32x murdered Sega's goodwill.
Then the cost of the Saturn led to the legendary "$299" Sony E3 conference...
Then Bernie Stolar and his hate for JRPGs...
> Their partner in MS wasn’t helpful.
The MS thing was actually an important PR olive branch after the Saturn.
Saturn had a somewhat deserved bad rep for API/doc issues, and doing 3D was extra painful between the VDP behavior and quads...
Microsoft was flouting around DirectX at the time, Even with it's warts at the time it was accepted by devs as 'better than what we used to deal with!'.
All of it was an attempt to signal to game developers; 'Look we know porting stuff to Saturn sucked, our API is better, but if you're worried, you are doing more PC ports now anyway, so this is a path'.
If anything, I'd say the biggest tactical 'mistake' there was that in providing that special Windows CE, Microsoft probably got a LOT of feedback and understanding of what console devs want in the process, which probably shaped future DirectX APIs as well as the original XBox.
> PS2 was coming
If the PS1 "$299" conference was the sucker punch, PS2's "Oh it's also a DVD Player" was the coupe-de-grace. I knew a LOT of folks that 'waited' but DVD was the winning factor.
Some consider the original Xbox as a sequel to the Dreamcast because it reused some of the principles and had some of the same people working on it. Heck, even the original chunky Xbox controller looks more like the Dreamcast and lesser known Saturn 3D controller than it does like modern Xbox controllers.
> Their partner in MS wasn’t helpful.
The MS thing was actually an important PR olive branch after the Saturn.
Saturn had a somewhat deserved bad rep for API/doc issues, and doing 3D was extra painful between the VDP behavior and quads...
Microsoft was flouting around DirectX at the time, Even with it's warts at the time it was accepted by devs as 'better than what we used to deal with!'.
All of it was an attempt to signal to game developers; 'Look we know porting stuff to Saturn sucked, our API is better, but if you're worried, you are doing more PC ports now anyway, so this is a path'.
If anything, I'd say the biggest tactical 'mistake' there was that in providing that special Windows CE, Microsoft probably got a LOT of feedback and understanding of what console devs want in the process, which probably shaped future DirectX APIs as well as the original XBox.
> PS2 was coming
If the PS1 "$299" conference was the sucker punch, PS2's "Oh it's also a DVD Player" was the coupe-de-grace. I knew a LOT of folks that 'waited' but DVD was the winning factor.