We are talking about the Genesis not SMS, even in japan NEC broke through by the late 80's.
You simply cannot talk about Genesis without talking about SMS or NES; keep in mind Genesis launched in America while NES was still the main commercial option on the market. Do you think the licensing agreements Nintendo locked down during the NES/Famicom era suddenly went away when the Genesis released? They did not.
Also in Japan, PC-Engine "broke through" but lacked a LOT of the major Japanese dev support because, again, Nintendo's strict licensing agreements. I don't even think it's fair to say they "broke through"; PC-Engine had a strong year or two but its sales collapsed almost immediately once the Super Famicom released. It's total sales in Japan are barely 2x that of MegaDrive's, and that system was some 3.5 - 3.8 million LTD there.
In comparison, Super Famicom did 16.7 million LTD in Japan during 4th-gen. So I don't really see the support through data that PC-Engine "broke through" in the Japanese market especially considering when its sales peaked and fell off.
It did for the most part by the time the Genesis was viable,.
Not really. Again, Nintendo was only found guilty of antitrust in the US market, not Japan and not Europe. And it's in Japan where Nintendo's licensing agreements were particularly strong because that's where the majority of 3P console developer support was at.
Even supposing you were correct, the transient benefits of those licensing agreements and terms don't suddenly reset to neutral for the following generation. That's not how reality operates in the business world.
Nonsense, they could have done it from 1992-1995 easily and didn't. When Nintendo wasn't even a problem, they had marketing deals with multiplats they could have easily made timed or full exclusive. With lack of western dev interest, Sega could have gotten more western devs to make games for it for them, or to port games from PC more not on the SNES, with the spotlight marketing and they didn't.
They DID get more Western devs to make games for them and port from PC, did you suddenly forget EA existed? I'm starting to think you have a very limited view of the actual history with them WRT this slice of the market. Even with the SNES/Super Famicom, Nintendo had a strong lock on Japanese devs & pubs, so Sega had to rely on Western devs/pubs to get a lot of content.
In no timeline was Nintendo ever NOT a problem for Sega, I don't even know where you got that idea from. SNES released in America in 1991; prior to that NES was still holding its own pretty well, even with Genesis and TurbographX-16 on the market. For whatever reason you're pretending now that Nintendo was straggling early on with SNES in the West the way Sony was with PS3 after its launch, but that was never the case. Sega did have majority marketshare during that '91 - '94 period but it's not like they ran away with those markets the way Microsoft did with 360 in US & UK during that phase of 7th-gen.
You are also making a weird choice to forward modern console gaming business tactics to a market that was less mature at that time and where those concepts were not commonly practiced. Even Nintendo rarely did timed or full exclusivity deals for 3P games; stuff like SF2 was the exception, not the rule, and the 3P exclusives they got were because they mainly came from Japanese 3P devs who were already firmly affiliated with Nintendo hardware, their ecosystem, and had already built up their customer base on said platforms and in said ecosystem. Going for 3P exclusivity deals didn't even start getting nominally more prominent until the PS1; even there it was pretty rare outside of stuff like Tomb Raider 2 or Sony/Capcom locking in a RE 2 & 3 PS exclusivity deal. Then those types of deals incremented a bit more the following gen, we saw that with Nintendo/Capcom doing the Capcom 5 deal, Microsoft helping fund some 3P games to get exclusivity like they did with Sega, etc.
3P timed & full paid exclusivity deals didn't really kick off in earnest until Microsoft did it with the 360, and that's over 10 years removed from the time of Genesis/MegaDrive. So why are you capitulating that Sega should have done a tactic that was not even widely popularized until over 10 years later and not even by a market leader, at that? Both Sega and Nintendo focused on a model where their systems were mainly for 1P content and if 3P devs/pubs wanted to bring content to the platforms, they could, but they didn't really "fight" over 3P support the way we've seen Sony & Microsoft do in the years since.
Capcom is an example of a company that was freed and I would say most if not the plurality of Capcom games with the Capcom logo released on the Genesis (unlike the SNES) were made/produced by Sega. Many of those had nothing to do with any restrictions because Capcom still did make games for the Genesis just not as many as they made directly for the SNES which can be attributed to a lack of Sega trying to incentivize them compared to Nintendo, and Sega's poor performance in Japan.
So you're asking why Sega didn't incentivize doing mass 3P timed or full exclusivity deals, then use Capcom as the example, then literally provide two answers as to why it didn't happen in that case, and somehow are not considering that similar answers could not be provided for other devs/pubs (particularly Japanese ones)?
FWIW, those kind of deals were not cheap, and it's not like Sega has Microsoft levels of cash to throw around; never did. 3P Japanese devs/pubs only started coming around to Genesis/MegaDrive more after the system took off in America, but they still had to develop the software and that took months or in some cases 1-2 years if we're talking about original IP from the ground-up for the platform.
So with that timeline, a lot of that support didn't even start to manifest until latter 1992 into 1993, and that's a step 3P Japanese devs/pubs would've needed to get to first
BEFORE Sega could entertain locking down other 3P games as timed or full exclusives, and why would SOJ pursue those types of deals if they were intending to move on to Saturn by 1994? Sure, SOA and SOE could have tried for those deals, but they'd still need funding from SOJ (as well as approval in some cases) to actually go after them. In that sense, SOJ would've been the bottleneck to such ambitions.
It was more cost-efficient and legally sensible for Sega to invest in things like Sega Technical Institute, and rely on their arcade ports as well as hoping that would encourage 3P devs/pubs to prioritize arcade ports to Genesis/MegaDrive. Whether that was ultimately preferable to, say, gunning after Enix or Capcom, or even Squaresoft, to shift SNES/SFC projects to Genesis/MegaDrive instead is debatable, but you also have to acknowledge you and I are benefitting from being here in the moment to reflect on the past.
The issue is Sega clearly wasn't thinking about doing the right moves to win. They had success and didn't know how to leverage it, and made a lot of moves they should not have made, or should have made earlier too late.
You are using VERY high levels of recency bias to make this judgement call, however. You simply cannot try applying business practices and trends of the modern, current day market wholesale to a completely different market from decades ago, and try passing value judgements on the past as a result, without running into a host of problems.
At the very least, you need to specifically quantify what actual things they did which were, in your opinion, good business moves or bad business moves, and go from there. Anytime I bring up bad Sega business moves, for example, I try pulling actual examples, like when they committed $1 billion to Gameworks in 1997.
This is a flawed view of things, because Sega wasn't really relevant in the US market or known with the Genesis until 1990. It took off and then as you just agreed to, had already lost to the SNES before "moving on" to the Saturn like people claim. They were already having problems keeping up previous momentum BEFORE that even happened. I would say late 1993 is when the start of the decline, maybe earlier a bit, happened because that's also when third parties had 1 million_ sellers coming out and Sonic was declining more in exchange. Then the third parties declines and they weren't able to move as many consoles.
Sega was relevant in the US market prior to Genesis, and during the first year of Genesis, due to their arcade releases, and arcades were still big in the US (albeit less so than prior to the crash) at this time.
You're leaning a lot into the idea that Genesis erosion happened way earlier than it did, even though Genesis marketshare in America peaked in H1 1994. We can argue that game sales falling off over the years as a sign, but again, you have to quantify the reasons into that. Usually, it comes down to marketing or lack of marketing: I've already touched on this in the past when talking about Sega leaning HARD into the Sega Scream which was a great way to centralize marketing to the console itself, but might've overpowered marketing spotlight on individual games, something that IMO Microsoft has eerily repeated with marketing GamePass the past few years.
Did 3P publishers reduce advertising for their games? Did rentals play a part (absolutely could have been possible depending on average length & difficulty of the game in question)? Were games selling less even an issue in relation to the budgets for those games (for example, PC or arcade ports would have costed much less so if those went from 1 million to say 650K, that is still a lot of revenue and profit in relation to the budget)? You have to actually ask those questions to have deeper insight.
No one said it was, where did this come from?
It's common sense. Do you genuinely think companies are ONLY fixated on outselling their competitors? If that were the case, Microsoft and Nintendo would have left the console market by now. No, the main goals of game platform holders is to bring in health revenue & profit in relation to operating costs, and to grow those margins, whether that means increasing marketshare, increasing prices, or a combination of things like those.
Even if the console gaming market was more of a wild west back then, actual corporate board members were not so gung-ho on playground or modern-day forum console warring mentalities as some people think. Even people like Nakayama and Kutaragi were on generally friendly terms and talked often, even if their respective companies were battling it out for market supremacy.
Sega of Japan was trying to position the Mega Drive as a entry level consoles, and trying to compete with NEC with the Sega CD until they gave up on it, and when they did, they brought the 32X over to Japan. This "moving on" from the genesis thing is wrong both in the US and Japan. But the claim was for the western market not Japan, so this is zig zagging around the issue.
Factually wrong. What exactly were they going to make the MegaDrive an entry level console to, during 1991 - 1994 prior to Saturn. How were they going to make MegaDrive an entry-level system to Saturn in Japan, if 1P software support was being wholesale shifted to Saturn and MegaDrive didn't have much Japanese 3P support for the Japanese market as-is? Why would SOJ have been interested in using MegaDrive as an entry-level system in their product ecosystem in any capacity other than semi-limited legacy manufacturing & support, when MegaDrive was commercially unsuccessful in that region?
The fact they released the 32X in Japan the exact same day of Saturn's release was an intentional move to bury the 32X; they did not have any heart or commitment for that add-on (rightfully so) in the Japanese market because they were fixing to move onwards to the Saturn. So your claim that people are wrong about Sega 'moving on' from Genesis is in itself even
more incorrect if you're trying to insinuate that Sega didn't really want to move on from the MegaDrive in the one market it underperformed the most. All you needed to do was ask yourself a few questions to check the internal logic of the idea and see if it held up to scrutiny.
The claim people were making is that Sega was winning and then "moved on to the Saturn" which didn't actually happen int he context they make the claim.
Well, in terms of marketshare, Sega were in fact winning over Nintendo in NA until around the holiday 1994 season; from then to 1997, the SNES outsold Genesis, but also keep in mind a lot of those 1996 & 1997 units would've been at very low prices if not liquidation. I haven't seen anyone claim Sega were "dominating" the NA market in that time frame, though, which would be incorrect; they at most had a 60 - 65% market share in the NA market by early 1994, which could be considered dominating, but only for a short stint of time. Otherwise the margins were a lot closer between them and Nintendo insofar as 4th-gen marketshare is concerned.
Margins were similarly close between them in the whole of Europe; there are some European markets where SNES led and others where Genesis/MegaDrive led, but we aren't looking at a 360-type long-term, persistent domination from Genesis/MegaDrive in either market. Again, though, no one's been making such a claim to my knowledge.
I think you're thinking of other responses in the thread and mixing them with mine by quoting me, because I never made the argument like some others have here that there was any arbitrary goal.
I'm not mixing anything up; that part of my comment was a meta commentary on tendencies almost
ALL of us have some tendency to do when discussing retro gaming hardware, software, events etc. It just happens naturally but, as long as we're aware that we can end up doing such by accident every here or there, we can catch ourselves before committing to doing such a thing, and that would help make these discussions more accurate (in the areas where accuracy is a requirement).
That doesn't just go with Sega, mind, but virtually any company discussed in terms of retro gaming, when there is some element of market competition involved.
replaced all forms of bad behavior and self destructive tendencies.
