Why did Sega fail to develop game consoles?

Currently, SEGA is recognized as a developer of video games for different platforms, that is, we can find it in PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox one and even in consoles of previous generations, that is why it is considered one of the companies with more video games made.

But this company is not even a shadow of what it used to be, since it not only developed video games, but also had its empire in arcade machines and game consoles. However, several decisions and a bad management of the company led it to have the need to abandon the development of game consoles.

Over the years many gamers have asked themselves what happened to Sega. In order to answer this question, we must evaluate certain aspects that led this great company to failure. For this reason, we are going to go back in time to the beginning of the 80s, when this company started making consoles.

Sega started with SG-1000, a very interesting console that had several revisions, the last one being SG-1000 Mark III. At that time they were only covering the Japanese market, until a company came that made them change their mind, this was Nintendo, which would launch their product to the western market.

At that moment they realized that they needed to launch their products in that continent, this way Sega of America would be born, which would take the marketing decisions in the adjacent countries, however, this would bring consequences to Sega Japan in the future, but it is something they did not see coming.

Over time these two branches had a kind of rivalry, as Sega Japan did not like the marketing that Sega of America applied, even though it sold very well, it was against their principles. This eventually led to both branches working independently, a big mistake, as they were one company.

In the West different hardware was designed without the consent of Sega Japan, saturating the market with new things which would not be successful, among them we can remember the Mega-CD or the famous 32X, starting an era of collapse that would lead to the next generation of consoles.

At the same time Sega was always with good profits thanks to the arcade machines, it was one of their best sources of income, let's remember that this company was the pioneer in demonstrating the potential in many aspects such as graphics thanks to the arcade machines, which is why they always had a moderate budget for their future projects.

After the great success of the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis and at the same time the disaster with its additional peripherals, they started to develop the new console that had as a key name "Saturn", at the beginning they had planned to make a perfect platform that would run 2D video games with the maximum potential, but one company made them change their mind, this was Sony with the PlayStation.

When Sony showed their technical demo of the T-Rex Sega, they understood that they could not be left behind, since they would be abruptly crushed by the new console of the competition, but they already had advanced much of the architecture of their project "Saturn" so they decided to implement a parallel processor to be able to give more power to their console and thus be able to run 3D games.

The detail with the double processor is that it made the programming for this platform very complicated, however, they did not pay attention to this technical section, thinking that the development companies would always be on their side to launch games on their new platform, but it was quite the opposite.

Finally, the Sega Saturn was launched a month before the Sony PlayStation in Japan, that country received this console very well, however, the strong market was in the west, who did not see with good eyes to the Saturn for several reasons, the main one was the price which was 400 dollars, something very high considering that Sony offered its product in 300 dollars.

Another factor that helped to bury the Sega Saturn were its games, as mentioned before, programming in that console was something very complicated, for that reason many developers went to Sony's side, because their console was very friendly at the time of programming, the only ones that knew how to take advantage of the maximum potential of the Saturn was the Sega itself.

By 1997 Sony had dominated the entire Western market, Sega in America no longer had anything to answer with, while in Japan they were ignoring what is happening in the West because of the war between branches, besides that the sales of Saturn in that country were higher than in the rest of the world.

In 1998 Sega would launch its last attempt to dominate the market, with a console that had incredible power and capability for the time, it was called the Sega Dreamcast. At this point it is not clear to many how Sega failed with such an incredible console as the Dreamcast, the problem goes back to their absurd decisions made in the past.

The fact of investing money in making peripherals that were not necessary like the Mega-CD or the 32X made gamers or consumers who believed in that company forget about it, choosing to buy a console from a more solid company that offered them a huge catalogue and a prosperous future in terms of technology.

Add to that the failure of the Saturn would make the Dreamcast born dead. After the company was left in the red, they couldn't do anything else but stop manufacturing consoles and enter as a video game developer, for the companies that had more money at that time, Sony and Microsoft.

Sega is one of the examples of how giants can fall into the video game industry, if perhaps their branches had worked together, saved capital for better projects and delivered really solid consoles like the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis and Dreamcast there were still new consoles from this company, but the past can no longer be changed.

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