Quote Originally Posted by gbpxl View Post
Ive thought about this a lot. The damn Genesis was getting more attention from Sega in 1998 than its successor consoles. Poorly run company on the part of Sega of America.
No, by 1998 Sega of America was long done with the Genesis. Heck they were done with it by Christmas 1995 for sure, and most of what came out in '96-97 were just 3rd party rehashes. They'd rightly shifted to the Saturn. There was just so many issues they had. Developers could not create games quickly. Sega of America's budget didn't provide for enough translations/imports of Japanese titles, including the strong RPG and Shooter categories. Even what was once Sega's bread and butter, arcade ports suffered. What did get released was often buggy, and just not impressive.

1998 was far too late, SEGA was done by then, whether they knew it or not. They likely knew. The Playstation stole their market share, reducing SEGA to not much more market than the TG-16 occupied years earlier. IMO their failure was in offering a primitive interactive FMV solution (CD) and a more powerful polygon-based solution (32x) separately, while asking consumers to spend $500+ to experience both. I felt that Tom Kalinske, being a toy guy, improperly missed the boat on the Genesis add-ons. They were good concepts, probably the only want the CD and 32X get released, but they never made practical sense. Each required far more investment than they got. Nintendo meanwhile completely ignored FMV trash, spent a little bit on special chips, and were able to have their SNES last several years longer than the Genesis.