That said, the Sega CD was reasonably successful for what it was, and I don't think it contributed much to Sega's downfall (if anything, it helped Sega foster an impression with customers of being on the cutting edge of things back then). Far more egregious were the 32X, since it confused customers about the company's direction after the Genesis and was abandoned so quickly, and the Saturn's architecture being so much more expensive and complicated than the PlayStation, especially for 3D games. The cost let Sony undercut them because they knew Sega couldn't match them without losing money on each console, and the complexity was such a hurdle that even Sega's first-party developers had trouble figuring it out (they had to release "do-over" ports of Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA because the first versions were so rushed and buggy). Sega of America also pulled the plug on the Saturn way too early (because of Bernie Stolar's infamous interview where he said the console wasn't the company's future, which caused third parties to immediately cancel their releases for it), which left the company with basically no presence in their biggest market for about two years.
Whereas I was talking about gaming on the Dreamcast back when it was still supported by Sega.
There was an arcade system based on the Dreamcast hardware called the Atomiswave. Instead of GDROMs, it used solid state storage.
Many (20+) of the Atomiswave games have now been converted to the Dreamcast and work great on the MODE etc.
Of course it is. If I were in on Sega’s board at the time then I’d have made they same decisions they had too. Those were the “correct” decisions for what they knew at the time. But that doesn’t change that it was the wrong architecture in hindsight.
That said, execs at Sony predicted the downfall of Saturn and would tease Sega execs about it at friendly lunch events. (There have been details accounts of those conversations shared by Sega execs, but a lot of them are published in Japanese)
> The conclusion our analysts reached was that the Saturn would win, largely on the strength of Virtua Fighter as compared to Tekken.
Sega developers were already experienced working on the Saturn’s architecture because they’d had exposure to similar boards on Sega’s arcade architectures. The problem was Sega existed in a little bit of a bubble compared to the direction that the rest of the industry was moving in with regards to 3D rendering.
So the problems with the Saturn weren’t obvious to observers until much later when games studios started complaining (though Sony had also “incentivised” discontent by buying up studios with exclusivity deals).
On top of this, Sega had some major unforced errors between harming their own credibility with the 32X and Sega CD and their surprise early launch that led to them launching with almost no games and angering retailers so badly that they refused to stock the system.
To me these are bigger factors than the architecture; the Saturn still does have impressive 3D games.
I also don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that SDKs were unknown to Sega at the time. They were being occasionally used on earlier consoles too (even if it wasn’t the norm). The real reason Sony had an SDK on launch and Sega didn’t was simply because Sega had a massive development resource whereas Sony had to rely entirely solely on 3rd party developers. So releasing an SDK was always on the roadmap for Sega but a lesser priority than it wouldn’t have been for Sony.
An SDK would certainly have made it easier to program for the Saturn but ultimately it would still have been significantly harder than the PlayStation.
Your overall point that there were lots of contributing factors is correct though. I wasn’t intending to suggest that the Saturns failure was down to one specific thing.
Edit: just to add, I agree there are some awesome 3D games on the Saturn. I own one and have a few. But the existence of good 3D games doesn’t negate the point that it was architecturally a challenging platform to do 3D on. I’d describe it really more of a 2D console that can do 3D via an official hack.
From going multicore before the tools were ready to backing quads over polygons.
The big thing folks have remember, Sony was not considered a major threat. It was entirely possible it could have just become. another obscure Japanese console from a hifi company. Like the X68000, PcEngine, Pippin & FMtowns Marty.
The modem did work surprisingly well for online gaming though and routers with Ethernet sockets weren’t (yet) common in most homes so I don’t disagree with Sega’s decision not to ship Ethernet as standard. It’s just a pity those Ethernet adapters are now in such short supply.
I still play on my Dreamcast a lot. It is a great console that, in my opinion, is the first of a whole new generation of consoles based around online play. But like a lot of pioneers, it suffered a little from being ahead of its time. Plus the fiasco of the Sega CD, 32x and Saturn (all of which were actually pretty decent in their own right but shouldn’t have existed from a commercial perspective) wouldn’t have helped peoples options of Sega ahead of the Dreamcast launch either.