Comment by gryson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gryson | Hacker News Reader

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This narrative has been pushed quite heavily by former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, but it leaves a lot out. Kalinske claims the Japanese president of Sega, Hayao Nakayama, forced him to launch the Saturn in NA before Kalinske was ready, and because of that, the Saturn failed and Kalinske resigned shortly after. As always, it's best to approach with caution when CEOs are assigning blame for company failures under their tenure.

The reality is far, far more complicated. Kalinske himself was against the Saturn going back to 1993, due to the predicted high cost of the console. This in turn led to the development of the 32X add-on for the Genesis as a low-cost entry into the 32-bit generation in NA, but the 32X failed spectacularly.

Most relevant, however, is that Sega failed to adequately compete against Sony in terms of garnering third-party support, both in Japan and NA. This is discussed at length in the excellent book Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakura (English translation available). The Saturn was difficult to develop for and Sega did not have good development tools early on.

Also worth reading is the recent account from former Sega president Hideki Sato, who was the head designer of the Saturn. He discusses many of the shortcomings of the console and Sega's strategy for it:

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sa...

I agree that this is way more complicated.

Nobody knew what 3D hardware would look like in 1994, they were too busy inventing it. For example, the Saturn provides quads as your primitive, which seems weird to anybody looking at the Saturn today. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 both used triangles.

You might have various reasons to prefer the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, but from a developer's perspective, the main reason you would prefer the Saturn is probably because of its 2D performance. But a higher price point for better 2D performance is a tough sell.

It's also interesting to look at the different companies through the lens of what their strengths are. Sony has generally had pretty solid hardware design, Microsoft has generally made systems that are easier to develop software for, etc.

Better 2D performance and more RAM. The lack of RAM kneecapped the Capcom fighting game ports on PSX.

The Saturn’s RAM expansion pack helped too: https://sega.jp/fb/segahard/ss/ram.html

Interesting discussion of the quad system: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/why-did-gpus-abandon-quad...

Great comment, and I agree. I do think Kalinske's rationalization is bullcrap ... but it also alludes to some truth, namely that Sega America and Sega Japan were not aligned on console strategy and were downright adversarial - and that certainly contributed to the failure of Saturn.

>The Saturn was difficult to develop for

That's something of an understatement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn#Technical_specific...

The Saturn always struck me as overdesigned and underengineered. So many custom chips to program and coordinate and a high unit cost when the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony ends up being just as good and cheaper almost all of the time.

>the simpler and more flexible approach taken by Sony

I mean, up to a point? The PS1 was so simple it didn't have a floating point processor. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bkedc/heres_a_quest...

Not having dedicated floating-point hardware seems like a totally reasonable trade-off, and is common even today for applications below a certain price point. They chose the MIPS R3051, even though the relatively low-cost R3500 was available then; the R3500, with an R3000 core plus integrated R3010 FPU, MMU and memory buffer co-processors, would have blown the budget for the console. At launch in 1994, the PS1 shipped with a fixed-point GPU (with GTE for 3d matrix math), and certainly held its own against the competition.

The PS1 platform prospered because it was cheap, and relatively welcoming for developers (lots of tooling, libraries, infrastructure), and it ended up selling over 100 million units.

It's very tough to argue too much with that kind of success.

The Saturn also lacked an FPU.

I've read in the past (sorry, don't have the link right now) that Sony also did some hardball with licensing.

In particular I've been told that they threatened Capcom over Mega Man 8 and X4, saying that if those didn't also show up on PSX, Capcom would lose their publishing license on PSX. If true, that would certainly add a bit of heat on licensees to publish on PSX and would result in Sega losing a lot of third-party exclusives.

I wise sage once said, https://youtu.be/Vhh_GeBPOhs?t=2 when you aren't number one, you can't afford shenanigans.

Hard to remember, but in North America at the time, Sega was #1.

Sometimes if you are number one, you still can't afford shenanigans.

The lesson is that no one can afford shenanigans, at least not for long.

Sega of Japan didn't remember that even when it was happening.

You're missing three part where Kallinske was trying to make a deal with Silicon Graphics for the hardware that Nintendo ended up buying for the n64. This would have been a much better outcome. Sega Japan shut it down simply because Kallinske came up with it and they weren't going to answer to Sega America.

Kallinske was also agaisnt the 32x.

Dreamcast was fine. It was a good machine with a good library, but it was too late by then.

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