100 reasons why Sega is/was stupid.

[AndrewTS 0]

INTERMISSION:

 

Sega VR

 

This one is maybe a tad iffy as an actual entrant, so I'm not inducting it. You can either condemn it as a silly idea that was way ahead of its time (or even *this* time), praise Sega for never actually releasing it (unlike the Virtual Boy), or you can just laugh at it.

 

 

LOL

 

After being featured in several magazines, as well as at numerous trade shows, the headset made its final appearance in 1993 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). It was shown behind closed doors to a thoroughly underwhelmed audience, with one GameSpot writer describing the game he played as an unresponsive blur which quickly lost any and all appeal. The whole project never progressed beyond the prototype stage and Sega officially claimed that it was halted due to users hurting themselves by moving while wearing the headset. They stated that the sense of immersion was so realistic, it could potentially cause injury to children who played it.

Nintendo by far suffered the worst blow of the Virtual reality fad with its abysmal Virtual Boy, spending $5 million just for exclusivity of the technology used in the system. Another $20 million was spent on the August, 1995 U.S. launch. Notwithstanding, the $180 price tag, combined with the clunky design and the lackluster software lineup, signaled its demise a little over a year later.

 

Quotes and Images from Sega VR: Great idea or Wishful Thinking? from Sega-16.com

[El Psycho Diablo 0]

I can sort of sympathize with the Smilebit one, but if your games don't sell, you're just fucked.

 

See also: Capcom and Clover Studios.

[AndrewTS 0]

That's why you, you know, market the games.

 

And Japanese games bombing on xbox are just par for the course.

 

No update today--injured finger. Plenty more coming soon, though.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

It dawned on me last night that I sort of knew a SoA employee when I was younger. I had friends whose father worked as a buyer for Ford and this apparently afforded him sports tickets from suppliers. Long story short, one of the Red Wings games we went to, we went for dinner with the supplier and his wife (an attractive SoA employee). My friends had a Genesis and were given a free copy of Comix Zone (apparently they had excess copies).

 

64. Throughout the thread, there seems to be a few common themes: Sega mocking games or hardware that didn't deserve it (seen early in the thread) or Sonic being booked so poor that the franchise slowly but surely lost marquee value. This one falls into the latter:

 

Sonic Shuffle.

 

If you never played it, keep it that way. In the early days of Mario Party - a fun game with simple mini-games and a straightforward goal (win games, buy stars) - Sega decided to strike while the party game iron was hot and release Sonic Shuffle. Since copying the Mario Party formula may have resulted in a good Sonic-themed game, it was decided to make mini-games confusing and frustrating (with long load times) and make the AI cheat it's way to victory by stealing your best cards (which was also a stupid system).

 

Way to go, team.

 

Edit: Numbering corrected

[razazteca 0]

When discussing Sega of America doing everything wrong all the blame should go to, Bernie Stolar.

 

Hi, lets kill the Saturn for the Dreamcast

[BUTT 0]

Anyone with a working brain would have also killed the Saturn for the Dreamcast. That doesn't mean Bernie Stolar isn't a moron.

[AndrewTS 0]

I think you give Bernie too much credit, and not enough to Sega corporate groupthink.

 

Bernie did hate imports and RPGs, though.

 

It's a shame Sega banked so much on the CD format when it didn't have the power to really deliver. If Sega hadn't botched the Sega CD/Mega CD...and heck, even put it off for a while until they had Saturn...the industry would be quite a different beast.

 

Gamers would be mainly Sega Dreamcast 2 fanboys and Nintendo Playstation 3 fanboys.

[BUTT 0]

Man, don't tell me you actually believe that Nintendo PlayStation bullshit. "They were ready to co-exist harmoniously before Nintendo screwed Sony BUT THEY GOT THEIR COMEUPPANCE!" Sony always had plans to release their own game system. The deal to create the SNES-CD was just their way of getting a foot in the door. The original plan for the PlayStation was to be a home entertainment system that played SNES carts and Sony's own CD-ROM games. I'm sure Nintendo would have been TOTALLY down with that. When the deal fell through Sony went ahead with the project on their own.

[El Psycho Diablo 0]

That's why you, you know, market the games.

 

And Japanese games bombing on xbox are just par for the course.

 

No update today--injured finger. Plenty more coming soon, though.

 

Nah, that's just people ignoring good games just because they're on an Xbox.

 

Then when the franchise goes boom, complaining that developers only release shooters and football games.

[AndrewTS 0]

Man, don't tell me you actually believe that Nintendo PlayStation bullshit. "They were ready to co-exist harmoniously before Nintendo screwed Sony BUT THEY GOT THEIR COMEUPPANCE!" Sony always had plans to release their own game system. The deal to create the SNES-CD was just their way of getting a foot in the door. The original plan for the PlayStation was to be a home entertainment system that played SNES carts and Sony's own CD-ROM games. I'm sure Nintendo would have been TOTALLY down with that. When the deal fell through Sony went ahead with the project on their own.

 

That is, in fact, *one* of the prospective agreements that was being worked out, but not the one I was thinking of.

 

wiki link

 

Nintendo approached Sony to develop a CD-ROM add-on, tentatively titled the "SNES-CD". A contract was struck, and work began. Nintendo's choice of Sony was due to a prior dealing: Ken Kutaragi, the person who would later be dubbed "The Father of PlayStation," was the individual who had sold Nintendo on using the Sony SPC-700 processor for use as the 8 channel ADPCM sound synthesis set in the Super Famicom/SNES console through an impressive demonstration of the processor's capabilities.

 

Sony also planned to develop another, Nintendo compatible, Sony-branded console, but one which would be more of a home entertainment system playing both Super Nintendo cartridges and a new CD format which Sony would design. This was also to be the format used in SNES-CD discs, giving a large degree of control to Sony despite Nintendo's leading position in the video gaming market.

 

In 1989, the SNES-CD was to be announced at the June CES . However, when Hiroshi Yamauchi read the original 1988 contract between Sony and Nintendo, he realized that the earlier agreement essentially handed Sony complete control over any and all titles written on the SNESCD-ROM format. Yamauchi was furious; deeming the contract totally unacceptable, he secretly cancelled all plans for the joint Nintendo-Sony SNES CD attachment.

 

Okay, so it was the SNES CD at that point, not the "Play Station". However, Sony didn't seem to give a damn about games or a gaming console at that point. They were planning to rake in money on (gasp) a proprietary disc format. Now that sounds like the Sony we know and love.

 

But Sega's failure or success with CDs had nothing to do with Nintendo's decision to back out.

[Invictus 0]

Man, don't tell me you actually believe that Nintendo PlayStation bullshit. "They were ready to co-exist harmoniously before Nintendo screwed Sony BUT THEY GOT THEIR COMEUPPANCE!" Sony always had plans to release their own game system. The deal to create the SNES-CD was just their way of getting a foot in the door. The original plan for the PlayStation was to be a home entertainment system that played SNES carts and Sony's own CD-ROM games. I'm sure Nintendo would have been TOTALLY down with that. When the deal fell through Sony went ahead with the project on their own.

 

One of the big reason's the deal fell through was because Sony wanted ownership of Nintendo's properties and franchises that appeared on the new system. Obviously, Nintendo wasn't down with that.

 

This is from Wikipedia, but I've read this in enough places (game magazines, etc) to know this is the jist of what went down:

 

"However, when Hiroshi Yamauchi read the original 1988 contract between Sony and Nintendo, he realized that the earlier agreement essentially handed Sony complete control over any and all titles written on the SNESCD-ROM format. Yamauchi was furious; deeming the contract totally unacceptable, he secretly cancelled all plans for the joint Nintendo-Sony SNES CD attachment."

 

EDIT: Andrew and I essentially just posted the same point at the same time. Whoops.

[AndrewTS 0]

Heh, it's cool. Clearly the two separate agreements they worked out got mashed up in my head, though.

[BUTT 0]

OK, back to Sega. The next one will be number 65 (the numbers got all messed up there, as there are two #51's and 2 #54's)

 

65) Spreading themselves too thin.

 

Sega was never a gigantic company on the level of a Sony or even a Nintendo. That didn't stop them from creating and/or supporting an astounding number of systems. In 1994, they were making games for Genesis, Sega CD, and Game Gear. And they were porting Genesis and Game Gear titles to the Master System for release in Europe. And that year they released the 32X, Saturn (in Japan) and Pico: The Computer That Thinks It's A Toy! And they were also pumping out a large number of arcade games. I also think they introduced a new brand called "Sega Toys" around this time. The next year they brought out the Nomad. It was also around this period (somewhere around '95-'96) that they began producing PC games. Anyway, by focusing on too many different pieces of hardware no system got the attention it fully deserved.

[AndrewTS 0]

Ok, I fixed my own numbering and sent out PMs on the needed corrections.

 

I was planning to mention Pico as a separate entry. It was trying to make a niche that there was little demand for, and of course all the software was edutainment intended for children.

 

However, the damn thing was $140! Ridiculous.

[razazteca 0]

Anyone with a working brain would have also killed the Saturn for the Dreamcast. That doesn't mean Bernie Stolar isn't a moron.

People were still angry about the past 2 generations of CD consoles that Sega was selling why would they want to buy 3 consoles in a period of 5 years? Sega could of kept the Dreamcast in development stage until they figured out what type of disc to use instead of rushing it out on 9/9/99.

[BUTT 0]

Well, it was actually released in November 1998 in Japan. But they did need to get it out early to get the jump on PS2. And as for this question:

 

"People were still angry about the past 2 generations of CD consoles that Sega was selling why would they want to buy 3 consoles in a period of 5 years?"

 

They DIDN'T buy three consoles in five years. That was the problem. If people had bought those consoles they wouldn't have needed to rush the Dreamcast. Yeah I'm sure Saturn owners were upset about the premature death of their system but there were only 1.5 million of them in the US, so why should Sega have continued catering to them rather than making another bid at the mainstream?

[razazteca 0]

It caused the premature death of the Dreamcast in the USA. To me the Megadrive 32x CD monster console was the prototype, the Saturn was the beta tester, and the Dreamcast was dead on arrival due to indifference of the bad marketing schemes SoA has done over the past few years....who to blame well his name is Stolar! PS2 built its fanbase on RPGs (Final Fantasy), Racing (Gran Tourismo), Sports (Madden) games from the disgruntled causal gamers that saw Sega rushing consoles to market every 2 years. Not every fanboy wanted to pay $299 just to play the next Sonic or Virtua Fighter.

[World's Worst Man 0]

Third parties abandoning the Dreamcast to make PS2 games was what killed the Dreamcast. The early launch combined with a solid year of titles is probably the only reason they had any success in the first place. Why the third parties were so quick to jump ship can probably be attributed to the fuck-uppery of the previous generation and a half.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

I still play my Dreamcast occasionally. Really underrated system. Controllers were pretty clunky, though.

 

Plus, I have a copy of Fire Pro D...still the best wrestling game ever, IMO.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

Piracy killed the Dreamcast. At least that's what I told people on IRC that talked about pirating games.

[The Man in Blak 0]

You know, I don't doubt that we can reach 100 reasons without much of a problem, but some of the stupidity cited here isn't all that different from poor decisions that have been made by Sega's competitors. Sega's failure as a hardware manufacturer is far and away the biggest contributing factor to their downfall in the console business. It's probably worth an entire thread in itself.

 

Third parties abandoning the Dreamcast to make PS2 games was what killed the Dreamcast. The early launch combined with a solid year of titles is probably the only reason they had any success in the first place. Why the third parties were so quick to jump ship can probably be attributed to the fuck-uppery of the previous generation and a half.

 

Absolutely. What third-party development studio wants to spend top dollar on purchasing a dev kit and acquiring/training talent to develop on a platform that doesn't appear to have any real long-term support from its manufacturer?

[razazteca 0]

Piracy killed the Dreamcast. At least that's what I told people on IRC that talked about pirating games.

That is a cop out because people have been using mod chips and downloading games for Playstations for years!

[The Man in Blak 0]

It's not necessarily a cop out - it's absurdly easy to pirate games for the Dreamcast, as there's not even a mod-chip required for it - but I think its impact is overstated somewhat.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

I also wasn't saying it to be serious, just to be a jerk to people on IRC that promoted badwill towards supporting the industry (to put things in context, this was around 2001 / 2002 and the DC's death was a bit fresher).

[Renegade 0]

Dreamcast piracy was only in full swing right before it croaked. It didnt really kill it.

[DrVenkman PhD 0]

Which is what people said as a response. I continued calling them a dirty pirate anyway.

[razazteca 0]

I'm going to blame Stolar again for having Windows CE compatible with the Dreamcast for all of the problems of not selling games.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Eh...it seemed like you walked into any game store, and they would have PS2 stuff out the wazoo, and the Dreamcast stuff would be tucked away in a back corner. Seems like the retailers just decided they wanted to push the Sony stuff more, for whatever reason.

[The Man in Blak 0]

After getting burned by the Sega CD, the 32X, the CDX, and the Saturn, do you really blame them? The same point that I made for the development studios applies to the retailers as well. Sega of America seemed so incredibly unstable at the time that it was hard to place a lot of faith in them, despite the fact that the Dreamcast might have been, pound-for-pound in context, the best system they ever created.

[razazteca 0]

Absolutely. What third-party development studio wants to spend top dollar on purchasing a dev kit and acquiring/training talent to develop on a platform that doesn't appear to have any real long-term support from its manufacturer?

So they took the easy route by using Windows CE making it simple for any college kid taking 1 semester of computer science to pirate games and upload it to mIRC or newsgroups.