit handheld gaming after GG. It should had been a slam dunk if they focused on an arcade/console tandem because at that time gamers were still amped up on arcade ports. Sega needed to also improve the home port adding content.
You could tell Sega lost focus and quality as even there really good Sega Sports Genesis games (not all of them, but many) somehow in the next gen of Saturn went down the toilet. Sega Sports were among the key reasons why so many of us got a Genesis. You'd get a good 1-2 punch of EA and Sega Sports.
Around that time, Sega had:
- Arcade
- Genesis
- Sega CD
- Game Gear
- 32X
- Saturn
- Nomad
- CDX (added in as an edit)
- PC ports of some games
- Even Sega Pico toys for kids
What they should had done is focus on arcade gaming, a good home console for ports, and maybe if the market had enough juice in it, tag along a Game Gear as second fiddle to Gameboy. Or just quit handheld gaming after GG. It should had been a slam dunk if they focused on an arcade/console tandem because at that time gamers were still amped up on arcade ports. Sega needed to also improve the home port adding content.
You could tell Sega lost focus and quality as even there really good Sega Sports Genesis games (not all of them, but many) somehow in the next gen of Saturn went down the toilet. Sega Sports were among the key reasons why so many of us got a Genesis. You'd get a good 1-2 punch of EA and Sega Sports.
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thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
TBF, Nintendo still had their hand in arcades at this time, though through other companies like Williams and Rare. They never 100% left that market in the '90s.
Concept-wise the Nomad wasn't a bad idea, it's just the battery life was shit. But a portable version of your previous home console with 100% library compatibility? Yeah, that's great IMO. Sony should have done similar for PS4 IMHO, maybe Project Q will still be that (hopefully with a better design), we'll see.
I think Sega should've prioritized the ST-V for arcade since it and Saturn were practically 1:1, and would have made ports much closer and easier. Meanwhile the Model 2 could've been used for graphically enhanced versions of those Saturn/ST-V games maybe a year later. Scoping those games for Model 2 to bring down to Saturn, even if just visually, always worked against Saturn perception WRT its power and capabilities because the gap between Model 2 and Saturn was significantly larger than System 11 to PlayStation, as an example.
And true Sega's software quality went down WRT the sports games for sure, but IMO Saturn was when their home software quality really elevated. Their 1P output was a lot stronger on Saturn than Genesis/MegaDrive IMHO, mainly because it seems like SoJ were just able to make more games. Like the only notable 1P JRPG they had in MegaDrive/Genesis era was Phantasy Star IV, versus on Saturn where they had Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shining the Holy Ark (through Camelot, but still), etc. They didn't even make any original rail shooters for Genesis/MegaDrive, but Saturn got Panzer Dragoon and Zwei, so on and so forth.
6%? I guess you never seen what retail markup is. More like 20 to 30 percent.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
On console hardware? That's what I meant.
Mr.Phoenix
Member
Even internally they talked about Playstation more than they said Sega.
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Oh ya, I forgot about Rare and KI. Maybe they had some other games too (I was thinking about their 1980s days).
I didn't have a Saturn, but the sounds of what I read it was a machine good for 2D fighters, 2D shooters and JRPGs. That's great for the Japanese market, but other regions like action games, sports, racers (at the time when racing games really picked up as a showcase game for any system).
As for Model 2 to Saturn, ya the gap was so big the Satrun version looked bad. Daytona is a great example. But what they should had done is adjust the home versions more. It sounds like many of their arcade ports didn't add a lot of extra content. Maybe if Daytona dropped from 40 cars to 20 it would had helped.
Then again, maybe the system was so difficult to develop for it didnt really matter and it was destined to be a tough slog no matter what. Maybe no matter how good some arcade ports were on a modest Saturn machine, people were just sick of arcadey home ports. And they'd rather try out Gran Turismo which is a total 180 vs the typical Sega racer.
Edit: I forgot CDX too.
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Sony is the parent company of PlayStation, so they get funding from Sony just like every subsidiary of any corporation does.
In this instance, they are talking about brand equity. Sony was a well-established electronics brand, so they were able to leverage that in the consumer space. The equity you are referring to is the value of a company's stock and assets when liabilities are taken into account.
Poor Eddie, that was one of the hills he insisted on dying on, that it wasn't a factor or true.
Even console hardware that seems low. What do you think it costs a retailer to ship, stock, and sale the item. And that’s not counting paying management, building costs, shrink, etc.
Scotty W
Gold Member
The simple truth is that, although they make great games, Sega is a stupid company. Full stop. Sega wa totemo baka desu.
If they had focussed on the Genesis, and ported their arcade games to Saturn things could have been different. Instead we got broken ports of Virtua Fighter and Daytona, while numerous classic games languish, unported, and often in such a limited release that there is no chance of making back dev costs.
Sega is stupid, so suck it, stupid Sega simps.
Nikodemos
Member
Their biggest problem is that they were in year 2+ (year 4+ in some cases) of all these bad hardware decisions. And, once hardware gets pushed out, killing it prematurely brings a lot of consumer anger. They really shouldn't have created the Sega CD and the 32X in the first place. And potentially the Game Gear as well.
Sega were horrifically unfocused for most of their console wars era. SoA and SoJ pulled in different directions, they both took equally bad decisions that tended to cross-amplify their negative impact, and never genuinely tried to leverage any potential inter-departmental synergy (their way of doing things was the bog-standard hyper-siloed Japanese company, where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing).
Worst of all, Sega were reactive. They rarely said "hmm, this is a cool idea that might actually work, let's do it". Instead they went "hmm, Nintendo have a handheld, let's also make one, but fancier, nevermind the price/battery life"; "hmm, NEC have a CD drive, let's make one as well, nevermind the massive technical hurdles"; "hmm, Atari have this Jaguar thing, and Saturn is too far away/expensive, let's make something cheaper, nevermind that we are already stretched thinner than a condom on a Bad Dragon".
I think Sega suffered dev cycle slowdowns when switching from 2D to 3D content; a situation that would repeat in a later generation (when going from SD to HD in the mid-late-00s).
Frankly, given the repeated duds put out by Sega Sports during the early Saturn period, I'd have taken EA's deal: kill the internal sports division in exchange for guaranteed ports of EA titles.
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Kyo
Member
The question always was "who's gonna develop software for it?" - you don't sell hardware just because it can play games from years ago, without new titles to promote alongside the console it will quickly be forgotten.
YeulEmeralda
Member
Yeah but by then consoles were no longer toys. They could be proudly displayed at electronic stores next to TVs and stereos.
Kilau
Gold Member
It’s amazing Nintendo ever agreed to that deal. He masterfully engineered the whole situation to get Sony on board with the PlayStation as a separate device to enter the market. The Nintendo “betrayal” story was born and the rest is gaming history.
Why bother to buy when you own 2/3 of the home console market? They will go to you regardless.
PS1 was easy to develop and had a major multi billion dollar company backing it, the Saturn was poorly designed to the point where british third party developers like Psygnosis were developing their own commercial dev kits because Sega of Japan was only willing to help developers who wanted to do exclusives, the Nintendo 64 was much easier to code despite still being harder than PS1 and it was easier to show off its capabilities in real time rendering and western developers had a major support with that system.
The OG Xbox which also had a multi billion dollar company backing to make the most powerful and easy to code hardware, while the PS2 was the hardest this time but not on Saturn levels, Microsoft managed to get massive support pre-launch compared to the Gamecube, at its launch window, you had games like Max Payne, Silent Hill 2, half of EA Sports and Nascars that were released for the Xbox but not on Gamecube, by 2003 you had third parties dropping out partially or entirely the support for Nintendo's console.
And for the organic thing: Back then it was easier to develop a AAA game in just 1/1,5 years that would lead to an acquisition following some titles, and some studios take very long or don't want to be acquired at all, it took Sony 20 years to acquire Insomniac, games nowadays take 5+ years which means it would take multiple generations to consider into an acquistion.
RAIDEN1
Member
For all intents and purposes the Sega Saturn should have remained a Japanese exclusive like the Sharp X68000 before it... by the time it released all it was, was a suped up Neo Geo at an affordable price, when the market demanded more than just flashy 2d sprites...it's like the whole Saturn project was stuck to what it would have been like for a 1992 release as opposed to 1995...also as add-ons go I don't think the Sega CD was a complete disaster considering add-ons don't tend to sell that well anyway....but having video playback quality than what you would watch on your TV and VHS didn't help matters.....you want an FMV game? Don't do it on the Saturn, as even the CD-i has better playback for video for the time...
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