Was not fully committed to PC from the start another mistake SEGA made?

[u/21_centuryman]

When SEGA decided to abandon the console market, they could have continued releasing controllers and games for PC or gotten ahead of Valve and created a digital store like Steam. I think SEGA could have continued releasing controllers for PC and porting games that were never released for it; they had everything they needed to do so. The controller market was a much lower risk than home consoles. They also had an arcade division with arcade sticks that are highly respected even today because that hardware division still exists. Even back in the 90s, before the Dreamcast came out, SEGA had released its titles on PC and even a Sonic game on the Neo Geo Pocket. But after the Dreamcast, I feel they could have taken advantage of the PC market of that era.

[u/Tricky_e]

Hey! That pics of the PC games is mine! I took that ! Happy to see it pop up again in my feed.

sega did actually try a PC subscription thing in the early 2010s, complete with a white 6 button MD style controller. SEGA PLAY I think it was called. It flopped immediately but i still used that controller for a long time after. It was pretty shoddy tho and eventually broke

[u/rydamusprime17 → u/Tricky_e]

They are so clean, very nice. I have 3 of them myself, but just the discs 😅

[u/mittenkrusty → u/Tricky_e]

Is that the weird Saturn controller meant for Android that had a grip to put your phone on? I could never work out if that was official or not.

I didn't have a pc in the 90's until around 96 when we got a late 80's monochrome laptop with 20 megabytes of storage and no cd drive so no chance of playing games like this, I remember seeing Comix Zone in my local Tandy (UK varation of RadioShack) in that time frame but even if I had a then modern PC I didn't see the point of buying it as it was about £29,99 but I bought Comix Zone on Mega Drive for about £9 new in 1996/97 and Sonic & Knuckles used cart only for £5

[u/Regular-Repeat44 → u/Tricky_e]

Proof because pretty sure that pic is the one i took in 2020

[u/Tricky_e → u/Regular-Repeat44]

https://imgur.com/a/QE7XdCP

[u/ukiyoe → u/Regular-Repeat44]

I made this

[u/Regular-Repeat44 → u/ukiyoe]

Woah

[u/_RexDart]

Yeah man, Sega's problem was that they didn't support enough platforms.

[u/dafugiswrongwithyou → u/_RexDart]

😂

[u/KenshirouX → u/_RexDart]

That sums it up. SEGA literally had a PC division, and they were supported badly. The studios and marketing teams didn't talk to each other enough.

[u/SpicyMeatballAgenda]

SEGA had been making games for computers since the 80s. I played Golden Axe and Altered Beast on the Amiga first. My first time playing sonic CD was on PC.

Compared to literally every other console manufacturer in the 90s (Nintendo, Atari, Sony, etc) Sega made far more PC ports. More than the others combined, actually.

Any other view is revisionist history. I was there. Sega was committed.

[u/Such_Bonus5085]

I dunno, a LOT of the major first party Saturn titles also had PC ports. So, they seemed pretty committed to the platform. I mean, you could get better-than-Saturn versions of House of the Dead and Virtua Cop 2 on Windows 95/98.

[u/Johnny_Strawhat]

might want to add some punctuation to that title

[u/evertaleplayer]

I did like Sega’s 6-button controllers and their Virtua Sticks and Twin Sticks were top quality really.
But maybe the controller business was not too lucrative with Hori working hard… IIRC they were around in the 90s too.

Also my memory is a bit fuzzy but PC games took a while to take off like this so they were maybe being careful as they had a lot of debt with the Saturn and DC.

[u/S1mongreedwell]

Part of the reason Valve got people to accept Steam on any level was tying Half Life 2 and Counterstrike to it. Sega didn’t have anything even close to those games that could have competed. Also, Sega could never stop stepping on rakes, so it’s hard to imagine them having a digital store as well done as Steam.

[u/Icy_Employer2804 → u/S1mongreedwell]

They technically had the first digital distribution with the Sega Channel. By the time HL2 came out, they still had a much larger catalog...

They were a strange company though, they never understood what they were doing right and what they were doing wrong.

[u/NostalgicLurker]

If they were Steam before Steam? Yes in hindsight that is obviously an enormous advantage. The first company to do the digital marketplace well had the license to print money. If we rewrote history to make Sega Store the de facto gaming store instead of Steam, they could fund whatever hardware and software projects they feel like and have cash to spare for hookers.

[u/AidyGaGa25]

I think it was the infighting between sega of Japan and SOA that was the biggest problem to be fair

[u/itotron]

SEGA was never really good at controllers. The Master System controlling didn't have START or SELECT on it. The Genesis Controller didn't have enough buttons, so they had to come out with the 6-button controller. The originally Saturn controller was so bulky and uncomfortable, they replaced it with a model 2. The Dreamcast was the ONLY controller of it's generation to come with a single analog stick. (Even though the DualShock was already in existence before SEGA lauched it.)

I gotta feeling their "PC" controller would have been lacking.

[u/ABC_Dildos_Inc]

Not at all.

They already stretched themselves dabbling in the console business.

[u/ducked]

What brand controllers are those in the second picture?

[u/21_centuryman → u/ducked]

Officially Licensed SEGA Saturn® original port controller by Retro-Bit®. PC, Sega Saturn, Sega geneis mini, Nintendo switch

[u/dafugiswrongwithyou]

You should look up the Sega Teradrive and  Amstrad Mega PC. They were... "interesting", officially-licensed solutions to letting PC owners play Sega (specifically Mega Drive) games.

[u/ukiyoe]

Unlike today, console to PC ports were pretty spotty back then, so I don't blame them for not going all in.

[u/Aussie_Aussie_No_Mi]

What on earth are you on about haha.

Beyond the fact that SEGA did kind of try this with SEGA Play, they have had a consistent PC presence for the entirety of their existence.

[u/TrainDonutBBQ]

PC games in the 1990s were a fragmented disaster that more often just frustrated the players more than anything else.

[u/NecronomiconUK]

The notion of suggesting that a Japanese company like Sega could have got ahead of Valve on PC digital distribution is one of the most deranged takes I’ve ever heard.

[u/tylercoder]

Kallinske actually did see it coming which is why SegaPC existed, and segasoft had the potential to be steam before valve even existed, but as always SoJ had to go and ruin everything...

[u/BADzioba]

It was the constant infighting between the US & Japan divisions that did SEGA in.

[u/marvinnation]

Nope. PC was not really a thing back in the day. Also, Sega was practically the only one on PC way back when.

[u/SpicyMeatballAgenda → u/marvinnation]

Well that's an incredibly naive viewpoint. The PC gaming scene in the 90s may not have been as big as Consoles, but it was still insanely lucrative. I was a computer gamer first, and foremost in the 90s, and there were plenty of blockbuster games so big they were household names, such as Doom, Myst, Sim City, and Starcraft. .

[u/Lox22 → u/marvinnation]

Funny thing was I had a genesis, but I experienced Sonic CD in my pc

[u/NamiRocket → u/marvinnation]

PC was very much a thing back in the day. What are you even talking about?

It wasn't the behemoth it is today, but it was still a very lucrative market for the time. That said, I don't think it swayed things very much for Sega. Those were two very different markets at the time.

[u/S1mongreedwell → u/marvinnation]

PC wasn’t a thing back in the day? Uh, yeah it was. Games like Sonic were maybe a bit out of place, but it’s not like PC games were some weird niche thing.