Good or Bad for gaming; The demise of Sega

[Lee]

So here I am, the biggest Nintendo mark ever, and I've just repurchased the main four Sega consoles. Those being the Master System, Megadrive (Genesis), Saturn and the Dreamcast. I'm sat there playing Sonic Unleashed on the Wii (a Nintendo console) and I think shizz...how did this happen?

Sega stopped console production in 2002, after poor sales on both the Dreamcast and the Sega Saturn. Since then Sega have become a third party games developer and are no longer the power house they once were.

So there question I ask is this; Was the move by Sega to stop console development good for gaming, or was it bad for gaming?

I personally think it's been bad for gaming; Since then we've really only had a handful of games by them which have been any good. Now if Sega were to have stuck with consoles after the Dreamcast I think things would be different.

You have to bear in mind that with the GC and N64, Nintendo sales were also flagging, yet they took a risk to develop the Wii and the DS...and it paid off, big style. Would this have happened if Sega was i the fold? Their old rivals from the early 90s....or were they just destined to fail in the long run, becoming gamings equivalent to WCW.

 

[klunderbunker]

I think at the end of the day it doesn't mean much. Sony and Microsoft have easily picked up the slack. Sega went out of business because the Dreamcast couldn't hang with the N64 and the playstation. It seems that they've done just fine without Sega, and even now the best sega series, Sonic, is being made on Nintendo machines. Nintendo puts out systems less often than its competitors, but when they do they blow the doors off. Look at the NES, SNES, N64 and Wii. All of them were by far and away the best systems out at the time. I was always a nintendo guy as were most of my friends. I knew one Sega guy and that was my uncle. I tried it and many games were similar to Nintendo, just not as good. Sega's demise didn't seem to hurt gaming much and was inevitable. With the playstation coming out to rival the 64 and the x-box on the horizon, there was nothing Sega could do.

 

[Uncle Sam]

I hear the Dreamcast actually had a pretty good list of games, and that it's really just shitty advertising and false promises that killed it. They still release two or three games a year for it, obviously.

Was Sega dying good for gaming? I'm just trying to think of any of its franchises which I gave a flying fuck about. Let's see; I quite liked Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, but they've completely abandoned that for 3D werehog bullshits. Every few months, they promise they're going back to basics, then tentatively add "like, remember in Sonic 2, when Sonic was a werewolf? Yeah, it's in there! Honest!".

Other than that, I can't say I particularly cared for Sega. The games it develops are consistently shit, I don't know why I'd want them manufacturing their own consoles again. So yeah, I suppose it's good for the gaming industry that Sega died.

Sega does what Nintendon't. It dies.

 

[Shocky]

Nintendo was also on the verge of crapping out of the console role, and they changed into something that I can't stand, but kids seem to love, and that's completely interactice. The Nintendo survived thanks to the Wii and Wiitards waving their magic wands around. Simply put, Nintendo became innovative, Sega did not. Now, the quality of the Wii and it's crap games is a topic for another conversation.

Simply put, Sega was dead in thew ater the minute huge companies like Microsoft and Sony decided to get intot he video game console race. Sega was simply to small, and not innovative enough to keep up with the pure hardware power that both Microsoft and Sony were going to put into their machines, and they simply didn't have the capitol to keep up with those companies.

Sega's legacy, outside of Sonic and other characters, will be that it proved to the world that you can have more then one successful console at a time. Where nintendo virtually had a monopoly on the gaming world, Sega broke it. With out sega proving theire was room for more, we might not have the Playstations and Xboxs that we play today.

 

[Jane]

In my opinion, Sega was good for one main reason, and thats Sonic the Hedgehog. He is arguably as big a mascot to gaming as Mario to some people, and his early games are much better than the Mario Bros series. The speed and fast-paced gaming was revolutionary, and I think he made a huge impact on the video game world. So now that Sega is gone, it's a good thing Sega had handed Sonic over to Nintendo, or I would be answering this completely differently. I don't think anyone really misses Sega, but they would miss Sonic. So the demise of Sega is not a huge deal. The demise of Sonic would be a heartbreak.

 

[Mr. TM]

While Sega died, their games have a chance to live on. This is good for Sega. The systesm themselves were good systems, compared to Nintendo, but on a whole, they did not have the power that Nintendo had. Sega died, and that isn't a problem. Playstation came in and took them out with their system. Microsoft came over and released the Xbox. Now both of those companies have released a new generation, Playstation has released two obviously. So in reality, the former feud of PlayStation and Xbox has taken over Sega, and has moved Nintendo from a top tier game system to a regulated children's toy.

 

[Kasey]

I think Sega's demise was great for gaming. They were always the ultimate premature ejaculators when it came to producing decent hardware. Nintendo took their time with the SNES and then proceeded to corner that market. The capabilities were glaringly apparent in multi-platform games (Mortal Kombat especially) as the SNES Motorola processors had better sound and graphical abilities than the rushed specs the Genesis put forth. Nintendo also saw the future in terms of how many buttons would be used on a controller. Oops, Sega.

Same situation for the Saturn. Aside from Nights into Dreams and me shooting money out the ass for Fire Pro Wrestling: Six Men Scramble (which was awesome), the Saturn left much to be desired.

By the time the Dreamcast came out, it was obvious that Sega's haste to trump the competition (namely Sony and Nintendo) to the next generation market helped to squash any chance of redemption.

In summary, I think that Sega's demise was good for gaming if you were Sony or Nintendo. Namely because it always showed the competition what not to do. Great Job!

 

[Ty Burna]

Back in the day I was probably the biggest Sega fan you could find. The biggest problem Sega had was they always had horrible timing on all their console releases. The Dreamcast was released basically later then the N64 and PS1 and was only a short while before the PS2 and Xbox came around.

Was it good or bad for gaming when Sega dropped consoles? The old Sega fanboy in me says it was bad for obvious reasons. Looking at most the games Sega comes out with now, I'd say it was good. Now they're relegated to releasing poor games and essentially ****ing out Sonic to any buyers. What I did like about Sega though, was that they seemed to be ahead of their time in terms of their ideas. The Saturn was using CDS before the PS1, the Dreamcast had a 56k modem built into it for online gaming (which I might add I used the hell out of when Phantasy Star Online came out) before the Xbox brought it mainstream and an ethernet port. Sega basically came up with great ideas but shit ways to implement them.

 

[Blade]

It's bad in terms of the diluted, castrated joke that Sonic has become, which I believe wouldn't have happened if Sega were still making consoles.... SWORDS in Sonic, honestly.

But otherwise, I think it doesn't matter much. And it had been inevitable when Sega kept churning out new consoles without backing up their current ones that it wasn't gonna last.
If it's anything, it's good since there's one less platform for shovelware to be released on.