Darklight wrote:
Yeah, I actually have both the Mega CD and 32X, and think that the Sega 32xCD (or whatever you want to call the Mega Drive w/ addons) is a brilliant machine, but from a business standpoint, neither of them did particularly well. The 32X launch was obliterated by Nintendo's launch of Donkey Kong Country, whilst the majority of Mega CD games were either rehashes of existing games but with CD sound (same as some CD32 games) or FMV "Make My Video" type things. Japan got some very decent RPG's for the system though. I still have my system set up, I use it every now and then, but seeing as Sega has all but gone bankrupt now (they've been bought out by Sammy), it's gone down quite a similar path to Commodore. Too far ahead of its time for its own good :-(
The 32X was a disaster because the devkits for the 32X and Saturn arrived at developers doors on the same day (the 32X was meant as a stopgap because it was thought the Saturn would be late, but it wasn't). As a result the software library sucked with few games looking better than SNES level (though the machine was far more capable).
The Sega CD actually has a handful of gems (Sonic CD, Lunar, Dune, etc.) some of which are my favorites from that era. The execution was less than perfect, but I still don't consider it a complete failure (the 32x on the other hand...). Perhaps I'm just biased because I develop homebrew for it.
Sega was not going into bankruptcy when Sammy purchased them. They had actually returned to profitability, but getting acquired doesn't seem to have hurt the company.
I think that's negligible when you take luck and the fact that Sega isn't producing hardware anymore into consideration.
They still sell video games and arcade hardware. 2 out of 3 ain't bad and it's a heck of a lot better than Commodore which exists today in name only (selling MP3 players no less). Leaving the console hardware market was probably one of the smartest business moves they made in a while.
