Have the Big Three Learned from the Saturn's Mistake?

Has SEGA's failed platform taught Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony anything?
3/8/2008 7:10 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 5

So here's the deal: In 1994, SEGA took a look at a new rival -- Sony -- and saw trouble in the making. Sony aggressively courted game designers. The PlayStation was easier to program than Saturn. Though Saturn was potentially more powerful, harnessing that potential was difficult because Saturn had two processing chips instead of one. Saturn was also not as well suited for handling 3-D games as PlayStation.

When both systems launched in Japan, SEGA took an early lead because of Virtua Fighter; the Virtua Fighter series games were among the most popular arcade games in history in Japan. SEGA had a nearly perfect port of Virtua Fighter, and the game sold on a one-to-one ratio with the hardware.

In America, the arcade business had been in decline for a decade, and Virtua Fighter lagged behind the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games in popularity among U.S. players. SEGA executives saw the writing on the wall. To avoid going head-to-head with Sony in September, SEGA launched Saturn prematurely in May despite not having enough software or proper marketing support.

The result: Saturn launched weak, languished all summer, and was all but forgotten when Sony released the PlayStation four months later.

SEGA executives knew they had a disaster on their hands. The obvious answer would have been to lower the price -- the PlayStation sold for $299; but for some unknown reason, SEGA fought to maintain the $399 price point. To attract sales, SEGA packed Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, and Daytona USA in with the console. Those were amazing games, but Saturn still lagged behind. Even worse, in 1996, Nintendo released its Nintendo 64 console and SEGA found itself in third place just ahead of 3DO and the Atari Jaguar.

In all fairness, a lot was happening behind the scenes at SEGA. The company was suffering from vicious internal politics. Also, while SEGA had developed Saturn to be the ultimate 2-D gaming machine, the world had moved on to 3-D.

In the end, it was the inability to adapt that sank Saturn. Sony took over the market with a better price, exclusive support from a wide variety of game publishers, and a cool-factor that appealed to more than just traditional gamers.

Saturnized Sony?

There are a lot of similarities between Sony's current predicament and the predicament of the Saturn-era SEGA.

For openers, Sony, like SEGA, pushed the price envelope and came up dry.

Also, Sony, like SEGA, has left its customers wondering what to play for a full year. If you bought a Saturn and you were not into Clockwork Knight or Worldwide Soccer, you pretty much had to entertain yourself with Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon for six months. The assortment on PS3 has been wider, but the drought of A+ titles is notable.

Like SEGA, Sony has had to deal with multiple platforms, too. Sony is now floating three systems -- PS3, PS2 and PSP. Unlike SEGA, Sony has the finances and the muscle to float all three platforms. Anybody thinking Sony has abandoned PS2 prematurely has not tried the Buzz! series. Guitar Hero III came out for PS2, and so did Rock Band. One area in which PS3 seems almost identical to Saturn is the processing problems. When Saturn came out, it had dual Hitachi processing chips that made it potentially more powerful than PlayStation, but very few designers ever managed to harness that power.