[egypturnash]

I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake.

"Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."

[danbmil99]

My company was deeply involved with Sega Saturn development at that time. One of the problems was a serious rift between Sega of America and Sega Japan.

SOA was committed to the idea that the Sega Genesis had a few more years of life in it, and that the American audience was not as interested in new technology for its own sake. They were, rightly in my opinion, concerned that a change in platform would benefit the competition not them, given that they had a market-leading position at the time.

Japan was, also correctly I suspected, convinced that Hardware Supremacy was essential to maintaining their Market position. Unfortunately, internal politics at Sega Japan caused the Saturn to be overly complicated and expensive to produce. I also think Japan failed to recognize that Americans were much more price conscious and less status- conscious than the Japanese Market.

We all know who won in the end. I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy.

Sega allowed internal politics and the Japanese Centric vision to Cloud their decision making process.

And then they doubled down on their flawed strategy with Dreamcast... And the rest is history

[gryson]

>I don't have any real evidence of this but my intuition is that Sony allowed their American arm more latitude and gave them more credibility with regard to designing the market strategy.

In reality, the exact opposite happened. Ken Kutaragi (creator of the PlayStation) and Norio Ohga (then-president of Sony) were outraged that the Sony executives in America were not following their instructions, and they fired the vast majority of them. This is discussed at length in the book Revolutions at Sony by Reiji Asakura. The American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black), and they hated that Kutaragi would not let them include a pack-in title for free with each console. The Japanese side quickly responded, fired most of them, and took direct control.

[gryson]

Oops - made a mistake here. The American side wanted the PlayStation to be WHITE, not black. I went back and checked the book. Quote:

>First he [Michael Schulhof - CEO of Sony Corp of America] objected to the color of the console. [He] insisted that gray was unacceptable in the U.S. market, and that the console must be white. Neither did he like the design or the logo mark. Their approach was to object to everything on grounds such as the results of market research: "We can't accept such an unusual controller. The design is too small for American hands." What is more, they insisted that they would set the U.S. list price themselves and they disapproved of the name PlayStation. The "Play" in PlayStation, they said, was reminiscent of "Playboy" and might be misconstrued. With one issue after another, the criticism was relentless.

>...Maruyama carefully assessed the likelihood that U.S. management would respect the intentions of management in Japan. He concluded that it would be impossible for managers steeped in the conventions of the game industry, and he decided to replace the lot except for a select few. In January of 1996, Sony established subsidiary SCEI America in San Francisco, simultaneously replacing most of the managers and launching a new management team. Maruyama comments: "We swept the organization clean of all the old obstacles. We realized that we had to manage our own business."

I previously transcribed more of this excerpt here:

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?34167-Sega-and-...

And here is the news story about Michael Schulhof being forced to resign:

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1995-12-06-19953400...

[ErikAugust]

"he American side wanted to make all kinds of changes - they hated the name PlayStation, they hated the grey color (they wanted it to be black)"

I have to love that these aesthetics the Americans were upset about made no difference to the success of the PlayStation.

[interestica]

I inherited an NES (something my parents would otherwise never have allowed to happen) and never owned another game system. My knowledge of the game systems were pretty removed. But, I know that I cognitively grouped the PlayStation with the SuperNintendo and my desktop computer at the time precisely because of the matching colours. I think it was an intentional design association that helped "understand the place" of those devices ("this is a computer"). Kinda like how my earliest tv was a huge carved wooden piece of furniture with fabric accents. The design told you "this is furniture".

[defen]

Sounds like a classic case of bikeshedding - the execs in question probably weren't qualified to have opinions on hardware design or software development, so instead they focused on entry-level stuff like the name and the physical appearance.

[MengerSponge]

Yeah, and that makes Sony JP firing them so much more satisfying.

[chc]

It's hard to say if that's entirely true. Sony did end up changing the system's color and making the controller bigger and bigger on subsequent iterations of the PlayStation, so apparently they came around on those ideas.

[ErikAugust]

I’ll agree to some degree, but PlayStation sold twice as many units as Nintendo 64. We could list the differences between consoles and point to some more important factors first - price, abundance of titles available, etc.

[lackbeard]

Or maybe it succeeded in spite of the name, color, and small controllers and would've been even more successful if the Americans got their way. I guess we'll never know.

[ErikAugust]

It sold 40 million units versus the N64’s 20 million units. N64 was black? Big whoop. Price, abundance of titles, and some other factors come before anything like that.

[danbmil99]

That's interesting. As I said I work with Sega so I didn't have any first-hand experience with Sony at that time.

So given what you're saying here I'll amend my perspectives to say that Sony Japan just understood the American Market better than Sega Japan.

[gryson]

I wouldn't say that the Japanese side of Sega wasn't aware of the issue of pricing the console too high. In fact, Hayao Nakayama often spoke of this in 1994 - he was very sensitive that a high-priced console would not sell in America (and used the 3DO as evidence). He was quoted a few years back as saying that the reason he approved the 32X was because Sega of America were insistent that the Saturn was priced too high to ever sell there (the quote is in the book Sega Mega Drive Collected Works).

However, the 32X failed spectacularly, and that left Sega with nothing but the Saturn. Their response was to price-match the PlayStation, which seriously pushed them into the red. There wasn't much that could be done at that point.

[corey_moncure]

How ironic given that the Net Yaroze, N64, and then PS2 were all black.

[kipchak]

Maybe the goal was to keep the design and implications of the "Nintendo Playstation" design?

[AdmiralAsshat]

I remember being a child at the time and thinking the 32X was a neat, if somewhat pointless add-on.

Somehow we got one, but I think it was after Sega had already pulled the plug on it, so there were some pretty insane discounts at the time where you could get the console, Virtua Fighter, and Star Wars Arcade for like fifty bucks. Great for consumers! But I'm guessing Sega wasn't making much (if anything) from it at that point.

[egypturnash]

I have always kinda felt that SOA seemed to be working at odds with Sega Japan a lot of the time! Now I know it wasn’t just me, thank you.

[subsubzero]

Totally this, and if I recall the upgrade was like $170 itself which was really expensive for teenagers at the time, plus it was confusing, sega genesis, add the 32x, Saturn comes out in a few months, oh and also sega CD has been around a for a year or so, it felt really disorganized. I felt the only thing sega had going for it was non-censored games, mortal kombat for snes had non-red blood in the fights, genesis did not.

[lostgame]

Well, they had great sports games; which didn’t matter to me at all, superior console ports of arcade games, and, of course, Sonic.

And then they utterly failed to launch a major original Sonic title for the console. shakes head

[vmception]

now its just "lets do a mid-life separate SKU with the same name and everything is compatible, but at least the airflow is better, maybe cheaper to manufacture, and maybe it outputs higher resolution"

its a better outcome, reminds me thats what happens when we allow companies to fail

[arprocter]

There was a Genesis 2 and a corresponding Sega CD2 which were smaller than the originals

[larrik]

The Sega CD2 was actually vastly better, in my recollection. I explicitly got that one and attached it to my full size genesis back in the day.

[arprocter]

I always thought you'd need the matching version, but apparently not

https://i.imgur.com/7jlcbQ1.jpg

[elsonrodriguez]

> I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines

2.5 machines. There were a few SegaCD+32X games.

[mdasen]

I remember being a kid and not knowing what kind of Sega I was supposed to want. Sega CD came out in 1992 and CDs were the new thing - most of the next-gen consoles were CD-based. But the 32X was newer (1994). But when the 32X was released, we already knew that the Saturn was coming. The Saturn was released in Japan the day after the 32X was released. It also meant the release of three consoles in less than three years.

For parents who had no interest in the systems, Sega seemed like a way to just keep spending money. First the kid wants Sega CD, then they want 32X, then they want Saturn. During the CD and `-bit` wars, Sega's lineup was weird and hard to decipher. Even if you were a kid that might know why a Saturn was better, how do you explain it? "Yea, it's the same 32-bits as the 32X and the same CD as a Sega CD, but it's better dad/mom!"

Nintendo had an easy story: it's been over 5 years since you bought me a Nintendo and this one goes from 16-bit to 64-bit! Sony had an easy story: it's 32-bit, only $299, CD-based, and Sony is the best name in all electronic stuff!

If you'd convinced your parents to buy a 32X for Christmas 1994, you weren't getting a Saturn 6 months later. "And what about the Jupiter that'll be out in another 6-12 months?" any parent could retort.

Sega burned developers with too many machines to develop for. Sega burned consumers with too many machines that would be quickly abandoned.

[karatestomp]

All the Sega stuff after the Genesis/Megadrive seemed really tied to their arcade efforts, in a way that Nintendo (and, toward the end of Sega's time in the market, Sony and Microsoft) didn't. AFAIK the 32x, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all only a little more different from their arcade counterparts than the NeoGeo was, which is why there were so many very faithful arcade "ports" on them (Star Wars Arcade and NBA Jam on the 32x, stuff like that). I've not seen that factored in to histories of the death of Sega's consoles, but wonder if it contributed in some fashion, or else helped stave off their demise.

[mntmoss]

The way in which Sega ultimately approached its console hardware business was actually similar from start to finish; you just have to look at the pre-Mega Drive consoles to see that the Mega Drive itself was the shining exception within a strategy that was very "spray and pray".

First there was the SG-1000 and the SC-3000 computer in 1983. Then there was a mostly cosmetic update, the SG-1000 II. Then there was the Sega Mark III and Master System; the Mark III had a variant release with an FM sound chip. All of these releases happened within a span of four years, 1983-1987. Throughout these releases there was a heavy focus on arcade ports, and Sega struggled with marketing the console as its own kind of experience.

When the Mega Drive came out in 1988 it was a big enough leap to be a stable target for a few years, and then Sega reverted to their previous ways. To the extent that Sega "got" their console business, it was a case of a few teams in various departments and subsidiaries that bucked the trends.

[pvg]

AFAIK the 32x, Saturn, and Dreamcast were all only a little more different from their arcade counterparts than the NeoGeo was

I think this is less true for the older hardware and even the DreamCast is somewhat more limited than its arcade board cousin.

[jklinger410]

Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive that.

[masklinn]

The expansion pak was only required for 2 or 3 games, and bundled with one of them.

Most of the games with epak support used it to increase quality and / or framerate, the game worked fine without. It was also relatively cheap ($50).

[yellowapple]

> It was also relatively cheap ($50).

Which is kinda impressive (for the time at least) considering how expensive RDRAM was/is relative to e.g. SDRAM.

[kipchak]

If i remember right the expansion module was included with DK64 which helped ease the pain a bit.

[kbrackbill]

The expansion module was just more RAM, not a whole new system. I think the 32x is more comparable to the N64DD, which failed and never actually made it to the US.

[Scoundreller]

Heh, my friend believed it turned his 64bit system into a 68bit system.

[rasz]

The fun fact about N64 memory expansion is it was on a 9 bit bus ;o) Rambus at that.