Overly sophisticated system architecture - If you will recall, the common perception was that Saturn was the most notoriously difficult to program nextgen videogame console on the market at that time. This was not exactly true, though, and it all depended on your point-of-view. Sega gave the programmers exactly what they wanted, which was a system whose complex hardware could be directly tapped for whatever software they desired to code, along with ample documentation on every aspect possible. That was heaven itself if you were a top-notch codehead; however, it was a nightmare if you weren't - or if you were the manager of a software development team for a leading third-party software house whose superiors wanted you to finish your game ASAP. If you will recall, it was none other than Sega's own acclaimed programming genius Yu Suzuki who said, "I think that only one out of 100 programmers are good enough to [properly program] the Saturn." The third parties didn't have time to learn such a complex machine as the Saturn, and frankly their bosses didn't care - not with an easier-to-program nextgen console such as the Sony PlayStation readily available. Remember what veteran third-party programmer Steve Palmer had to say on the subject? "Video games were no longer a "niche" market, and the "big boys" had moved in. Time is money. Nobody was given the time to learn new hardware anymore." In creating an overly complex system architecture, Sega had practically guaranteed delays on Saturn software development for all parties concerned.
Lack of a sufficiently good development environment early on - Chris Slate of Game Players magazine made this observation as 1995 drew to its close: "Sega struck first with an early sneak attack launch in mid-May. Unfortunately, Sega caught itself by surprise as much as the competition, and the result was a great piece of hardware left to sit on shelves with just a handful of mostly mediocre games. It would stay this way until development caught up months later with worthy titles." The reason, as we now know, was that Sega did not have practically any third-party titles ready to ship with Saturn for its abruptly early U.S. launch. The game developers were still busy wading through the manuals and learning the hardware, and many of them preferred to wait until they better understood the console. Remember, many of the best games to ever grace Sega's venerable 16-bit Genesis/MegaDrive console were by such notable third parties as Capcom, Core, Electronic Arts, GameArts, Masiya, and Namco, to name but a few. Where did almost all of them go when the 32-bit generation of consoles came along? To the system for which software development was the easiest - the Sony PlayStation. Sega was too busy doing Saturn third-party support the old-fashioned way to realize just appealing Sony had made PlayStation development with its canned software libraries. Almost every developer who has cared to publically comment on the issue has noted that the Saturn was quite capable of matching and in some cases outshining PlayStation, but it wasn't until the second-revision Saturn devkits and the Sega Graphics Library 2.0 that they felt like that had what they needed to produce good games fast. Don't forget the observation by Sega's own Yu Suzuki that only 1 in 100 programmers were capable of properly programming the Saturn, nor developer Steve Palmer's observation about the constant time pressure on third-party software development, either. They and their fellows had to make good-looking, decently-playing games yesterday per their employer's demands. For the average developer, the only system on which one could consistently do that without having to learn a lot of documentation was the PlayStation with its canned software libraries, and that remained the situation for many moons until it was practically too late for Sega to fix the problem. By the time it presented a solution to Saturn development, most of its audience had left it months earlier and were clustering around Sony's console instead.
Misreading the system's early market performance - Sega of Japan was under the mistaken impression that Saturn did far better in Japan than it actually did. As the late Isao Okawa himself noted, they were too busy counting sales to take stock of long-term market trends, and that proved to be Sega's undoing. Simply put, Saturn did as well as it did in Japan for one reason - it was the only nextgen console available that had Virtua Fighter. Once the initial glamor wore off and the PlayStation proved itself a worthy competitor - less sophisticated in its hardware perhaps but with better 3D capability and a wider software base - then many Japanese gamers proved as astute as their Western counterparts by jumping ship and joining the Sony bandwagon. It just took a lot longer in Japan than it did in the West. Sega should have been paying far more attention to Saturns sold over the counter at local retail stores than it should have out of Sega warehouses to retailers.
Pricing the system too high for its intended market - You would think that Sega would have learned from Trip Hawkins and the blunders that were made with the 3DO, but instead it almost immediately committed the very same mistake that had doomed the 3DO to failure. Sega priced the Saturn too high for its intended market. Pricing trends that had been developing in the videogame market over the past two decades indicated that the average price for a brand-new, nextgen console should be within the US$200-$350 range. 3DO had been immediately doomed to extinction with its hefty US$800 price tag - a loftily absurd figure that seems ridiculous even now. For Sega to price the Saturn at US$399 was an open invitation to disaster in the minds of many industry analysts both then and now. Of course, there was a very good reason why Sega set the price of the Saturn so high: it was operating under a steadily growing mountain of debt. Even so, Sega should have been more willing to take a hit on the price of the console and instead look for needed funds in software sales, whence the real profits lay. Steven Kent sums up this particular issue as well as anybody in his seminal work The First Quarter when he observes, "[Saturn] was too expensive for the consumer elextronics category. The $399 price point was known to be more of a high-end electronics ticket - something that people might pay for a stereo component, but not for a videogame console. Sega was making the same mistake Trip Hawkins had made with the 3D0."
Alienation of potential system supporters - Sega's once-strong relationship with third-party developers was fraying fast due to the managerial meddling from Sega of Japan. Like Nintendo before it, Sega had began to throw its weight around, dictating to its licensees what they could and could not do, how much and when, and so on. The third parties no more liked this in 1995 than they did in 1985 when Nintendo was pulling the exact same crap. Sega had by now also gained the unenviable reputation of "putting out one hardware unit after another." While Sega of Japan made it perfectly clear that Saturn was and always would be the company's future, many developers remained skeptical - especially after news of the rumored Eclipse 64-bit Saturn upgrade and the all-new Katana and Black Belt console designs leaked out in 1997. With all this confusion going on, it was no wonder that the third party community began to look elsewhere to push its products. They found it in Sony, who was very generous in its licensing terms and offered a console with simple-to-program architecture that yielded incredible results. In contrast, Sega spent a lot of its time pissing off third parties big time, so it was inevitable that they woud turn to Sony instead. It was the exact same thing that Sega had done to Nintendo and Nintendo had done to Atari years before. You would have thought that somebody at Sega saw it coming.
Lack of a system library containing good, diverse software - If there is one lesson that you, the average gamer, should have learned by now, and it is one that I cannot emphasize enough, it is that software sales are the true money train of any given vendor's system. You have can have all the fancy hardware in the world, but if you don't have enough software that properly shows it off to your intended audience, then your system is going to suffer and you right along with it. Sega should have known better than to launch the Saturn the way it did in the U.S. - advance the release date so that there was almost no software for it, let along any good software. The scant handful of titles that were available were obviously and admittedly rushed. Not a good way to get your foot in the door of consumer's homes. Furthermore, the rushed launch meant that the console sat on store shelves for months without any significant software support. By the time it arrived, the opportunity that Sega had hoped to seize with an early launch had already passed and people were now looking at PlayStation instead. Sony may not have had Sega's experience in making videogames, but it had money and lots of it, and as Game Players put it, "Baby, that can buy you all the experience you need." Add to that the simplicity of the PlayStation architecture in comparison to the mess that comprised the Saturn's internals and it was no wonder that the third party community jumped ship as fast as it did. This trend would continue throughout the lifetime of both systems, with Sony's deep pockets enabling it to afford the third-party support and system exclusives that Sega simply could no longer afford as it lost precious market share and profits right along with it. The fact that Sony was able to do such things as launch the system with the backing of the likes of Namco and Konami, wrestle Square away from Nintendo (and the Final Fantasy RPG franchise along with it), get Capcom in its corner with its best programming teams and first go-round on hot titles (do the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil franchises ring a bell?), and welcome a disgruntled Working Designs from the Sega fold speaks volumes. Sony had the better and more diverse software library, with few exceptions, because they could afford to pay others to develop it for them. It's that simple.
Refusing the good advice of your peers - The executives at Sega of Japan were hell-bent on making the Saturn work in a market that they knew full well was Sony's for the taking. Since their side of the company was the older and more experienced, or so the common wisdom went, then they supposedly knew what was best for Sega. Nakayama and his allies repeately ignored and overruled the advice of Sega of America president Tom Kalinske and his staff, as well as that of Shinobu Toyoda, their own U.S. market liason, on just about every critical aspect of the rapidly burgeoning 32-bit videogame market. They were going to make the American videogame market fall in love with the Saturn just as it had with the Genesis years earlier. What they forgot was that it was the American side of the business that had endeared Sega to its American fans, not its Japanese senior management. The same was true over in Europe, but Saturn had already flopped there and Sega of Japan was not about to waste any time and effort there. The U.S. was the big money market - the place where the stakes were the highest - and it was there that the Saturn should have succeeded. It did not because Nakayama and his staff were too busy refusing to listen to the good advice of Kalinske, Toyoda, and their fellows. "You're launching the system way too early," Nakayama and his staff were repeatedly warned. "It doesn't have the software base. You're wasting your efforts." Sega of Japan simply would not listen to those who best knew the intended market. It should have surprised no one what happened next.
Banking all of the company's hopes on a flawed gamble - The single most important decision insofar as Sega's future was concerned was Nakayama's 1996 gamble of banking Sega's fortunes solely on the Saturn. In all fairness, Nakayama really did not have any other choice - Genesis was beginning to fade in the West and seasoned developers were turning their backs on his beloved little 32X. The flaw in Nakayama's decision was that he made it as early as he did. It is generally agreed by most industry observers that Genesis still had enough life left in it to survive another year, which would have given Sega one more desperately needed profit stream. It is also possible, given hindsight, that more developers would have begrudged the 32X another chance. Nakayama pulled the plug on Genesis before it was really dead and axed the 32X before it even got a fighting chance because he was desperate to see Sega seize the emerging 32-bit market for its own. By putting all of his eggs in one basket, leaving nothing else on which to fall back (something that his competition over at Nintendo was not doing), Nakayama was in effect tying down the wheel and leaving Sega's ship free to drift where she would in the currents of the videogame markets. How could he have possibly known that this one decision would have directly influenced Sega's course as it did?
Poor advertising campaigns - One of the most glaring problem with the Saturn was its public image. It got a bad rap from the industry, it got a bad rap from gamers, and it wound up getting a bad rap from Sega as well. That last was due to its erratic and largely ineffectual advertising efforts in the West to promote Saturn to nextgen gamers. Sega fans in Japan got excellent advertising, including a number of spots for its games that are still fondly remembered today. Over in the West, though, Sega promptly ditched the beloved and successful "Sega Scream" and "Pirate TV" in favor of a softer, more mature image. It didn't matter which firm Sega employed - most of the advertising wound up being pretty much the same: "Here is Saturn, damnit - now take it or leave it." Most Western gamers chose to leave it and buy PlayStations instead. By the time Sega executives figured out what what happening and why, it was too late. After that, it didn't matter what they did for advertising - they had already lost the media war to their more astute rivals.
Playing your hand too early - The last thing you want to do in a high-stakes poker game is tip your hand, especially when it is a losing one. Hayao Nakayama was the first to do this by ordering the 1995 launch of the Saturn in the U.S. moved up five months despite the protests of Sega of America. In so doing, he left the Saturn high and dry as a console with virtually no software to sell, thus giving Sony the chance to blitz the media with pre-launch PlayStation hype and build up a decent launch library for the console. Surprisingly enough, Bernie Stolar would repeat Nakayama's mistake once he arrived at Sega, albeit for different reasons. In all honesty, this is the only major mistake that I can attribute to Stolar's tenure at Sega of America. Notwithstanding the now-famous personality clashes that Stolar had with various individuals working with or in conjunction with Sega, he let it be known early on that Saturn was a doomed system; furthermore, he did so publically at E3 1997. After that, it was curtains for Saturn in the West. Nobody wanted to develop for it, nobody wanted to sell it, and nobody wanted to buy it or its games because the president of Sega of America had effectively said that the Saturn was dead. It precipitated continuing negative press on Sega's "dying system" that would grow and snowball until the official announcement was made the following year, hurting sales across the board. Yes, Saturn was already a doomed system, but Stolar had no business letting the rest of the world know about it while it could still have some presence on the market. That one comment killed any chance that Saturn had of making a respectable showing that year; in other words, as was noted earlier, Stolar "... buried the Saturn alive" with his statement. Instead, most of the market share that Sega lost went to the reemerging Nintendo, with Sony gobbling up the leftovers.
Source - SegaBase
Lack of a sufficiently good development environment early on - Chris Slate of Game Players magazine made this observation as 1995 drew to its close: "Sega struck first with an early sneak attack launch in mid-May. Unfortunately, Sega caught itself by surprise as much as the competition, and the result was a great piece of hardware left to sit on shelves with just a handful of mostly mediocre games. It would stay this way until development caught up months later with worthy titles." The reason, as we now know, was that Sega did not have practically any third-party titles ready to ship with Saturn for its abruptly early U.S. launch. The game developers were still busy wading through the manuals and learning the hardware, and many of them preferred to wait until they better understood the console. Remember, many of the best games to ever grace Sega's venerable 16-bit Genesis/MegaDrive console were by such notable third parties as Capcom, Core, Electronic Arts, GameArts, Masiya, and Namco, to name but a few. Where did almost all of them go when the 32-bit generation of consoles came along? To the system for which software development was the easiest - the Sony PlayStation. Sega was too busy doing Saturn third-party support the old-fashioned way to realize just appealing Sony had made PlayStation development with its canned software libraries. Almost every developer who has cared to publically comment on the issue has noted that the Saturn was quite capable of matching and in some cases outshining PlayStation, but it wasn't until the second-revision Saturn devkits and the Sega Graphics Library 2.0 that they felt like that had what they needed to produce good games fast. Don't forget the observation by Sega's own Yu Suzuki that only 1 in 100 programmers were capable of properly programming the Saturn, nor developer Steve Palmer's observation about the constant time pressure on third-party software development, either. They and their fellows had to make good-looking, decently-playing games yesterday per their employer's demands. For the average developer, the only system on which one could consistently do that without having to learn a lot of documentation was the PlayStation with its canned software libraries, and that remained the situation for many moons until it was practically too late for Sega to fix the problem. By the time it presented a solution to Saturn development, most of its audience had left it months earlier and were clustering around Sony's console instead.
Misreading the system's early market performance - Sega of Japan was under the mistaken impression that Saturn did far better in Japan than it actually did. As the late Isao Okawa himself noted, they were too busy counting sales to take stock of long-term market trends, and that proved to be Sega's undoing. Simply put, Saturn did as well as it did in Japan for one reason - it was the only nextgen console available that had Virtua Fighter. Once the initial glamor wore off and the PlayStation proved itself a worthy competitor - less sophisticated in its hardware perhaps but with better 3D capability and a wider software base - then many Japanese gamers proved as astute as their Western counterparts by jumping ship and joining the Sony bandwagon. It just took a lot longer in Japan than it did in the West. Sega should have been paying far more attention to Saturns sold over the counter at local retail stores than it should have out of Sega warehouses to retailers.
Pricing the system too high for its intended market - You would think that Sega would have learned from Trip Hawkins and the blunders that were made with the 3DO, but instead it almost immediately committed the very same mistake that had doomed the 3DO to failure. Sega priced the Saturn too high for its intended market. Pricing trends that had been developing in the videogame market over the past two decades indicated that the average price for a brand-new, nextgen console should be within the US$200-$350 range. 3DO had been immediately doomed to extinction with its hefty US$800 price tag - a loftily absurd figure that seems ridiculous even now. For Sega to price the Saturn at US$399 was an open invitation to disaster in the minds of many industry analysts both then and now. Of course, there was a very good reason why Sega set the price of the Saturn so high: it was operating under a steadily growing mountain of debt. Even so, Sega should have been more willing to take a hit on the price of the console and instead look for needed funds in software sales, whence the real profits lay. Steven Kent sums up this particular issue as well as anybody in his seminal work The First Quarter when he observes, "[Saturn] was too expensive for the consumer elextronics category. The $399 price point was known to be more of a high-end electronics ticket - something that people might pay for a stereo component, but not for a videogame console. Sega was making the same mistake Trip Hawkins had made with the 3D0."
Alienation of potential system supporters - Sega's once-strong relationship with third-party developers was fraying fast due to the managerial meddling from Sega of Japan. Like Nintendo before it, Sega had began to throw its weight around, dictating to its licensees what they could and could not do, how much and when, and so on. The third parties no more liked this in 1995 than they did in 1985 when Nintendo was pulling the exact same crap. Sega had by now also gained the unenviable reputation of "putting out one hardware unit after another." While Sega of Japan made it perfectly clear that Saturn was and always would be the company's future, many developers remained skeptical - especially after news of the rumored Eclipse 64-bit Saturn upgrade and the all-new Katana and Black Belt console designs leaked out in 1997. With all this confusion going on, it was no wonder that the third party community began to look elsewhere to push its products. They found it in Sony, who was very generous in its licensing terms and offered a console with simple-to-program architecture that yielded incredible results. In contrast, Sega spent a lot of its time pissing off third parties big time, so it was inevitable that they woud turn to Sony instead. It was the exact same thing that Sega had done to Nintendo and Nintendo had done to Atari years before. You would have thought that somebody at Sega saw it coming.
Lack of a system library containing good, diverse software - If there is one lesson that you, the average gamer, should have learned by now, and it is one that I cannot emphasize enough, it is that software sales are the true money train of any given vendor's system. You have can have all the fancy hardware in the world, but if you don't have enough software that properly shows it off to your intended audience, then your system is going to suffer and you right along with it. Sega should have known better than to launch the Saturn the way it did in the U.S. - advance the release date so that there was almost no software for it, let along any good software. The scant handful of titles that were available were obviously and admittedly rushed. Not a good way to get your foot in the door of consumer's homes. Furthermore, the rushed launch meant that the console sat on store shelves for months without any significant software support. By the time it arrived, the opportunity that Sega had hoped to seize with an early launch had already passed and people were now looking at PlayStation instead. Sony may not have had Sega's experience in making videogames, but it had money and lots of it, and as Game Players put it, "Baby, that can buy you all the experience you need." Add to that the simplicity of the PlayStation architecture in comparison to the mess that comprised the Saturn's internals and it was no wonder that the third party community jumped ship as fast as it did. This trend would continue throughout the lifetime of both systems, with Sony's deep pockets enabling it to afford the third-party support and system exclusives that Sega simply could no longer afford as it lost precious market share and profits right along with it. The fact that Sony was able to do such things as launch the system with the backing of the likes of Namco and Konami, wrestle Square away from Nintendo (and the Final Fantasy RPG franchise along with it), get Capcom in its corner with its best programming teams and first go-round on hot titles (do the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil franchises ring a bell?), and welcome a disgruntled Working Designs from the Sega fold speaks volumes. Sony had the better and more diverse software library, with few exceptions, because they could afford to pay others to develop it for them. It's that simple.
Refusing the good advice of your peers - The executives at Sega of Japan were hell-bent on making the Saturn work in a market that they knew full well was Sony's for the taking. Since their side of the company was the older and more experienced, or so the common wisdom went, then they supposedly knew what was best for Sega. Nakayama and his allies repeately ignored and overruled the advice of Sega of America president Tom Kalinske and his staff, as well as that of Shinobu Toyoda, their own U.S. market liason, on just about every critical aspect of the rapidly burgeoning 32-bit videogame market. They were going to make the American videogame market fall in love with the Saturn just as it had with the Genesis years earlier. What they forgot was that it was the American side of the business that had endeared Sega to its American fans, not its Japanese senior management. The same was true over in Europe, but Saturn had already flopped there and Sega of Japan was not about to waste any time and effort there. The U.S. was the big money market - the place where the stakes were the highest - and it was there that the Saturn should have succeeded. It did not because Nakayama and his staff were too busy refusing to listen to the good advice of Kalinske, Toyoda, and their fellows. "You're launching the system way too early," Nakayama and his staff were repeatedly warned. "It doesn't have the software base. You're wasting your efforts." Sega of Japan simply would not listen to those who best knew the intended market. It should have surprised no one what happened next.
Banking all of the company's hopes on a flawed gamble - The single most important decision insofar as Sega's future was concerned was Nakayama's 1996 gamble of banking Sega's fortunes solely on the Saturn. In all fairness, Nakayama really did not have any other choice - Genesis was beginning to fade in the West and seasoned developers were turning their backs on his beloved little 32X. The flaw in Nakayama's decision was that he made it as early as he did. It is generally agreed by most industry observers that Genesis still had enough life left in it to survive another year, which would have given Sega one more desperately needed profit stream. It is also possible, given hindsight, that more developers would have begrudged the 32X another chance. Nakayama pulled the plug on Genesis before it was really dead and axed the 32X before it even got a fighting chance because he was desperate to see Sega seize the emerging 32-bit market for its own. By putting all of his eggs in one basket, leaving nothing else on which to fall back (something that his competition over at Nintendo was not doing), Nakayama was in effect tying down the wheel and leaving Sega's ship free to drift where she would in the currents of the videogame markets. How could he have possibly known that this one decision would have directly influenced Sega's course as it did?
Poor advertising campaigns - One of the most glaring problem with the Saturn was its public image. It got a bad rap from the industry, it got a bad rap from gamers, and it wound up getting a bad rap from Sega as well. That last was due to its erratic and largely ineffectual advertising efforts in the West to promote Saturn to nextgen gamers. Sega fans in Japan got excellent advertising, including a number of spots for its games that are still fondly remembered today. Over in the West, though, Sega promptly ditched the beloved and successful "Sega Scream" and "Pirate TV" in favor of a softer, more mature image. It didn't matter which firm Sega employed - most of the advertising wound up being pretty much the same: "Here is Saturn, damnit - now take it or leave it." Most Western gamers chose to leave it and buy PlayStations instead. By the time Sega executives figured out what what happening and why, it was too late. After that, it didn't matter what they did for advertising - they had already lost the media war to their more astute rivals.
Playing your hand too early - The last thing you want to do in a high-stakes poker game is tip your hand, especially when it is a losing one. Hayao Nakayama was the first to do this by ordering the 1995 launch of the Saturn in the U.S. moved up five months despite the protests of Sega of America. In so doing, he left the Saturn high and dry as a console with virtually no software to sell, thus giving Sony the chance to blitz the media with pre-launch PlayStation hype and build up a decent launch library for the console. Surprisingly enough, Bernie Stolar would repeat Nakayama's mistake once he arrived at Sega, albeit for different reasons. In all honesty, this is the only major mistake that I can attribute to Stolar's tenure at Sega of America. Notwithstanding the now-famous personality clashes that Stolar had with various individuals working with or in conjunction with Sega, he let it be known early on that Saturn was a doomed system; furthermore, he did so publically at E3 1997. After that, it was curtains for Saturn in the West. Nobody wanted to develop for it, nobody wanted to sell it, and nobody wanted to buy it or its games because the president of Sega of America had effectively said that the Saturn was dead. It precipitated continuing negative press on Sega's "dying system" that would grow and snowball until the official announcement was made the following year, hurting sales across the board. Yes, Saturn was already a doomed system, but Stolar had no business letting the rest of the world know about it while it could still have some presence on the market. That one comment killed any chance that Saturn had of making a respectable showing that year; in other words, as was noted earlier, Stolar "... buried the Saturn alive" with his statement. Instead, most of the market share that Sega lost went to the reemerging Nintendo, with Sony gobbling up the leftovers.
Source - SegaBase
