Review of Retro Gamer's 32X "Retroinspection"

[sheath]

The biggest point of the 32X detester camp is that it should have been cheaper, wasn't cost effective, and was a rip off. Sega was "greedy and dumb" for releasing such an expensive add-on. But, by comparison, the 32X offered new gameplay for a relatively efficient cost. The only question was whether the add-on was significantly more expensive in the UK (it definitely was in Brazil) than it was in the US.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Well my thought on the cost of an add-on is you shouldn't price it for more than the console it's adding on to. From a consumer's point of view it doesn't make sense for half a system to cost more than the system it's getting added on to.

To me that's like buying a new gaming computer (say around $800-$1000) and then 2 years later buying a new graphics card for that computer for $1600-$2000. It doesn't make sense. I could just buy a new computer for that kind of money. I think that's what people get at. You could have purchased an SNES or another Sega Genesis for less than a 32X. And if you wanted both a Sega CD and a 32X you could have bought a PS1 or Saturn instead for that price.

For the 32X and Sega CD to be truly cost effective add-ons, they should have been priced for no more than the going rate of the Genesis at the time of their release, if not less. Yeah they may have been sold at a loss initially, but they probably would have sold a lot more than they did.

[sheath]

The only kinds of companies that could ever afford to sell the most advanced tech at a loss were anti-competitive mega-corps. Since Sega was never this, the idea of selling at a loss is moot.

Mean Machines Sega, May 1995. Still no 32X blasting or fire sales.

[sheath]

EGM June 1995, Aside from Shadow Squadron being rated only slightly above average, business as usual. Except that Nintendo, [sarcasm]fully aware that the 32X wasn't a threat [/sarcasm], dedicated a two page fake editorial to blasting Sega for releasing it instead of something like the SFX-2.

[Barone]

I like how Nintendo was promising the next generation of games on the SNES while it couldn't handle its own generation of games without slowdown, loadings, several cuts...

[sheath]

I like how Nintendo was promising the next generation of games on the SNES while it couldn't handle its own generation of games without slowdown, loadings, several cuts...

That is kind of the point here. Nintendo was assuring the masses that add-ons were okay, as long as you had to repurchase them with each cartridge sold. Meanwhile, Sega was having some sort of internal communications breakdown that has yet to be thoroughly detailed. Scot Bayless quit in November of 1994, if that date is correct, and I would assume SoA management were spending most of their time job searching after that. It would be great to confirm some of Bayless' account, of him being the primary go to guy for the Sega CD, not sleeping for days to launch the thing, etc. If he really was that much of a selfless individual (they do exist) then his sudden departure would also be a huge moral loss for the company.

[sheath]

Gamepro June 1995: The 32X continues to be overshadowed by, well, everything 32-bit besides itself. Still no fire sales though.

[Da_Shocker]

Nintendo wasn't selling hardware at a loss. The only thing you are doing by posting all of these magazines is proving how lukewarm the media treated the 32X. They weren't trashing the system, but they also weren't there saying OMG buy a 32X asap. And once the media stopped giving a fuck about the 32X and moved on to bigger and better things such as the Saturn and PSx. I mean look at all of the review scans on here. Did the 32X even win any game of month honors? How about a bronze award from EGM? Just about all of these reviews that sheath has posted says the games on the 32X are so so.

[Team Andromeda]

Nintendo wasn't selling hardware at a loss. The only thing you are doing by posting all of these magazines is proving how lukewarm the media treated the 32X. They weren't trashing the system, but they also weren't there saying OMG buy a 32X asap. And once the media stopped giving a fuck about the 32X and moved on to bigger and better things such as the Saturn and PSx. I mean look at all of the review scans on here. Did the 32X even win any game of month honors? How about a bronze award from EGM? Just about all of these reviews that sheath has posted says the games on the 32X are so so.

SEGA was not selling the Mega Drive or 32X at a loss and was only selling Saturn and Mega CD at cost price - Though I guess all Hardware launches sell at small loss initially until volume and productions rumps up and hits a set number of thousands of units . And why can't you just accespt that not only the press but the wider gaming public found other consoles far more interesting than the 32X ?

The 32X was promised as a gateway to the 32 bit world at a fraction of the price , but it quickly turned out than that wasn't the case and the move to go to the limiting and costly Cart format a step backwards and more to the point SEGA Japan were all fully behind the Saturn and they were the main productions lines for all SEGA's In-House console games

I like how Nintendo was promising the next generation of games on the SNES while it couldn't handle its own generation of games without slowdown, loadings, several cuts

It's called PR and all corps do it ,


Looking over some of the Spin SEGA used with the 32X and Saturn. I remember SEGA making out that the PS2 couldn't do Cel shading graphics and how SEGA Japan said that ever DC game would be running at 60 fps.

[Da_Shocker]

SEGA was not selling the Mega Drive or 32X at a loss and was only selling Saturn and Mega CD at cost price - Though I guess all Hardware launches sell at small loss initially until volume and productions rumps up and hits a set number of thousands of units . And why can't you just accespt that not only the press but the wider gaming public found other consoles far more interesting than the 32X ?

The 32X was promised as a gateway to the 32 bit world at a fraction of the price , but it quickly turned out than that wasn't the case and the move to go to the limiting and costly Cart format a step backwards and more to the point SEGA Japan were all fully behind the Saturn and they were the main productions lines for all SEGA's In-House console games



It's called PR and all corps do it ,


Looking over some of the Spin SEGA used with the 32X and Saturn. I remember SEGA making out that the PS2 couldn't do Cel shading graphics and how SEGA Japan said that ever DC game would be running at 60 fps.

+1

And let's not get into how Sega tried to paint Mario Kart as some crappy slow game compared to Sonic 2. All of these companies were like politicians digging at each other all the time.

[kool kitty89]

The only kinds of companies that could ever afford to sell the most advanced tech at a loss were anti-competitive mega-corps. Since Sega was never this, the idea of selling at a loss is moot.

But that's not true. ANY company (at any point in video game history) could have afforded to sell a console at a loss. It's just a matter of what other trade-offs they'd need to make to facilitate that.

Selling at a loss (or just selling at a lower profit for that matter) is just like any other marketing investment: spend more initially to increase sales and consumer interest (and developer interest via increased PR). Thus, it's simply a matter of establishing an overall marketing budget and allotting that to different areas from print to TV to in-store ads to product placement and pricing. (with a fixed budget, you'd have to sacrifice one or more of those to increase another, thus, in the extreme, you could rely purely on viral marketing and put all investment in subsidizing the price point)

And one more comment on cost/price: remember that retail mark-up tends to be massive, often more than 2x the price of the product's price from the manufacturer (and several times the raw manufacturing cost). Off the top of my head, I happen to know the Atari 7800 sold to retailers at roughly $25~30 for much of its market life, yet it retailed for $80.
Also, sometimes special negotiation with retailers can greatly deflate this mark-up, like with Commodore and the C64 convincing retaliers to sell the base system at (or near) cost price while profiting substantially from software and peripheral sales. (disk drives, etc)



Of course, the problem remains that large/stable/successful corporations have much more resources across the board to work with, which is the primary issue with Sony's pricing AND marketing compared to Sega's at the time. (Nintendo had a huge amount of liquid funds as well) And Sega hitting hard times in the arcades on top of suffering from management conflicts hurt them even more. (though I probably don't need to repeat this )

That is kind of the point here. Nintendo was assuring the masses that add-ons were okay, as long as you had to repurchase them with each cartridge sold. Meanwhile, Sega was having some sort of internal communications breakdown that has yet to be thoroughly detailed. Scot Bayless quit in November of 1994, if that date is correct, and I would assume SoA management were spending most of their time job searching after that. It would be great to confirm some of Bayless' account, of him being the primary go to guy for the Sega CD, not sleeping for days to launch the thing, etc. If he really was that much of a selfless individual (they do exist) then his sudden departure would also be a huge moral loss for the company.

The difference is marketing: Nintendo rarely specifically marketed their enhancement chips, and even more rarely did so in an "add-on" fashion. And even then, it didn't make much difference to the layman who simply cared about the end results: the perceived appeal of the game and the price. Embedded hardware on cart made those games pretty much idiot proof, no added purchase or installation of hardware needed, or even knowledge of the presence of that added hardware. The only difference on the consumer and retail end would be cost/pricing, assuming similar profit margins were employed. (really no different than using larger or faster ROM chips to similar net cost)

Dedicated add-ons have the potential to be much more cost effective (is successfully adopted in large volumes), but have the disadvantage of being substantially more difficult to market to the public in a similar sense to introducing a full next-gen system. However, the simpler and cheaper the add-on is to obtain and install, the less problematic it should be. (higher cost/complexity make that worse, as does having multiple add-ons released, and the more complex the situation becomes, the more costly it will be to successfully market the new hardware or get developer support for that matter -not to mention the added logistical complications of having more distinct products out)

The best case would be releasing a single, very cheap and simple to install module that was also very cost effective to integrate as standard with later model base systems. (for the current generation of consoles, the obvious example would be RAM expansion -a component that could be made as an easy to install module/cartridge that would have been very low cost by the middle of the systems' market lives and also cheap to include as standard -boosting the Xbox 360 to 1 GB for example)


I've argued pretty much all of this before, but I'm not sure you specifically ever saw it . . . especially if it was mixed in with another topic.

[sheath]

But that's not true. ANY company (at any point in video game history) could have afforded to sell a console at a loss. It's just a matter of what other trade-offs they'd need to make to facilitate that.

Nintendo always, or nearly always, sold for profit. Sega nearly always sold at cost or for a profit until the Saturn, and then went back to selling at cost for the Dreamcast until liquidating stock. Sony and Microsoft have always sold for a massive loss, sometimes nearly as much as a mass market console is lost on every unit sold. Whether or not Sega, Atari or Nintendo could have sold their hardware at a loss is not relevant to my comment. Though I think at their peaks each of them certainly could have sold at a loss and made up the losses elsewhere, that was actually the time they made the most profit on games and console sales. Why would they want to cut that back, especially considering the R&D and marketing costs of launching the next generation of hardware?

Also, I worked at retail through the later PS2 years into the early HD years, and we could NEVER buy a console and sell it for a profit, we always had to sell it at what we bought it for and make money on game sales (preferably used). The big chains could get bulk discounts on these consoles, but they were still making a very small margin, in the $10 per console range.

Of course, the problem remains that large/stable/successful corporations have much more resources across the board to work with, which is the primary issue with Sony's pricing AND marketing compared to Sega's at the time. (Nintendo had a huge amount of liquid funds as well) And Sega hitting hard times in the arcades on top of suffering from management conflicts hurt them even more. (though I probably don't need to repeat this )

This was my point, smaller companies have more stringent finances (and mentalities) and therefore cannot afford to do what Sony did.

[sheath]

Mean Machines Sega June 1995. No fire sales, and even a few recommends of the 32X over the Sega CD. The previews and reviews are mostly promotional.

[Team Andromeda]

Nintendo always, or nearly always, sold for profit. Sega nearly always sold at cost or for a profit until the Saturn, and then went back to selling at cost for the Dreamcast until liquidating stock

Seath , The Saturn was sold at cost price it was never ever really sold at a loss and that was reflected in its super High price . DC was sold at a loss from the get go and to be fair to SEGA Japan there went public and said they were going to make the money on games sales and sadly were crippled by poor sales of DC games in Japan.

[sheath]

EGM July 1995. The 32X, 3DO and Jaguar are clearly overshadowed by the impending Saturn and PS1 launches. The 32X and its games are still being sold for regular retail, but BRE Software has discounted Cosmic Carnage, After Burner and other "undesirable" 32X games to $30. It looks like EGM likes FMV games like Fahrenheit more than they like games like Shadow Squadron, Motherbase 2000 and Metal Head.