Sega's Corporate History

I found this interesting http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=SegaBase+Dreamcast that goes pretty in depth about the progression of SEGA's business. It's an insightful, if not loaded with references to back up the claims, that look into SEGA's business model over the years. Maybe SEGA always sucked at marketing an just generally making a profit, since post 16-bit days.

 

Nice read, but some errors here and there in the early history part.

The Sega CD was an attempt to compete with PC-Engine(Turbografx-16), which also had a CD-Rom component, 3 years before Sega CD was launched. The Sega CD's problem wasn't that it was before it's time, but that it was a copy of something another console did better, made just to extend Genesis's life-span.

The Saturn wasn't just a hack job though. Old Sega always tried to be pioneers in games technology with new consoles. The release may have been rushed, but years later, Sony's executives admitted that they were initially shocked at how high-end the Saturn's hardware was. The components were so expensive they wondered how Sega even managed to sell it at the price they did. That's what gave them the idea of killing Saturn with a price war against the much cheaper to produce Playstation.

The other problem with the Saturn was that it was built mainly for sprite based games while Playstation was built mainly with 3D polygon rendering in mind. Unfortunately, when the Saturn was planned, the industry was experiencing the Virtual Reality bust, making a lot of developers think sprites were still the way to go for a long time. Once 3D gaming took off however, developers just found Playstation better to work with and the Saturn lost a lot of support.

Reading through the article, it still saddens me that Sega worked so hard on the Dreamcast, but Sony at the time was so strong in marketing that all they needed to do was say "Yeah, but Playstation 2 is coming!" to kill off any hype and momentum the Dreamcast had.