Dreamcast released too soon

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5903377&forum_id=2#50132814)

“ Sony had annual sales of 3 trillion yen. They made their own CD-ROM drives. They had their own semiconductor factories. Once when I was talking with Ken Kutaragi [the creator of the PlayStation], he said “Hideki-chan”—he refers to me using the “chan” diminutive—“Hideki-chan, there’s no way you can beat me. Where are you buying your processors? From Hitachi. From Yamaha. What about your CD-ROM drives? You’re buying everything. By buying from Hitachi, Hitachi is profiting. You can’t make anything yourselves. We can make everything ourselves, including custom parts. We have our own factories.” Near Nakashinden, they had a huge factory where they made audio equipment that they were using for the PlayStation. Their cost structure was completely different.

“That’s the way it is, Hideki-chan,” Kutaragi told me. “So quit the hardware business. Why not just do software? We’ll give you favorable treatment.” He wanted us to go third party. We had been going for so long in the hardware business, for better or worse, and to go third party now? We had been half-heartedly successful in America once, and this made it impossible to quit the hardware business. Maybe if the Mega Drive, the Genesis, had been a failure, things would have been different. But we had a strange taste of success.“

N64 was a really good platform in some ways that was both lower cost and more powerful (but had its shortcomings including a lack of Games). But anyway there was a lot of competition and Sega couldn’t retain the western Scumbag audience’s attention.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5903377&forum_id=2#50132818)