They didn't just make a few tactical mistakes. They had deep-reaching organizational failure, and succeeding would have required doing basically everything different, beginning from the SoJ/SoA bifurcation. For Saturn to be a success, it would have needed :
- To cost $100 less
- To be programmable in a straightforward main thread/render thread paradigm
- To not be launched into a market already confused by Sega CD and 32X, and have not wasted any capital or development effort on those turkeys
- To have good games and good 3rd party development support
I think the price could be overcome if they had good games and marketing. Since nobody bought CD or 32x the confusion was probably secondary to the resources lost on them. Your 2nd point sounds like it's referring to how Saturn was a hassle to program for, which was definitely a problem.
The 4th point there is the most important. Sonic is the most obvious and important, but they didn't carry on many of their other franchises from Genesis to Saturn either. Nintendo at least had the sense to fall back on their established franchises, and to do them well.
They fucked up 1 and 2 front to back, and it goes all the way down to their software & engineering teams being heads-down in arcade boards and thus not comprehending where home gaming was going. And because they got that wrong, the hardware ended up being colossally expensive and difficult to program while delivering awful 3D performance & image quality. The last couple years of Genesis were mismanaged to a horrendous degree, which is why they launched into a bad market situation and terrible dev relationship of their own making. It wasn't fixable, not really. I've seen it said that Sega is, at heart, the company that fucked up SMS, Game Gear, Nomad, 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast, and the fact Genesis succeeded was really just a happy accident.
I can't argue with that, but I do think it was fixable. They should've stuck it out instead of rushing into Dreamcast. Find ways to lower the price and put out good games.
Dreamcast actually had a good launch apparently, but they were already in too bad a position for it to matter I guess. Maybe that would've changed had they delayed their next gen plans.
The Nintendo 64, by contrast, really only had two major failures. One was sticking with cartridges, which screwed up the economics of the platform and the ease of porting. The other was treating 3rd parties like Nintendo still held all the cards. This all came back to a business failure, not understanding that Sony had become the big dog and needed to be seen as holding the superior market position.
I'd say being last to that generation didn't do Nintendo any favors either. They let Sony get a foothold and essentially usurp their position, and when they finally did launch the N64 it had just 2 games (even if one
was SM64).
I think Metal Gear is a really great and fun series and no I don't care that it's woke because Raiden is a femboy or The Boss knows karate or whatever fuck you.
Nobody actually thinks it's woke bud
The first Tomb Raider game is a tedious piece of shit. Oh what's that, your jump angle onto the poorly textured platform ledge was 0.1 degrees off? Lol now you're dead from either ludicrous fall damage, or landing next to an overpowered enemy you can barely fight thanks to the shitty camera providing awful combat. There goes a half-hour of progress unless you save every 2 minutes like an autistic maniac! Its designers should be banished, and whoever inflated Lara's tits by accident is the sole reason this hot mess became a franchise.
I agree, but it was probably great at the time, you need to consider historical context.
Getting rid of persistent lobbies in many games sucked the fun out of them to me. Used to be, you'd play with the same people 4-5 games in a row and party up with people you clicked with. Now it's just random people silently playing along to advance to their next unlock before disbanding at the end of a single match or game.
They got rid of those? That's insane.
What I really hate is not being able to message players in games. Modern settings let everyone turn their profile private, sucks the fun out of things. I mean, I mostly just wanna use it to bitch at people, but still, I might wanna say gg or something. Gaming has become so impersonal. You're never going to find a rival or anything these days.
