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Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony
- WeylandYutani 3y agoPlayStation demolished everyone. The biggest blow was that Sony managed to take Japan- the home market of Nintendo and Sega.
- londons_explore 3y agoBut sony is also japanese.
- goosedragons 3y agoAnd arguably more Japanese than Sega which traces its routes back to the US and was owned by an American company for many years.
- dangus 3y agoBy this time that’s about as relevant as calling Nintendo a playing card company.
- goosedragons 3y agoEh, the chairman of Sega at the time the PlayStation launched was American.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoSega of America, yes. Hayao Nakayama was CEO of Sega of Japan from 1983-1999.
- gryson 3y agoThe chairman of Sega Enterprises was Isao Okawa (founder and president of CSK, majority owner of Sega). The president of Sega Enterprises was Hayao Nakayama.
- lapetitejort 3y agoIncidentally, Playstation is primarily an American endeavor now. Sony Interactive Entertainment and Playstation Studios are now based out of California. Most of the first and second party developers are American or European. Playstation owns just one Japanese developer. Some claim that this western shift has compromised the "quirky" aspect of the Playstation brand. Look at the PS1 lineup and you will find so many oddball games that became classics, or at least cult classics. I would not disagree. Playstation has an amazing track record of releasing games, but from a wider view the games do look homogenous.
- fomine3 3y agoSIE shut down Japan Studio. O-X button swap and censorship are unpopular for Japanese. They becoming US culture quickly.
- DeathArrow 3y agoAnd after that, Xbox appeared. :)
- pjmlp 3y agoAnd after that, in typical Microsoft's mismanagement, Xbox One happened and they haven't recover ever since.
- wsgeorge 3y agoIs Xbox doing poorly? I don't know much about the console space, but it looks to me like a continued success
- izacus 3y agoIt's doing fine, but Sony is (again) doing a bit beter. Although it's a bit of a loaded question here, since Microsoft integrated Xbox and Windows gaming ecosystem. The current situation is actually pretty nice - there are three big players with big market shares from which neither has a clear monopoly. Microsoft is seriously thretening to break that by buying themself a monopoly in game publishing though.
- pjmlp 3y agoThere were always three big players, previously Microsoft's place was owned by SEGA.
- Keyframe 3y agoWhich resonates more than surface level of that statement you made. Xbox is pretty much next gen SEGA hardware and SEGA was ultimately driven to the ground by a guy that kickstarted Xbox (nasty people would say as a prize)
- sanderjd 3y agoI hadn't thought much about this, but you're so right, it's so refreshing that there is such healthy competition in this market.
- chrisco255 3y agoInterestingly, Sega was founded by Americans, but by the 90s Sega of Japan was in full control of the company.
- gryson 3y agoThere is no "Sega of Japan." Sega Enterprises is a Japanese company that founded the subsidiary Sega of America to market its products in North America. Sega Enterprises can trace its origins to Americans such as David Rosen who were in Japan after the war.
- chrisco255 3y agoSega went through a number of buyouts and merges and renames and spinoffs over the decades so it's a pretty complex history to follow as it alternated between American and Japanese ownership. By the mid 80s, CSK, a Japanese software firm, purchased the company from Gulf and Western, the American owners at the time. They then established Sega of America, so I say "of Japan" to distinguish the Japanese office. The name Sega, is derived from Service Games of Japan, the name in the 1950s.
- _the_inflator 3y agoWell, it started with a coop with Nintendo and Sony: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_NES_CD-ROM
- AndrewOMartin 3y agoThat 3d bar chart is something special. The half-assed 3D effect serves only to make it harder to read. I appreciate this is often the case with diagrams, but this is an amazing example.
- robertlagrant 3y agoAlso, the largest category is labelled "Other".
- guidedlight 3y agoThe early 90's were awash with terrible examples of charts. Honestly, I think business folk for the first time got the tools to create high-quality graphical charts and they went nuts without understanding what they were doing -- no doubt, trying to out do one another and impress their boss.
- lizknope 3y agoI graduated in 1997 and at my first job we had an engineer that loved making Powerpoint presentations. I hated that stuff but he used every 3D option, different color palettes on every page, etc. We had someone else print up fake business cards for him that changed his title to "3D Pie Chart Engineer"
- buryat 3y agoit's art, self-expression through the power of powerpoint, it's fun and liberating, honestly, an exhibition with this theme is just waiting to happen
- realaether 3y agoNowadays they're just called data visualisation engineers.
- hbn 3y agoMicrosoft's WordArt was too much power for some people
- appleflaxen 3y ago> Hindsight suggests none of those really worked and that Sega's other primary obsession, lowering hardware costs after its launch, both for competition and margins, backfired. The retail margin on a core $250 Saturn system, without pack-in games, was 6 percent, or $15, while Sony seemed to be offering 10 percent core, 15 percent pack-in. > "How Did Sony Do it?" one slide rhetorically asks. The answer, according to Sega, is that it was perceived to be cheaper, its software "looks better than ours," that Sega "equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD," and that Sony has "effectively leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics." All Sega had to do, according to the next slide, was improve its software, get pricing advantage, improve its advertising, spend better on TV advertising, and "dramatically improve" its game timing. Simple enough.
- dangus 3y agoI highly recommend the movie/documentary “Console Wars” as it touches on this subject. The success of the Genesis especially in the United States, at least according to this movie, came from a “dream team” when it came to marketing and promotion. This team included Tom Kalinske, former CEO of Mattel. For a time, this team at Sega of America held the parent company’s ear, and it led to the Genesis breaking Nintendo’s monopolistic stranglehold on the game industry. The Genesis succeeded because of some pretty amazing marketing and the success of Sonic the Hedgehog. By the time the Sega Saturn came along, this team was gone, and I think it shows.
- gryson 3y agoConsole Wars leaves a lot out. For one, Sega of America was in financial trouble as early as the 2nd half of 1993 when revenues nosedived. The company ended up laying off 70% of its 900-member workforce by the end of 1995. Despite having one of the largest game development divisions in the world, it utterly failed to consistently release hit titles (its internal studio, STI, was infamous for having more unreleased than released games). The CEO of Sega of America, Tom Kalinske, was strongly against marketing the Saturn in North America due to its expected high price tag. He persuaded the parent company to develop and release the ill-fated 32X, and then he put most of the company's resources into supporting it. When the 32X bombed upon release, the decision was quickly made to bump up the release of the Saturn, but Sega of America had almost no software in the pipeline. Ironically, in the end, the Saturn matched the PlayStation in price for most of its life. A few articles on the topic for anyone who's interested: https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-an-analysis-of-export-revenue-1991-1998/ https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-an-a... https://mdshock.com/2022/05/09/a-second-atari-shock-the-decline-of-the-16-bit-console-era/ https://mdshock.com/2022/05/09/a-second-atari-shock-the-decl... https://mdshock.com/2022/08/16/a-cloud-appears-over-sega-of-americas-rapid-progress/ https://mdshock.com/2022/08/16/a-cloud-appears-over-sega-of-...
- ranting-moth 3y agoAny ponders what that post it note means? It was stuck on the "Brand Strategy" folder. "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97". There is a text above it, "Be the" ? "RR - What were F?96 SW s? limitations" "RPG's most messea?" "Stupid approach"
- davb 3y agoIt looks like the top line is “Screw better technology” (with the r dropped off). “RR - What were FY96 [Financial Year '96] SW sampling limitations” “RPG’s most messy” (with a superfluous letter in there).
- groovy2shoes 3y agoThis looks good to me. And the last line reads "STUDIO APPROACH".
- _notreallyme_ 3y agoI read "Be He", not "Be the" "sampling limitations" "Studio APPROVED" I can't work out "F?96" and "messea"...
- geswit2x 3y agoSthoic approach
- stevehawk 3y agoStudio approach
- ndiddy 3y ago"Bootleg" refers to the "Bootleg Sampler" series of demo discs that got packaged with Saturn consoles.
- zerr 3y agoCan we say that it is actually a zero-sum game?
- neilv 3y agoWhat's the ethics of a third party publishing alleged leaked documents like this? There's an arguable public interest, if the documents are genuine (less if genuine but cherry-picked), but does that override respect for the IP of the company and privacy of named people?
- toyg 3y agoIt's been 25 years; by now these materials can be considered historical documents of public interest, which trumps copyright.
- neilv 3y agoIs this your gut feel, or some accepted journalistic standard?
- allarm 3y agoWhat's your opinion on this? 25 years is quite a common timeframe for declassification. I would assume that's quite reasonable timeframe for journalistic standards as well. https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/declassification-faq https://www.justice.gov/archives/open/declassification/decla... https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-program-archive https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/crest-25-year-pro... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declassification
- neilv 3y agoIIUC, declassification concerns checks&balances upon powers given to a government that is responsible to citizens. Sega documents, on the other hand, seem more like fodder for an MBA student's case study, and anecdotes to drop in popular business books. Which seems much lower public interest, to plug into whatever cost:benefit calculation. I don't have a good sense of what should be done about the Sega documents. (Hypothetically, were I a journalist but knowing only what I do now, and the documents had been leaked to me only, I'd probably try to authenticate them and determine the motives of the leaker, and then I'd have to get advice from others.) Not specific to the Sega documents, I'm frequently concerned when I see some kind of information leaked/stolen, and the appearance is that everyone automatically considers it free-game for all purposes. That appearance might only come from a vocal minority, but when no one questions or objects, it looks universal, and like a sociopathic culture.
- progre 3y ago"299"
- MBCook 3y agoThat was BRUTAL. For those who don’t know what this refers to, Sega showed off the Saturn at CES (?), announced it was launching that same day, and would cost $399. That’s $800 converted to todays dollars. Sony had their presentation later that day. The Sony gentleman got on stage, said ‘299’, and walked off. That was it. Sony got ALL the news. The Saturn immediately seemed overpriced and had to prove it was worth the extra money, which they were unable to do enough to succeed. Additionally, because Sega bumped their launch up by months WITHOUT telling many partners, they pissed a bunch of them off. Huge important retailers like KB Toys who didn’t get early stock not only refused to carry the console, they pulled all existing Sega stuff off the shelves too. Game developers were caught flat-footed too and didn’t have their games ready. Sega basically botched the entire launch in the US thing. And it came back to bite them when the Dreamcast came out.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Additionally, because Sega bumped their launch up by months WITHOUT telling many partners, they pissed a bunch of them off. Huge important retailers like KB Toys who didn’t get early stock not only refused to carry the console, they pulled all existing Sega stuff off the shelves too. Game developers were caught flat-footed too and didn’t have their games ready. This vaguely reminds me of the Nintendo Switch, which launched without really having any games going for it. Mario Kart 8 and Breath of the Wild were both available on release, ported from the Wii U. You could also get Rayman Legends (ported from the Wii U, four years old) or Disgaea 5 (two years old, but ported from PS4, so new to a Nintendo console). Super Mario Odyssey (original to the Switch!) didn't come out until 8 months after the Switch released. They never have done a Mario Kart for the Switch. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (ported from the Wii U) released for the Switch 15 months after the Switch released. But everyone loved the Switch anyway; the fact that on release there were zero new games (and maybe up to two old games that were to your taste) available didn't seem to hurt anything.
- snarfy 3y agoIt's the games. It always was the games. I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII. If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it. Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted. Marketing and the hardware didn't matter to me. It was the games.
- pipes 3y agoTastes vary, but power stone and soul calibur are great (and still look great today). Though you are right in a way, it didn't really have a recognisable brand game like gran turismo or Tekken. (Or goldeneye)
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoSega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer. 32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?). In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'
- mkjonesuk 3y agoI was in my mid-teens and a big gamer when Sony entered the ring with the PlayStation and I still cannot to this day get over the fact that they actually did it and became the dominant force in gaming. I remember thinking it was just another fad like the Minidisc and because they had no clear mascot like Mario or Sonic it was bound to fail. Next thing I knew the Saturn was a joke and everyone I knew had a PlayStation. The ads were EVERYWHERE and people I knew who had never even owned a games console were buying the PS1. When the PS2 was announced I was also blindly convinced the Dreamcast would compete but the PS2 just DOMINATED. Literally everyone I knew had one (not me sadly) it was a stunning thing to behold. When games like GTA3 hit I knew Sega were done for. I personally only connected with the Sony handheld unit owning a PSP and I also eventually got a Vita. Other than UMD they were (still are) awesome little devices to play with.
- m463 3y agoWhat I thought was amusing was when the wii came out. All the publicity was about the playstation 3 and xbox 360, and the wii didn't get much notice because it didn't have the amazing system specs. But it was fun with the accelerometer controller and less pixels and mips didn't get in the way of that.
- grepfru_it 3y agoThe load times bro, I could not get on the CD based bandwagon. I played Sewer Shark on the Sega CD and the load times where miserable. I even thought the resolution was abysmal (compared to my PC at the time). No way it would win, I thought. By christmas of 97 I had a PS1 and spent all day playing Tomb Raider. The hardware was beyond any other console and the design was slick and new. And while Sony won, and my Saturn sat in the corner collecting dust, the N64 was the only system that came out when my friends came over. Nothing could compete with 4 player mario kart or starfox. Sega was dead before the dreamcast even came out.
- MisterTea 3y ago> I played Sewer Shark on the Sega CD six - six - niner - six ugh, that game kinda sucked. Never hit that million pounds of tube steak high score. What a weird time for gaming. FMV games were something that looked like the future to a little kid but once you played them they were awful. The video padded out boring interactive game play like shooting the rats in Sewer Shark or the shooting galleries of Ground Zero: Texas. I remember Night Trap being highly controversial at the time for sexual an violence themes and I only knew one kid who had it and his mother threw the game out so I never got to play it.
- LarsDu88 3y agoSega had Sonic Adventure, Soul Caliber, Phantasy Star, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi. On the gaming front they had everything they needed. On the pricing front though... oh boy. You are not gonna survive as a hardware company when Sony jams a DVD player into their gaming console and sells at a $100+ dollar loss just to pump up the DVD standard
- Dah00n 3y agoEspecially not when most (all?) of those games were also on the playstation.
- brirec 3y agoAll of those games were Sega exclusives (I think even first-party Sega IP) until Sega threw in the hardware towel and began making games for other platforms. Edit: Soul Caliber isn’t Sega IP, but the rest are
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoMost those are first-party Sega games - certainly not available in PlayStation until Sega threw in the console towel and became a third-party developer. Also, folks? Soul CalibUr.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LarsDu88 3y agoIt was a solid 2-3 years before those games were ported to PS2, Gamecube, and (in the case of jet set radio) Xbox! 13 year old me gasped when they announced Sonic Adventure would be released on Gamecube. That's when I knew the jig was up. It was like when the Soviet Union opened a McDonald's in Red Square. You knew the jig was up!
- astrobe_ 3y agoI've always wondered how much of the success of the PS1 could be attributed to the fact that games could be basically free because of the CD/DVD medium instead of cartridges, which required more dedicated hardware to make "backups".
- TheRealPomax 3y agoIs there a tl;dr?
- Dwedit 3y agoSega Arrogant
- kraig911 3y agoThat era of gaming so many people fail to see why marketing was super important because the games all were pretty good. It's important to remember that before the cd/dvd era console manufacturers made money off the cartridge sales, so the commission was high. When sony was using CD's they took way less I think 15-20% vs 50 or something compared to nintendo. And even still nintendo/sega couldn't make the medium as fast as sony. Sony could mint cds for a fraction of the cost of making cartridges. As well if Namco wanted to order 1,000,000 cds for a special launch date, sony could. Nintendo/Sega couldn't.
- TurkishPoptart 3y agoI loved the Dreamcast. It had superior specs, lesser loadtimes than PS2. But lacking in multiplayer games.
- lizardking 3y agoWhich specs? Seems like PS2 had quite a bit more power on paper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Technical_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Technical_specificat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2#Technical_specifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2#Technical_specif...
- ClassyJacket 3y agoWhat specs? AFAIK the PS2 was superior in almost every way, plus it had dual analogue sticks, the lack of which just makes certain games impossible on the Dreamcast. https://segaretro.org/Sega_Dreamcast/Hardware_comparison https://segaretro.org/Sega_Dreamcast/Hardware_comparison
- mirchiseth 3y ago"La Zona Blanca" ad [1] mentioned in the article is funny. But I do agree with the note "When did we decide on Hare Krishna cult members?" There must be better ways to spend the ad money OR may be Sega marketing was using Hare Krishna members as purple cows [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-XXTobhao4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-XXTobhao4 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170 https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/d...
- CamperBob2 3y agoHard disagree. Without the cult members the ad would have lost a lot of comedic flair. It would have landed in an uncanny valley between serious and not-serious. Kalinske was out of line trying to micromanage at that level.
- brightlancer 3y agoI stopped buying console games after ~1993 until sometime in the 2010s, so my experience with the Playstation and such was visiting friends who had them. It was pretty cool, but I think Sega was doomed in North America before that. Sega released the (backwards compatible) Genesis two years before Nintendo released the Super NES -- anecdotally, I knew far more folks with SNES than the Genesis, and my impression was that was true all over NA. Again, Sega released the (backwards compatible) Saturn two years before Nintendo released the N64, but I didn't know anyone at the time who had a Saturn and a few who had the N64. My recollection was that Nintendo kept promising their console "tomorrow tomorrow" so that folks wouldn't buy the Sega consoles. And I think it worked. I don't know if this played out in Japan and Europe, but in NA I think Sega was doomed long before the original PS.
- wk_end 3y agoIn North America, the Genesis was actually more popular than the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era - 1994 or so. By that point the Genny's paltry colour palette (64 on-screen 9-bit colours) was starting to look really dated - not just next to the new 32-bit consoles but even next to the SNES, as devs started to learn how to make it sing (see: Donkey Kong Country). And the bungling of the Sega CD and especially the 32X really did a number on their brand. When all is said and done they ended up pretty much neck-and-neck, with Nintendo pulling ahead a little bit, but any way you slice it, with 18M units sold in NA, the Genesis was an enormously successful product. The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the Playstation, so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's delays. In Europe, the Genesis (and Master System!) were even bigger than they were in North America, but the Saturn still bombed and Sony still ruled the next gen. In Japan, the Saturn was actually quite successful - more popular than the N64 actually - whereas Sega's previous systems never really caught on. But, again, it still lived in the shadow of the mighty Playstation. And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible. The Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil cared about the Master System.
- brightlancer 3y ago> In North America, the Genesis was actually more popular than the SNES until near the tail end of the 16-bit era I've heard this but IME "everyone" had an SNES while only a few people had a Sega Genesis -- and many of them also had an SNES. Maybe it was just folks I knew, but I went to college in a different state and SNES was much more popular among them. So I know what I've read but it's so far off from my (pretty broad) experience that I wonder if the stats are misleading. > The late arrival of the N64 did little to hurt the Playstation, so you can't pin Sega's failure on Nintendo's delays. I think Sega got caught in the middle between Sony and Nintendo (they're completely different markets now) and many folks who would have bought a Saturn instead held out for Tomorrow Tomorrow on the N64, which was what I anecdotally saw with the Genesis vs SNES. > And, as a nit: the Saturn wasn't backwards compatible. The NA Saturn could play Genesis games. I didn't own one so I couldn't test if it played Master System games. > The Genesis was, but no one outside of Europe and Brazil cared about the Master System. I feel personally attacked. ;) I don't remember why I got the Sega Master System over an NES, but it may have been for Phantasy Star. To the original post, I agree the Sony Playstation hurt Sega significantly, but I think Sega was in trouble before the PS hit the shelves (in part because of the issues w/ the SegaCD and 32x, as you said).
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoSony kept innovating PS1, you could play your CD musics and play games PS2, you could play your DVD movies, play games and play online! PSP, you could browse the internet, watch movies, listen to music and play games on the go! Sony kept innovating and that helped the industry move forward Now they are exploring with VR.. What the competition been doing during that time other than complain? You see that kind of similar success with Nintendo and the Wii, they innovated and attracted the mass, and they repeated it with the Switch Sony gets lot of unfair criticism in my opinion, Apple did the same with the iPhone, they offered something unique that people wanted If Microsoft wants to turn the table, they'll have to offer something interesting, 2 console with different specs just aint it
- Solvency 3y agoSega Genesis had X-Band. Literally internet on a cartridge-based console.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoIt wasn't a Sega product and was also available on the NES, internet in the 90's was very niche What's funny is the NES was a personal computer in Japan (Famikon - Family Computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System#...
- nebula8804 3y agoLets be fair, Microsoft entered this industry by innovating their way in. The original XBOX having built in Ethernet and a HDD meant that they were first to establish a proper online service and then they built out the whole infrastructure to enable voice chat and social. Reminder that this was before Skype, Facebook, and even Myspace! They essentially built the first real online voice communication and social network. Contrast this with the PS2 which was a bolted on online experience. You had to buy separate equipment to connect it, the support was limited to a handful of games and each game had their own custom infrastructure. It was a legacy console in this regard. They followed it up with the 360 adding a whole layer to the gameplay with things like achievements, expanding the console to include things like Netflix while further solidifying their online offerings. The 360 helped make online video streaming into what it is today. It allowed people to spend more time doing things with their "box" when they didn't want to play video games. Then came the massive support for indie titles and the app store. Wanted to play a classic? You can in minutes with the app store. (Sony eventually copied this but MSFT was first out of the gate). Sure Microsoft fumbled multiple times, which company hasn't? You can list numerous examples where Sony, Nintendo, and Sega have messed up. But Microsoft has definitely innovated and helped move the industry forward.
- droptablemain 3y agoI found a reference to a game called "Duke Newcomb 3D" in this document. Gave me a nice laugh.
- bmogen 3y agoBen and David did an amazing recap of this as a followup to their Nintendo episode for anyone interested in longer form audio: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cYnQRvFySAG8n3Hu5or44?si=99d26300a6264a35 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1cYnQRvFySAG8n3Hu5or44?si=9...
- LarsDu88 3y agoSega was vicious in how they approached hardware. They low-level took down 3dfx with false promises to include a 3dfx voodoo chip in the Sega Dreamcast, then reneging on the deal, contributing to 3dfx's ultimate bankruptcy and the rise of Nvidia today.