Shenmue 3, or a New Sega Console?

[MrSega]

@CruSega. From what we can conclude, had SEGA known that Sony was planning to enter the hardware business they would have chosen a chipset early on that would been entirely Model 2 based,one VDP, high res and would have 3Xs more powerful than PSone & it would been so simple to program.

I can easily say that JAMMA 1993 proved fateful. The Japanese Amusment Crowds' reaction of disinterest in Model 1 SAVED SEGA from making a stupid business decision that would have been disasterous & Saturn would have suffered an even WORSE fate.

Yeah, I kinda get sad thinking about Shenmue. When you think about it, at the time it begin development in early 1997, things had finally started looking up Saturn. US sales had finally improved, 3rd party developers were willing to give it one more chance, there were dozens of Japanese killer apps begging to be imported & best of all, SEGA had finally figured out how to utilize its power & had solved the problem on how to deal with its difficult programming. All this was proof that Saturn still had a few years of life left. But leave it to that idiot Bernie Stolar to ruin everything.

But today at least we can look on the bright side, Things aren't looking good for Sony, Vita is off to a poor start in Japan & there ain't going to be no Playstation 4 for a while.

[CruSega]

@CruSega. From what we can conclude, had SEGA known that Sony was planning to enter the hardware business they would have chosen a chipset early on that would been entirely Model 2 based,one VDP, high res and would have 3Xs more powerful than PSone & it would been so simple to program.

I can easily say that JAMMA 1993 proved fateful. The Japanese Amusment Crowds' reaction of disinterest in Model 1 SAVED SEGA from making a stupid business decision that would have been disasterous & Saturn would have suffered an even WORSE fate.

Yeah, I kinda get sad thinking about Shenmue. When you think about it, at the time it begin development in early 1997, things had finally started looking up Saturn. US sales had finally improved, 3rd party developers were willing to give it one more chance, there were dozens of Japanese killer apps begging to be imported & best of all, SEGA had finally figured out how to utilize its power & had solved the probem on how to deal with its difficult programming. All this was proof that Saturn still had a few years of life left. But leave it to that idiot Bernie Stolar to ruin everything.

But today at least we can look on the bright side, Things aren't looking good for Sony, Vita is off to a poor start in Japan & there ain't going to be no Playstation 4 for a while.

And Saturn sales were good in the Christmas of 1997 when Sega was giving away Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. What that jackass Stolar did was unforgivable to Sega's US supporters and to the Japan market where Saturn was still very competitive. I still remember the sheer horror when he uttered "The Saturn is not Sega's future."

All those great Saturn games that Stolar left behind in Japan....lucky my Saturn was modified.

[stu]

@CruSega. If you check out the System16.com link on Model 2 I posted, on the Dayona USA flyer site owner who's an Arcade engineer expert states with hard evidence that Daytona USA was originally coded as a Model 1 game early in development.

I checked there and it made no mention of Daytona USA being originally a Model 1 game. I also take issue with your claim that Model 1 was unpopular within Sega and that this was why it was dropped, in fact I have found that it was quite the opposite.
From what I have read on the subject Virtua Racing was actually only developed as a experimental game and was never planned for release, however Sega got such a positive reaction when they showed the game that they decided to put it in to full production. Both Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter were extremely popular games.
The only reason Sega didn't develop more Model 1 games was down to the high cost of the board. They opted to use Model 2, which was still expensive, but had better performance and gave Sega a more competitive edge in the arcade market.

Here is what Absolute Astronomy has to say about Virtua Racing:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Virtua_Racing

Quote: "Virtua Racing or V.R. for short, is a Formula One racing arcade game, developed by Sega-AM2 and released in October 1992. Virtua Racing was initially a proof-of-concept application for exercising a new 3D-graphics platform under development, the "Model 1". The results were so encouraging, that Virtua Racing was fully developed into a standalone arcade title. Although Atari's Hard Drivin' had introduced polygonal characters and environments to the racing genre 4 years earlier, VR had vastly improved visuals in terms of polygon count, frame rate, and overall scene complexity, which all contributed to a greater sense of immersion."

[MrSega]

@CruSega. Got a PAR 5 &1 Cartridge for my Saturn back in 2009. I snagged a copy of the flawless port of X-Men VS Street Fighter with the 4MB cart. Since my Saturn is almost 15 years old, I don't wanna strain it so I plan on buying a Japanese Saturn.

[CruSega]

@CruSega. Got a PAR 5 &1 Cartridge for my Saturn back in 2009. I snagged a copy of the flawless port of X-Men VS Street Fighter with the 4MB cart. Since my Saturn is almost 15 years old, I don't wanna strain it so I plan on buying a Japanese Saturn.

Sega consoles are rock solid. This isn't Microsloth we're talking about here. But if you get a Saturn, one of those fancy white ones look snazzy even to this day.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sega-Saturn-SS- ... 53eaeb81dd

My Saturn is going to be 17 years old this May, and still runs like it came straight out of the box. Still have fond memories when NetLink was my only gateway to the Net, via Concentric ISP.

[MrSega]

@CruSega. While I don't mind which Japanese color I plan on getting( either an early Grey one from 1994-1995 or the more popular 1996-1999 White Saturns.) It all depends on what I can find on Amazon.

I brought my Saturn brand new in August 1997. Works fine. Except the CD lid is busted,no big deal. It still works. Just have to keep prying the door open with a penny.

I also brought Rockman X3 as an import straight from Japan!

[stu]

And Saturn sales were good in the Christmas of 1997 when Sega was giving away Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. What that jackass Stolar did was unforgivable to Sega's US supporters and to the Japan market where Saturn was still very competitive. I still remember the sheer horror when he uttered "The Saturn is not Sega's future."

All those great Saturn games that Stolar left behind in Japan....lucky my Saturn was modified.

While it was true that the Saturn sales were good in 1997, Sega were bleeding a lot of red ink when they were "giving away" those Saturns with those games. In trying to match Sony's price cuts like from 199.99 down to 149.99 and further, this really ate in to Sega's available funds, since the Saturn had always been an expensive machine to manufacture, due to its complexity. I remember an analysis I read on the way the Saturn was constructed and it pointed out that Sega was certainly losing money on each Saturn sold, due to its complex architecture and the sheer number of components in it.

I think in the end Sega found themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation with Saturn, they realised that they would be cutting off their fans by killing the system early, but at the same time they couldn't afford to be losing so much on each system sold and still be able to invest in building the Dreamcast, I think in the end Sega just decided to cut their losses and concentrate on the Dreamcast.

I think this situation occured with Microsoft and the original Xbox, that thing cost a fortune to make and apparently Microsoft lost about 4 billion dollars on the original Xbox, which is why they killed it as soon as the Xbox360 came out.

Going back to the Saturn, I think Sega could of handled the situation better, maybe by keeping the software on the shelves so that existing owners could at least buy games, also maybe brought some of those games from Japan over, probably dropping production of the machine, but keeping the games on the shelves would of been more profitable.

In closing I agree overall it was certainly a shitty situation for the Saturn owners, seeing Sega drop the system so completely. I'm sure a lot of people who bought the 32X and Sega-CD as well as the Saturn probably swore off ever buying another Sega branded console again after that happened.

[Comrade Snarky]

Microsoft's main issue with the original Xbox was how they signed contracts. They couldn't use many alternate suppliers for parts and didn't have a way to redesign the chips and shrink the size. I don't remember the details, they could have made a profit, but their legal team dropped the ball.

[stu]

Microsoft's main issue with the original Xbox was how they signed contracts. They couldn't use many alternate suppliers for parts and didn't have a way to redesign the chips and shrink the size. I don't remember the details, they could have made a profit, but their legal team dropped the ball.

Thats true. A lot of the circumstances in Microsoft's case are different, I was more using the Xbox example to demonstrate another situation where a console manufacturer chose to kill off a system prematurely, due to it losing a lot of money throughout it's time on the market.
A lot of issues with the original Xbox revolved around Microsoft's poor relationship with Nvidia over how much Nvidia were charging for their Xbox GPU, also Intel controlled the manufacturing of the Pentium III/Celeron that was used in the Xbox, the component that I believe was the most expensive was the 8GB hard drive in the Xbox, the costs on this component stayed pretty static all through the Xbox's life and certainly never got cheaper for them.

[CruSega]

And Saturn sales were good in the Christmas of 1997 when Sega was giving away Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and Virtua Cop. What that jackass Stolar did was unforgivable to Sega's US supporters and to the Japan market where Saturn was still very competitive. I still remember the sheer horror when he uttered "The Saturn is not Sega's future."

All those great Saturn games that Stolar left behind in Japan....lucky my Saturn was modified.

While it was true that the Saturn sales were good in 1997, Sega were bleeding a lot of red ink when they were "giving away" those Saturns with those games. In trying to match Sony's price cuts like from 199.99 down to 149.99 and further, this really ate in to Sega's available funds, since the Saturn had always been an expensive machine to manufacture, due to its complexity. I remember an analysis I read on the way the Saturn was constructed and it pointed out that Sega was certainly losing money on each Saturn sold, due to its complex architecture and the sheer number of components in it.

I think in the end Sega found themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation with Saturn, they realised that they would be cutting off their fans by killing the system early, but at the same time they couldn't afford to be losing so much on each system sold and still be able to invest in building the Dreamcast, I think in the end Sega just decided to cut their losses and concentrate on the Dreamcast.

I think this situation occured with Microsoft and the original Xbox, that thing cost a fortune to make and apparently Microsoft lost about 4 billion dollars on the original Xbox, which is why they killed it as soon as the Xbox360 came out.

Going back to the Saturn, I think Sega could of handled the situation better, maybe by keeping the software on the shelves so that existing owners could at least buy games, also maybe brought some of those games from Japan over, probably dropping production of the machine, but keeping the games on the shelves would of been more profitable.

In closing I agree overall it was certainly a shitty situation for the Saturn owners, seeing Sega drop the system so completely. I'm sure a lot of people who bought the 32X and Sega-CD as well as the Saturn probably swore off ever buying another Sega branded console again after that happened.

Unfortunately for Sega, once they committed to the Saturn's unconventional design, they had no choice but to stand behind it. Despite financial losses on the 3-game giveaway, they could have used the expanded userbase as a basis for new titles, such as Shenmue and a real Sonic based off the 3D portion of Sonic Jam or completed the STI version of Sonic XTreme. They would have still lost money but in the long term, would have been a wiser decision than abandoning another platform.

And you're right about 32X and SegaCD. Despite claims that it's water under the bridge, many ardent Sega supporters vowed never to invest in Sega after the Saturn and have maintained that vow to this day. That's why Dreamcast sales, after the euphoria of 9/9/99, slowed down to a crawl in 2000. Sega threw many fans under the bus with the 3 prior failed systems and expected them to return when Dreamcast was available. Worst management in gaming since Atari.

Sega also missed (more like threw away) the opportunity to continue milking the (still lucrative) Genesis market when they sold the distribution rights to Majesco, thereby putting themsevlves in the unenviable position of having to depend only on the ailing Saturn.

The difference between Sega and MS is that MS never screwed over their fans with junk such as 32X and SegaCD. I remember going to small import shops in 1998, and the owners were hesitant to even open a Dreamcast for display. Safer for them to keep pushing the PS1 which was still selling like proverbial hotcakes.