CruSega wrote:
I think Sega wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted desperately to retain the huge Genesis userbase in America with 32X while winning the Japanese market with the Saturn. All that time and money wasted on developing,marketing, packaging the 32X could have been used towards the Saturn in the US market, a market that Sega was enjoying immense success with Genesis. Star Wars Arcade could have, for example, been retooled into a Saturn launch title along with possibly a Virtua Racing Remix (fully texture mapped)--instead, these two decent games were wasted on the magic mushroom 32X. There was a Virtua Racing for Saturn from Time Warner Interactive but it sucked. At least in Japan, consumers had the choice of 32X or Saturn from the get go (and they sold around three 32Xs there). In the West, 32X was shoved down our throats and it was wrong since the western gamers were the ones supporting Sega and embracing Sonic, Streets of Rage, Ecco the Dolphin...but we get shafted.
In one magazine, possibly GamePro, Tom Kalinske described Sega's strategy as that of GM: Genesis would be the Chevrolet (for budget gamers), 32X would be for the everyday gamer (kind of like Buick) and Saturn would be the "Cadillac" of Sega's hardware lineup. I was stunned at how moronic the statement was, considering Sony had the PSOne ready for battle and Donkey Kong Country was helping Nintendo regain the lead in the 16 bit market. Sega must have really felt the US gamers were dumb enough to buy anything from them which clearly was not the case... as Pico failed and Nomad was disastrous. I picked up a Nomad for about 20 bucks in 1995 or 1996. It devoured batteries after 30 minutes of use.
I agree there on your first point. Sega definitely got too greedy and wanted to keep both their domination of the US and European markets and then also take advantage of Virtua Fighter's popularity over in Japan, however the way they went about it was terribly flawed. As far as the US launch goes they should never had planned the 32X, that was going to end up a mistake from the very start. They should of gone ahead with the original plan to launch it in September so as to maximize the number of games available, maybe then they could of worked to improve the US/EU version of Daytona so that it didn't have that huge border around it, going through with the original plan would of kept that retailers on their side and would of meant that there were more 3rd party titles to choose from, it wouldn't have solved any of the Saturn's other shortcomings tech wise but an improved launch range of games would have given prospective owners a better choice of games.
As for that article you mentioned I think I read something in a UK magazine saying much the same thing, sadly I think by the time I read that I was already starting to lose faith in Sega and their plans, having both the 32X and the Saturn on the market created a lot of confusion in the marketplace and I really didn't feel like choosing either for fear of picking up the wrong one. I eventually waited till about May 1996 to make my choice, since things had started to settle down by that time in the UK. I ended up picking the Playstation as it had more games available that I wanted to play.