How important is the spec of a games console? How about the games released on it? Pretty important right? Are they the most important things? Yeah? Well maybe not. I believe that Sega ended up exiting the games console market mainly through bad BUSINESS decisions. Let's go old school and remember the days when Sega had it all..

Can you remember the days of SNES vs Mega-drive/Genesis? Nintendo and Sega were in such a powerful position in the games industry it was hard for competitors to enter the market. Sega's next-gen console, the Saturn, was deemed the future and had no immediate competition from Nintendo. How could anyone screw this up? How about these 3 key mistakes:

1) Delays

The Saturn was delayed well over a year. What many people don't realise is that this delay was business influenced. Sega were doing so well in the market with the Mega-drive/Genesis and its add-on hardware that the release of the Saturn 'so soon' was not a profit maximising option.

2) Loud and Proud

Sega had announced almost everything about the Saturn 3 years before the release. They were beaten by PlayStation hands down due to Sony keeping extremely quiet about their games console until nearer it's release date. This also helped build hype near the release date, not 2-3 years before like for the Saturn (very early marketing). By the time the Saturn was released it already seemed old news. Sony were also able to find out way too many details about the competition so early in their own development of the PlayStation.

3) Underestimate the competition

Hearing of Sony entering the market should have worried Sega much more than it did. They may had found out later than they had liked about the PlayStation, but should have responded by releasing the Saturn AT LEAST 6 months before, ideally a year, such as Xbox 360 has done to the technologically superior PS3 enabling the 360 to dominate through an early start and being able to get it's "later wave" of games for the console out that normally annihilate the launch games. This could have countered Sony's 'keep quiet' marketing.

In UK the Saturn's launch was a disaster compared to the Playstation. This hopefully shows how important the right business decisions are to even a dominant player in the games industry. I've read so many games console comparisions of success revolving around specs and games that I thought I'd try something different. Thanks for reading, please add your thoughts and comments.