Killing the Saturn torched the Dreamcast's chances in Japan. I always wondered how well Virtua Fighter 3 and Shenmue would have sold over there if they looked as good as they appeared to be.
Yeah, that's a good point. Not releasing VF3 or Shenmue for the Saturn was kind of crazy-stupid; the Saturn was only four years old at the end of '98, and there was clearly still some amount of market for it in Japan even if the PS1 had pulled into the lead in '97. Sure, the hardware was losing money, but games like those, to keep the software market going a bit longer and sell lots of copies of some very popular games... why would you NOT release them? Sega must have been trying to push Dreamcasts, but they failed at that, and only managed to lose even more money than they otherwise would have. A mistake for sure.
Stolar purposely ignored RPGs and anime just as that market was catching fire. It's totally mind boggling. Oh and let's ignore these arcade perfect fighting games even though crippled ports sell in the hundreds of thousands on the Playstation.
Yeah, 2d fighting games weren't as popular as they had been before, but they definitely still had enough of a market to sell okay on PS1... and that the Saturn ones were better, particularly the Capcom ones that require the 4MB RAM cart, is a definite advantage which Stolar threw away by killing the system before the RAM carts could have come out here.
And yes, being anti-RPGs at exactly the time when anime and RPGs were finally becoming popular was not exactly smart either. However, could he have guessed how huge FFVII would be? He probably should have had a clue, with how much Sony pushed the game, like, all year, but... it IS true that before that JRPGs hadn't been nearly as popular. And he DID bring over Shining Force III part 1 and Panzer Dragoon Saga, so there wasn't nothing. But the "I don't like RPGs" attitude clearly angered some of the Saturn's hardcore base and missed the direction the industry was going in, and when your sales are as low as the Saturn's were, you can't do those things and have your system survive.
However, I definitely do not think that just having some more RPGs and fighting games would have "saved the Saturn" or something; the best thing they had to answer to FFVII was probably Grandia, and there's no way that could have released before mid '98. I do think that Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Grandia would have made a pretty good first-half-'98 library had the Saturn still been a system Sega cared about, though; they'd just have needed to push it in '97, have a new bundle and more marketing, no Bernie, etc., and they could have gotten there. After mid '98 the system's library starts to thin out, unfortunately, but there certainly was enough to get through that year at least, and with VF3 Saturn, into '99 as well. Higher costs for Sega, yes, but also much higher potential benefits. Bernie's strategy coming in in spring '97 was basically to fire a lot of people at Sega of America, scale down the company, and get ready for the next generation NOW, 2 1/3 years before that generation would begin. I'm sure he reduced losses, but he also ruined Sega's present and future in the process. We know that strategy failed, so they needed to do something else instead.
Dude must have been a Sony sleeper agent
He did the same stuff at Sony before going to Sega, so no. He was just mistaken about what would sell in the mid '90s, and completely clueless about how to keep his hardcore fanbase still interested.
