<story><title>Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/mid-1990s-sega-document-leak-shows-how-it-lost-the-second-console-war-to-sony/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dumpsterdiver</author><text>Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.</text></item><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I&amp;#x27;m actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer.&lt;p&gt;32&amp;#x2F;64-bit Nintendo really didn&amp;#x27;t make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn&amp;#x27;t always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).&lt;p&gt;In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There&amp;#x27;s something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, &amp;quot;Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we&amp;#x27;re gonna buy a PlayStation.&amp;#x27;</text></item><item><author>snarfy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s the games.  It always was the games.&lt;p&gt;I got the NES for Super Mario Bros.  I got the Playstation for Tekken.  Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.&lt;p&gt;If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it.  Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted.  Marketing and the hardware didn&amp;#x27;t matter to me.  It was the games.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisco255</author><text>Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that.&lt;p&gt;The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.</text></comment>
<story><title>Mid-1990s Sega document leak shows how it lost the second console war to Sony</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/mid-1990s-sega-document-leak-shows-how-it-lost-the-second-console-war-to-sony/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dumpsterdiver</author><text>Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.</text></item><item><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I&amp;#x27;m actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer.&lt;p&gt;32&amp;#x2F;64-bit Nintendo really didn&amp;#x27;t make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn&amp;#x27;t always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?).&lt;p&gt;In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There&amp;#x27;s something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, &amp;quot;Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we&amp;#x27;re gonna buy a PlayStation.&amp;#x27;</text></item><item><author>snarfy</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s the games.  It always was the games.&lt;p&gt;I got the NES for Super Mario Bros.  I got the Playstation for Tekken.  Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII.&lt;p&gt;If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it.  Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted.  Marketing and the hardware didn&amp;#x27;t matter to me.  It was the games.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AdmiralAsshat</author><text>Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge&amp;#x27;s memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they&amp;#x27;re probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would&amp;#x27;ve cost a fortune, and that&amp;#x27;s assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would&amp;#x27;ve taken 5-10 carts.</text></comment>