Yeah, I also don´t understand what they´re into. Maybe the troubles with the company´s finances caused creativity to go down the drain. One thing to certainly make them think is if finances are bad! SEGA might have thought that we nolonger wanted their wellknown franchise characters, and so began to think about innovation! A kind of panicky reaction, to their self-created financial quagmire!
Who on Earth is so dumb to drop the making of the best selling brand name games, in a time where first SONY, and NEXT Microsoft enter the market as competitors? I tell you: weak management! I really position myself toughly here, since I cannot give in to that kind of sloppy management. They are to blame, nobody else. The developers are not the management. They "just" make the games. It is executives, shareholders who are to blame here. The executives must at all times ensure the health of their company, even if this means to make drastic decisions, buying back shares to prevent hostile take-overs etc. (Nintendo is like that, and thank HIM up there for that!).
But in a time where they KNEW they had to be carefull, SEGA made no drastic cuts, they instead spent 1/2 Billion Dollars on a console which was sure to receive only meagre response in the wake of the Saturn console flop. If I knew that my previous product was perceived bad and sold poorly, I would think thrice before I lanched my next product. SEGA should have waited until around the time when the Playstation 2 was launching (like Nintendo will do with the Ps3) and THEN made their move. I guess proper advisors could have helped them to arrive at that decision, which they could not make themselves.
You can just vividly imagine how it must have been shareholder pressure or something like that which caused SEGA Management to launch the console before the Playstation 2. Had they had more guts, they would have gone against the shareholders, knowing and explaining to them why it would be wiser to launch at the same time as Playstation 2 as SONY always had more money to talk down any competitor with their deep pockets and army of lawyers and marketing people. Shareholders cannot be allowed to undo a company for reasons of wanting to make a buck faster, and that seems to have been the problem from the start. Shareholders are really some of the most faithless people you can get anywhere. They just want their money, and care little how!
The mouth-to-mouth commercial is always the best, and their little white wonder would have gone neck-and-neck with the Ps2 had it come out at the same time as it did. THEN, the third party developers would have started to see the potential in the Dreamcast and we would have had a whole different situation for SEGA today!
Topic: SEGA profits down by nearly 80%! Is SEGA losing it? (Read 24365 times)
