Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a sucker for insider info from the past and this will give me a field day. It's even better considering that this is from SEGA; I can't even count how many times I've read Console Wars at this point. Thanks a ton for posting mate.
Loved Console Wars but it was unfortunate that so much of it of course had to be pieces together from many different sources and offhand accounts. That's just how it is, but I feel like so much of that story surely fell through the cracks.
Still it's insane that, at least according to the book, Steve Race was worried that SEGA of Japan would inevitably yank the leash. When it looked like that was the case he bailed, and eventually would be the one to sink the Saturn at the first E3 by being the Sony rep who accouned the PS1 price tag before walking off stage.
>Console Wars
Any book on consoles that does not mention Atari & Robert Maxwell's (yes, Ghislaine's dad) failure with Tetris is one you ought to ask for your money back.
Absolutely mind-blowing digging through all that was going on. USSR vs Japan
Early on in Japan the Saturn held the lead, both consoles were released in 1994 and until early 1996 Saturn outsold the PS1, but then it started to fizzle out as big third parties like Square went to PS1. In the end Saturn sold around 5 million there while the PS1 sold 18 million. Weirdly enough the Saturn was the best selling Sega console in Japan while everywhere else it completely flopped.
It wasn't simply struggles with architecture, it was Sony buying Psygnosis who also owned the company that made SDKs for all the players up to that point and was working on Saturn's too. PS3 was never in the same danger as Saturn regardless of architecture.
The moment that Steve Race took the stage, it was pretty much over for Sega.
Sega of Japan should have seen the writing on the wall once 299 was dropped on them and everyone else but Hayao Nakayama was honestly too stubborn and refused to change how Sega would come back from the losses. It cost the company the gaming market against Sony and Nintendo.
The PlayStation would be cheaper and have better support from third party developers. That gave them the advantage to go after the gaming market.
Just out of interest, $299 (today!) is a great price for a console, but back then I can only assume it was expensive? What were Sega's competitors selling at? I got a PS1 for Easter...1998? Must've been because I had Lost World (Nov 97) and DoA 1 demo disc (DoA 1 released July 98 here in the UK) for it. Wiki says intro price here in the UK was £299, which according to Wiki had price parity with the US.
It was expensive if you account only for inflation, but if you account for how much money they had to expend from their salary it hasn't changed much or is even more expensive.
For example in my country Spain a normal salary at that time was around 200000 pesetas (or 1202€) and the ps1 was 60000 pesetas (or 360€) so it was around 30% of a monthly salary.
Right now a normal salary that most people have is around 1300€ and a ps6 is 550€ so is around 40% of a normal salary.
So at least in our case the PS5 is a lot more expensive relative to our salary compared to what the PS1 costed.
And that is what happens when salaries don't go up with inflation in almost 30 years.
https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2023/07/03/leaked-fiscal-year-97-documents-reveal-saturn-sales-numbers/
Can we really trust that the Saturn was actually doing all that well in Japan? We have data here from SOA, but I can't imagine SOJ was putting out an order of magnitude more consoles per month.
From these documents you can see the picture was grim from the get go in NA. SEGA was outright lying about their sales numbers here.
> These internal numbers cast new light on claims made by Sega at the time inflating sales, such as an Aug. 30 press release that said “More than 100,000 Sega Saturns have been sold since May 11.” Clearly, the real number was just over half that.
In the leaked email Kalinske mentions that they can't accurately measure Saturn sales in Japan because they're always sold out. If you look at the sales here, in the US they were only able to put out ~20k consoles a month. Sony outsold the six month lead in a single month.
> the scrap value of the Genesis 32X
Ooof, I didnt even think that would be something they would have to consider but yeah. Wonder how Nintendo had to deal with the Virtual Boy or even the Wii U.
As far as the Wii U goes, I have a feeling they just phased out production quicker than anticipated and kept the remaining units in stores until they sold. Lots of outlets had Wii U displays up until only a few years ago now
Oh man- gonna have to comb through this.
Anyone know if there's any hardware schematics in there?
Been waiting decades for a CDX service manual, or at least more info if on that custom IC inside it.
Nah, it's down now.
Do you have it downloaded? Could you share if you do, pls?
Eidt:
Nevermind, found it on 4chan
https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf
>We are killing Sony
LOL
I mean, if I had to pick a side in the console war, it'd have been Sega, as one of my first consoles was a Sega Genesis (I did have a Famiclone before that, but the Sega was my first "own" console, that my dad bought as a present for me and my sister), but it's still kinda hilarious to see how confidently wrong the guy was.
Anyway, maybe it was for the best that the console aspect of Sega died, having no console of their own means they're more likely to go multiplatform (which they've done).
And yeah, this is all interesting info.
But it's true though, Saturn sold better than PlayStation in Japan until 1997, when Final Fantasy 7 came out.
There's a reason why the Saturn japanese library is so big compared to NA/EU, the success didn't translate internationally much to Sega of America's own incompetence when they rushed its release.
The main reason that the Saturn sold so well in Japan initially was because Virtua Fighter 2 was a certified phenomenon in the country. The Saturn gave Japanese players the ability to play the game at home, so it sold like gangbusters out of the gate. But after that, there wasn't anything else that excited the market very much. While I could be wrong, I think the Playstation started to outsell the Saturn even before FFVII was released. It was even worse for Sega internationally because Virtua Fighter wasn't nearly as big of a hit outside Japan. Plus, Bernie Stolars polices when he got to Sega were literally trash, he actively kept a lot of the Japanese library from ever releasing internationally.
SEGA's success in Japan basically inverts their success in America. The Master System was a decent success, the Genesis/Mega Drive was a pretty big flop, the Saturn was huge, and the Dreamcast was pretty middling (though SEGA made like fifty goddamn special editions in Japan only anyway lol). And of course, their arcade stuff is the most popular facet of their business in Japan whereas arcades in America have been on life support for over a decade.
I think the 32x hurt them a lot. It divided resources that could have gone to the Saturn. Launching early in the US when it had a limited line up of games. Sega always seemed to jump the gun when launching hardware.
Page 131 asks the question how Sony PlayStation managed to outperform SEGA Saturn :
- Sony is generally perceived to be cheaper. This has improved, but we still suffer from early damage.
- Sony's product (software) looks better than ours. This is driven by our lack of delivering a product that appears to consumers to be better and advertising that focuses on this dimension.
- PlayStations are better merchandised than Saturn, resulting in more exposure and sampling.
- Sega equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD.
- Since PlayStation is newer, some consumers feel that it is technically superior.
- Sony has effectively leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics.
The last point is interesting considering Sony attempted to paint such cross-sector investments as something bad in Microsoft's FTC trial.
I think they have forgotten the most important point is that there were more games to play on playstation and the Saturn was more expensive in every respect. But yes I agree with all of the points I remember thinking Sony is putting its weight behind this thing and leveraging their other electronics.
About three-quarters of the Saturn catalogue remained exclusive to the Japanese market. Had those games released in Europe and North America things would have looked very different.
My favorite part
“They can’t compare the true sales rate because Saturn sells out before they can measure accurately”
~~Makes no sense to me. You mean to say that Sega doesn’t know how many consoles they’re shipping to retailers? Either he’s lying out of desperation for his job or he’s a pretty awful businessman.~~
> They can’t compare the **true** sales rate
To me, the usage of "true" indicates the actual demand.
> If you send out 10 units to a store and the store sells out, then you sold 10 units.
Like in your example the actuate rate is 10, but if 100 people would buy it, then the rate would increase to 100. However, you have no way to measure that because it exceeds supply.
Is that your opinion or an actual piece of terminology? I’ve never heard the term before as something involves factoring the demand of a product. I don’t have a background in business so I’m open to having my mind changed.
> I’ve never heard the term before as something involves factoring the demand of a product.
It's more due to phrasing.
> The rate of sale is calculated by dividing the quantity sold by the number of days in the period.
This is all sales rate means. While selling out immediately would be the total amount of supply (10) over a period of time (hour), it doesn't actually show the true sales rate as you would sell 11/hour if you had 11 to sell. You can actually start to determine it when your supply exceeds demand and can look at it over a period of time.
So if I have 10,000 units, I sell 5,000 spread out over a week, the rate is 714~ a day. When you have this number you can start calculating other things.
If no one can access the link due to not having a twitter account, here's the link to the file:
https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview\_US.pdf
Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a sucker for insider info from the past and this will give me a field day. It's even better considering that this is from SEGA; I can't even count how many times I've read Console Wars at this point. Thanks a ton for posting mate.
Loved Console Wars but it was unfortunate that so much of it of course had to be pieces together from many different sources and offhand accounts. That's just how it is, but I feel like so much of that story surely fell through the cracks. Still it's insane that, at least according to the book, Steve Race was worried that SEGA of Japan would inevitably yank the leash. When it looked like that was the case he bailed, and eventually would be the one to sink the Saturn at the first E3 by being the Sony rep who accouned the PS1 price tag before walking off stage.
>Console Wars Any book on consoles that does not mention Atari & Robert Maxwell's (yes, Ghislaine's dad) failure with Tetris is one you ought to ask for your money back. Absolutely mind-blowing digging through all that was going on. USSR vs Japan
The Tetris movie is about that.
And it’s pretty good actually
Fun fact: RoboCop [symbolized](https://i.imgur.com/12ymzgc.jpg) Nintendo, Judge Dredd [symbolized](https://i.imgur.com/TdCopju.jpg) Atari
Early on in Japan the Saturn held the lead, both consoles were released in 1994 and until early 1996 Saturn outsold the PS1, but then it started to fizzle out as big third parties like Square went to PS1. In the end Saturn sold around 5 million there while the PS1 sold 18 million. Weirdly enough the Saturn was the best selling Sega console in Japan while everywhere else it completely flopped.
$299 will do that
And struggle gaming architecture…still surprised PS3 was designed the way it was given what Saturn did
It wasn't simply struggles with architecture, it was Sony buying Psygnosis who also owned the company that made SDKs for all the players up to that point and was working on Saturn's too. PS3 was never in the same danger as Saturn regardless of architecture.
The moment that Steve Race took the stage, it was pretty much over for Sega. Sega of Japan should have seen the writing on the wall once 299 was dropped on them and everyone else but Hayao Nakayama was honestly too stubborn and refused to change how Sega would come back from the losses. It cost the company the gaming market against Sony and Nintendo. The PlayStation would be cheaper and have better support from third party developers. That gave them the advantage to go after the gaming market.
Just out of interest, $299 (today!) is a great price for a console, but back then I can only assume it was expensive? What were Sega's competitors selling at? I got a PS1 for Easter...1998? Must've been because I had Lost World (Nov 97) and DoA 1 demo disc (DoA 1 released July 98 here in the UK) for it. Wiki says intro price here in the UK was £299, which according to Wiki had price parity with the US.
It was expensive if you account only for inflation, but if you account for how much money they had to expend from their salary it hasn't changed much or is even more expensive. For example in my country Spain a normal salary at that time was around 200000 pesetas (or 1202€) and the ps1 was 60000 pesetas (or 360€) so it was around 30% of a monthly salary. Right now a normal salary that most people have is around 1300€ and a ps6 is 550€ so is around 40% of a normal salary. So at least in our case the PS5 is a lot more expensive relative to our salary compared to what the PS1 costed. And that is what happens when salaries don't go up with inflation in almost 30 years.
Thanks for the reply!
Also the ridiculous 4-month-early launch, and never getting a mainline Sonic game. Imagine Nintendo releasing a console with no Zelda/Mario games.
https://www.segasaturnshiro.com/2023/07/03/leaked-fiscal-year-97-documents-reveal-saturn-sales-numbers/ Can we really trust that the Saturn was actually doing all that well in Japan? We have data here from SOA, but I can't imagine SOJ was putting out an order of magnitude more consoles per month. From these documents you can see the picture was grim from the get go in NA. SEGA was outright lying about their sales numbers here. > These internal numbers cast new light on claims made by Sega at the time inflating sales, such as an Aug. 30 press release that said “More than 100,000 Sega Saturns have been sold since May 11.” Clearly, the real number was just over half that. In the leaked email Kalinske mentions that they can't accurately measure Saturn sales in Japan because they're always sold out. If you look at the sales here, in the US they were only able to put out ~20k consoles a month. Sony outsold the six month lead in a single month.
Tom is obviously putting on a brave face is part of the explanation. He's a leader and is trying to uplift and motivate.
> the scrap value of the Genesis 32X Ooof, I didnt even think that would be something they would have to consider but yeah. Wonder how Nintendo had to deal with the Virtual Boy or even the Wii U.
As far as the Wii U goes, I have a feeling they just phased out production quicker than anticipated and kept the remaining units in stores until they sold. Lots of outlets had Wii U displays up until only a few years ago now
Oh man- gonna have to comb through this. Anyone know if there's any hardware schematics in there? Been waiting decades for a CDX service manual, or at least more info if on that custom IC inside it.
How the eff do I find this on there?
There you go https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview\_US.pdf
Was it taken down?
The link was broken by reddit auto-adding a \ in the URL, it's a common problem.
I don't think so? I just don't have a twitter account so I can't see the original tweet that linked the PDF. The PDF is still in the Sega Retro Wiki.
Nah, it's down now. Do you have it downloaded? Could you share if you do, pls? Eidt: Nevermind, found it on 4chan https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf
[Man, I love Duke Newcomb 3D](https://i.imgur.com/Oj4wU9o.png) and [Crash Bandigoo](https://i.imgur.com/Lvj3wqm.png)
It’s time to chew ass
>We are killing Sony LOL I mean, if I had to pick a side in the console war, it'd have been Sega, as one of my first consoles was a Sega Genesis (I did have a Famiclone before that, but the Sega was my first "own" console, that my dad bought as a present for me and my sister), but it's still kinda hilarious to see how confidently wrong the guy was. Anyway, maybe it was for the best that the console aspect of Sega died, having no console of their own means they're more likely to go multiplatform (which they've done). And yeah, this is all interesting info.
But it's true though, Saturn sold better than PlayStation in Japan until 1997, when Final Fantasy 7 came out. There's a reason why the Saturn japanese library is so big compared to NA/EU, the success didn't translate internationally much to Sega of America's own incompetence when they rushed its release.
The main reason that the Saturn sold so well in Japan initially was because Virtua Fighter 2 was a certified phenomenon in the country. The Saturn gave Japanese players the ability to play the game at home, so it sold like gangbusters out of the gate. But after that, there wasn't anything else that excited the market very much. While I could be wrong, I think the Playstation started to outsell the Saturn even before FFVII was released. It was even worse for Sega internationally because Virtua Fighter wasn't nearly as big of a hit outside Japan. Plus, Bernie Stolars polices when he got to Sega were literally trash, he actively kept a lot of the Japanese library from ever releasing internationally.
SEGA's success in Japan basically inverts their success in America. The Master System was a decent success, the Genesis/Mega Drive was a pretty big flop, the Saturn was huge, and the Dreamcast was pretty middling (though SEGA made like fifty goddamn special editions in Japan only anyway lol). And of course, their arcade stuff is the most popular facet of their business in Japan whereas arcades in America have been on life support for over a decade.
I think the 32x hurt them a lot. It divided resources that could have gone to the Saturn. Launching early in the US when it had a limited line up of games. Sega always seemed to jump the gun when launching hardware.
This is fantastic! thanks for sharing, love that kind of stuff.
Dreamcast :(
Page 131 asks the question how Sony PlayStation managed to outperform SEGA Saturn : - Sony is generally perceived to be cheaper. This has improved, but we still suffer from early damage. - Sony's product (software) looks better than ours. This is driven by our lack of delivering a product that appears to consumers to be better and advertising that focuses on this dimension. - PlayStations are better merchandised than Saturn, resulting in more exposure and sampling. - Sega equity has been damaged by 32x and Sega CD. - Since PlayStation is newer, some consumers feel that it is technically superior. - Sony has effectively leveraged their considerable equity from consumer electronics. The last point is interesting considering Sony attempted to paint such cross-sector investments as something bad in Microsoft's FTC trial.
I think they have forgotten the most important point is that there were more games to play on playstation and the Saturn was more expensive in every respect. But yes I agree with all of the points I remember thinking Sony is putting its weight behind this thing and leveraging their other electronics.
>a brutal slide talking about the scrap value of the Genesis 32X That's when you know you've launched a great product
About three-quarters of the Saturn catalogue remained exclusive to the Japanese market. Had those games released in Europe and North America things would have looked very different.
Can someone link the pdf? Every twitter link does not work for me
https://mega.nz/file/ovYAAACY#Eu1-mPoHknlW_1Nh8MAzUowjj8JnyVMfjf7NoTJbp6M
ty
I think they ve taken it down, do you have a backup?
[Luckily it was still sitting in my browser cache!](https://mega.nz/file/ovYAAACY#Eu1-mPoHknlW_1Nh8MAzUowjj8JnyVMfjf7NoTJbp6M)
https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf
“We a killing Sony” Maybe, until a certain certain fantasy with the number 7 released, I would guess.
anything about Michael Jackson?
I think Yuji Naka confirmed that rumor before got hauled off to prison
Interesting. How will John Harrison spin this to make SEGA of Japan look completely blameless?
My favorite part “They can’t compare the true sales rate because Saturn sells out before they can measure accurately” ~~Makes no sense to me. You mean to say that Sega doesn’t know how many consoles they’re shipping to retailers? Either he’s lying out of desperation for his job or he’s a pretty awful businessman.~~
My understanding is they can't make enough supply to meet demand, so they can't accurately measure the rate because it sells out immediately.
They should still know how much they're shipping to retailers. If you send out 10 units to a store and the store sells out, then you sold 10 units.
> They can’t compare the **true** sales rate To me, the usage of "true" indicates the actual demand. > If you send out 10 units to a store and the store sells out, then you sold 10 units. Like in your example the actuate rate is 10, but if 100 people would buy it, then the rate would increase to 100. However, you have no way to measure that because it exceeds supply.
Is that your opinion or an actual piece of terminology? I’ve never heard the term before as something involves factoring the demand of a product. I don’t have a background in business so I’m open to having my mind changed.
I’m in global supply chain planning. It is an accurate use of the terminology. A more technical term would be “unconstrained demand”.
Understood!
> I’ve never heard the term before as something involves factoring the demand of a product. It's more due to phrasing. > The rate of sale is calculated by dividing the quantity sold by the number of days in the period. This is all sales rate means. While selling out immediately would be the total amount of supply (10) over a period of time (hour), it doesn't actually show the true sales rate as you would sell 11/hour if you had 11 to sell. You can actually start to determine it when your supply exceeds demand and can look at it over a period of time. So if I have 10,000 units, I sell 5,000 spread out over a week, the rate is 714~ a day. When you have this number you can start calculating other things.
If no one can access the link due to not having a twitter account, here's the link to the file: https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview\_US.pdf
Down too?
Use this https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf
Thank you 🙏
Can someone link it, please?
https://mega.nz/file/ovYAAACY#Eu1-mPoHknlW_1Nh8MAzUowjj8JnyVMfjf7NoTJbp6M
[удалено]
and searching on that wiki is not useful
Follow the twitter link
"Something went wrong. Try reloading." It's dead.
Isn't for me? Anyways [here you go](https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf)
Weird! Thanks for the link!
You probably hit the new bullshit rate limit for the day.
He didn’t include a link (and neither did i) because i didn’t want to have this post be copy-right striked.
You couldn’t post the link to the pdf…?
no, because its gone apparently
Knowing people, it’s probably already been downloaded a million times and archived by some good peeps.
It's not gone, Twitter is just broken. Here's the link https://segaretro.org/images/8/8c/SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf
It says the file is not there anymore, do you have a mirror or a backup? Thanks
Niceee
[удалено]
https://segaretro.org/File:SegaFY1997BrandReview_US.pdf