They might have apologized to EA and done a lot of things differently to entice devs again. This is the period where game engines are refined and optimized and a new wave of games come out with astonishing quality not seen in the first two years. Just when the DC was beginning to catch on (after 3 years), Sega Japan pulled the plug. The industry focuses on ONLY heavy-hitting sales today, not as a pillar for creative projects.Ĥ) Pulling the plug too early. Sadly, this is why gaming today tends to be so homogenized. Screwing the EA relationship over a silly royalty dispute was damned stupid and arrogant and pointless. There are a lot of unique games on the DC, but a console needs heavy hitting sales numbers to fund the next gen and support the more creative games. (It's a shame the aftermarket missed this opportunity since the 2nd port was universal having a built-in VMU with front-cord would have been great, and Retro Fighters missed that opportunity again just last year).ģ) Electronic Arts called Sega's bluff and it wrecked Sega's 3rd party support as anyone paying attention to the American market could have told them (and probably did), because when EA gave up, a lot of smaller studios did also. So charge $50 for the controllers! So what? Same as Nintendo. The screen should have been built INTO the controller itself, so that the power cord could come out at the front. When the novelty of a watch-game in one's controller wears off and one has replaced the watch battery once, with no reason to even take the VMU out, that's the end of it. The VMU contributed to the failure of the console by making an already clunky non-ergonomic controller even worse. (Not that Nintendo hasn't made hardware blunders). I was looking carefully at my DC controller and thought the VMU was an idiotic accessory that caused problems with negligible benefits. The 32 would have thrived well into the N64 lifespan and competed directly with Nintendo. Neither should have been addon accessories. But as an addon? The Sega 32X should have lived alongside the Sega CDX, which evolved into Saturn. It should have been a full 32-bit console, never mind the Genesis library. The 32X came 5-6 years later, so there was no logical reason to launch as an accessory to a grossly outdated console.

It was awesome that a home console had a CD drive. Sega CD was a parallel product, a good effort, not a mistake.

The #1 reason why the DC failed was Sega Japan, which made terrible decisions for a decade that added up. I don't mind criticism since this is an op-ed. (assume every statement is written 'IMO', not as fact). I'm not a historian, just a sad Sega fan who lived thru those years. I'm not raising the issue of competition. I started writing this op-ed as a reply elsewhere and decided it should just be a new post.

Half life sega dreamcast