Sledgehammer, on 21 October 2017 - 10:29 AM, said:
Just a reminder: Bernie Stolar is the same man who said "Saturn is not our future" (1997 E3) what scared away a lot of publishers and greatly contributed to Saturn's death in America, not to mention that his desire to see 3D titles only no matter the quality (which also means no JRPGs are allowed) on both Saturn and PS1 also did a lot of damage to the systems in NA (PS1 in America was a shitshow on launch in term of game library). The only good thing he did was probably a successful Dreamcast launch in NA, but even then he fucked it up at the same time when he denied DVD players for Dreamcast, something what made PS2 a huge success in the first place. Tom Kalinske is perhaps the only SoA's (or the entire SEGA) former CEO who is worth to be proud of.
So what? Sega was losing tons of money on every Saturn sold. Go compare the final revision of the Saturn's motherboard to the Playstation's. Now try selling it at the same price. You're just going to bleed out.
What really contributed to the system's downfall was the terrible architecture. Developers didn't want to waste an extensive amount of time programming a machine with a piss poor install base. By the time Stolar killed it at E3, the system was already dead in the water and the entire country knew it. They were including Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop, and Daytona USA with every system. That wasn't working either...three free games couldn't shift any units.
The system's very
existence was enough to kill the company. NOTHING about the architecture, marketing, software library, or brand image was tailored to the Western World.
Stolar's
real mistake that no one talks about is pricing the Dreamcast at cost. $249 would have been low enough, and the install base would have grown at the same rate. Honestly, that's what really sunk the company. How many companies have had the chance to launch a system at one of the lowest prices ever, adjusted for inflation, AND pocket fifty bucks per unit?! Sucks too, because aside from that, he nailed the launch.
Full disclosure: I own a modded Saturn with an Action Replay Plus 4M, and I fucking love it.
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That said, "Hollywood stars" already looks like a big red flag and sounds like that alone will cost a lot of money considering that even quite horrible VA themselves seems to be very expensive in States (compared to Japanese VA, at least), I find their strike especially hilarious. "Episodic" too doesn't bring any kind of confidence unless this is not another Square Enix "episodic" bullshit.
The red flag isn't Scott Miller's shady business deals?