In recent years, the rise of the “gaming history” genre has exposed me to many Western-centric Sega post mortems that essentially blame the fall of Sega on conflicts between Sega of America (and SoE) and the Sega of Japan mother company - with the vast majority of the blame being placed on SoJ for being ridiculously overly secretive.

Very interesting to hear the other side of the argument in this article. Paraphrased: SoA was a marketing division that kept biting off more than it could chew and was negatively impacted by proximity to SV and the “move fast and break things” ethos.

The prototypes shown in the article demonstrate that SoJ clearly had no lack of creativity or desire to experiment with unique hardware concepts - but they were extremely cautious not to release anything half-baked. Meanwhile, SoA kept announcing (and sometimes even releasing) hardware that was inferior to similar concepts under development in Japan.

The SoA “Sega VR” vs the SoJ “Virtua Visor”, the SoA 32X vs the SoJ Saturn, etc.

SoJ still likely deserves much of the blame since they repeatedly refused to share information on internal prototypes to SoA, but the issue is clearly more nuanced than the “stodgy Japanese vs dynamic Americans” explanation I kept getting fed.