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RE: Sony, Square, Sega, and the 9-9-99 Debacle
On the other hand, Sega had little choice with its rebates and giveaways. What with the Mega CD, 32X, and Saturn absolutely killing trust in them. They worked hard to try and win it back. Even had they not offered those outlandish rebates and giveaways - even had Sony not had Square release FFVIII the same day -, it's still difficult to imagine a scenario where Sega emerges victorious. It's always been the scrappy arcade underdog to Nintendo's toy-making (and then game-making) empire and Sony's vast financial resources, and the thing about the scrappy underdog is that they must be lucky always, where his opponents must only be lucky once or twice.
It might be difficult to see from today, but at the time, I remember watching Sega come out swinging with everything in their arsenal to not only beat Sony to the punch with a next-gen console, but use the power of Sonic, 2K Sports, and Soulcalibur combined with that $100-cheaper price point to get people to seriously consider jumping ship from Sony to Sega.
Sega's Dreamcast was on the cover of every gaming magazine of the day. Their marketing blitz was extraordinary--they ran huge single- and later multi-page ads for months leading up to September touting how amazing their machine was. They had demo kiosks in Wal-Mart, for heaven's sake, first running video trailers and later playable versions of launch titles.
Sony had to use every business-judo trick in their arsenal to keep their players loyal and convince them to stick with the PlayStation brand while they waited for next-gen hardware to show up on store shelves. Then they had to weather gripes of low quantity and deliberate shortages of hardware because they couldn't manufacture them fast enough...and then they had to overcome another hurdle of first-gen hardware that didn't work because they pretty much suspended hardware Quality Assurance in an effort to meet demand with supply, which caused a huge backlash in both North America and Europe.
Between Sega's early launch, and the amazing software that came out after it, Sony absolutely blowing their world-wide launch, and a trend in Japan which saw them selling hardware at a loss without a corresponding uptick in software sales (because it was the cheapest DVD player on the market), Sony had to spend a shit-ton of money making up for their mistakes, and it would have been very easy for a few higher-ups in the company to look at a video games division that was hemorrhaging capital and sowing ill will among consumers all over the world to say, "Enough, shut it down," and that would have been the end of it all.
Sony survived 2000-2001 by bleeding millions of dollars because their execs were willing to write it all off as an up-front sunk cost that could hopefully be recouped across the console's lifespan. Without that gamble, Sega pretty much owns the market with a two-year uncontested head-start on Nintendo and Microsoft. :)
That would've made for a heck of a world, with Nintendo, Sega, and Microsoft duking it out. I wonder what it would've looked like.
Thank you for all the information, too - I can say I've learned something new today.