I want you to be real honest with me, Yea Forums

Saturn was $100 more and not as widely available. It's literally simple numbers. A lower cost and better availability equals greater appeal.

I didn't even know it was hated, I simply figured it was the lesser between it and the Dreamcast at the time. Nothing compared to Air Force Delta for me

THREE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE U S DOLLARS
in 1995

Inferior ports, and no Sonic

Yeeesh!

What was Sega thinking?!

I still remember, as a young lad, being at TRU in the summer and seeing Saturn for sale. All the mags said it was going to be launching in September, and I didn't find out what happened until later. It was really weird, no ads, no push, just here's your Saturn bro.

Piss poor marketing?

Part of it was reputation. Sega had tried two independent and expensive add-ons to the Genesis, one of which had the smallest line-up of games outside of the Virtual Boy.
Part of it was availability and affordability. If you're not familiar with the story, SoA pulled a stealth launch for Saturn in the US, but without informing most of the developers and retailers. Only three games were ready at launch (one of which was Myst) and Wal-Mart and KB Toys reacted so negatively to not being one of the chosen three outlets for launch they blacklisted the Saturn entirely. And this is on top of the fact PS got a leg up following that E3 announcement by instantly undercutting their price by $100.
Following up on that last point, that was a Bernie Stolar brain-fart, and he was a fucking idiot when it came to the crushing point: games. He was openly against bringing over 2D games from Japan despite it being the system's specialty, while simultaneously not being able to provide an original Sonic game after Xtreme's development exploded and losing exclusivity for Tomb Raider despite it being originally designed for Saturn. The cherry on top is when he decided SoA wasn't going to publish ANYTHING for Saturn past Summer of '98, despite releases continuing in Japan up to Dreamcast's launch.

Thats why Saturn sold 6 mil in Japan and less than 4 million combined outside Japan, JRPG wasn't popular globally until FF7, and FF7 was PS exclusive so after that it was a wrap in Japan too

Again, WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY THINKING?!

Lack of an American Segata Sanshiro

People got burned out on saga with all the addons. It oversaturated the market and confused consumers. That and everything was shifting into 3d more cinematic games and the Saturn's library was mostly 2d platformers, which seemed outdated at the time.

they thought that the surprise release would get them huge publicity and be what people would be talking about for a long time. instead, nobody realized it happened

Intentionally no marketing. They unironically thought a surprise release at E3 1995 was a good plan.

So it was a badly done shadow drop?

No triangular polygons

These two posts really sum it up. Sega is known for making bad decisions, but they way they handled the Saturn in the US is one of the reasons why they're no longer in the hardware market. Not to demerit the software it had, but it was a mess. Despite doing a good job with the Dreamcast, it wasn't enough to pull them back up to the position they had with the Genesis.

>no proper Sonic game
>more expensive than the PS1
>surprise launch that fucked over literally everyone
>most of the good games didn't get localized because Stolar is a pile of human detritus
>some dogshit weird 90's-ass marketing campaign instead of based Segata Sanshiro

Sega struggled because the Japanese and American divisions could not get along causing lots of fumbles in both marketing and production.
The Saturn launch was botched because it was rushed causing a small day-one library, it was $100 more expensive than the PS1, and it lacked an early killer app like Mario 64 or Ridge Racer. Saturn's launch gems were Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA, which I'm not saying are bad games, you could play at an arcade. Their selling point was that you can finally have a good console port of said titles, whereas the N64 and to a lesser extent the PS1 were selling experiences that were unique to that platform.

You forgot an important one:

> Sega Saturn is, TO THIS DAY, still shit to emulate EVEN ON THE LATEST PC

They announced it at E3 but I mean, this was 1995 E3 so take that for what it's worth.

The fact that companies still do shadow drops for things like demos or weird indie games despite how hard that blew up in Sega's face always catches me off guard but I guess that just says more about how much more important E3 is these days to the layperson and how much the market has changed.

Basically yes. Remember too that this was in the mid-90s, and home internet was still not as common as it is these days, so the word wasn't going to rapidly reach a large number of people (Not to say doing a surprise release in today's age is a good idea either)

It came out with no advertisement. It wasn't about hate.

Back then when a new system came out, we had a year plus to prepare. A year to ship our games off. A year to let our parents know we wanted THIS. A year to circle it in calenders. A year of hype.

My brother worked at electronics boutique (Gamestop). He came in one day and fucking Saturns were sitting there. Nobody had ANY idea it was coming out.

You simply couldn't do this, the economics of it didn't work. Add to that that Sega was a much stronger brand among black people, who, like today, did not have any money. Double fuckup.

It was a really fun system. Jaguar XJ220 has a special place in my heart. It sucked dick compared to the PS1 though.

That's not really relevant to why the Saturn bombed stateside though.

But yeah there's a reason I still own a saturn instead of just emulating that shit. I just wish shit like Burning Rangers or Radiant Silvergun or Panzer Dragoon Saga didn't require me to put down a mortgage to afford.

Nintendo and Sega courted dumb new gamers to their platform full of style over substance shit, that's why.

It's that goddamn simple.

Should have launched with Virtua Fighter 2 desu.

>sega
Goddamn it I mean Sony.

america was mostly unaware of the saturn.

Which games of sega genesis / Mega drive would you recommend?
I search.
> games that are easy
> games without difficult difficulty
> games without any kind of violence (even without cartoon violence)
> games without enemies and without fights against enemies

yeah we needed more 3d adventure games those sure dont get old

Right, me personally I didn’t have internet in 1995 and I was far from the minority. So it was literally seeing this thing on the shelf and not seeing what they did until I read it in Next Gen or EGM months later.

Another thing about this, the game market was mostly young kids and teenagers at the time, I couldn’t just drop $400 on a fucking Saturn because it was on the shelves. And when PS1 was announced at $300 it was obvious what I would ask for my birthday or Christmas. Now if they waited a few months. Maybe got VF Remix and Sega Rally at launch, and people could make informed decisions, who knows.

good luck with those criteria

easy games weren't really a thing back then

Most of the games never made it to America.

I can see why.

Play road rash 3

Well, then let's eliminate the criterion of easy games.

is that I downloaded a sega genesis / mega drive emulator

and I need games.

but I need games without any violence (not even cartoon violence) games without enemies, and innocent games

I do not want games that have some form of violence

Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine

because westerners got singed on the Sega CD, add in the fact that the Saturn was a literal surprise release, giving 3rd party developers no time to learn the system's architecture.
Sega management fucked it up pretty bad, but it still has some great games that nobody knows about like super tempo and tryrush deppy.

US sega execs screwed over the saturn refusing to localize loads of games

SOJ screwed over SOA by pressuring them to do the surprise launch thing and then ousting Kalinske in favor of motherfucking Stolar.