Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…We will link to the video of this in the show notes. It's on YouTube. People still watch this to this day. The reaction is amazing. At first, there's silence because people are like, what did he just say? What does this mean? What's going on? Then the crowd starts cheering, and then you can hear after about 20 seconds or so, when this really sinks in of what this means, people go nuts. There's another wave of cheering. It's unbelievable. That last wave is all the developers realizing, oh, my God, we are going to print money because there's going to be so many people buying this thing. This exact moment in the afternoon of May 11th, 1995 is the death of Sega. Let's go back and think about the three key constituencies in the video game home console business flywheel. You've got the consumers. Why on earth would any consumer go buy a Sega Saturn today on May 11th, on its launch day, that has no Sonic game, has only six games total, and it costs 399, when you now know that the PlayStation which is far superior, is going to come out just four months later, they're going to have perfect ports of all the latest and greatest arcade technology video games, and it's going to cost less? You're not going to buy a Saturn. That's the consumers, then the retailers. The retailers are so mad at Sega. Sega just completely ruined all of their holiday season planning because for retailers, Q4 is everything. Why are these consoles launching in the fall in the US so that it can be ready for the holidays? Sega just screwed all this up. Now, more importantly, they've got units on trucks on route to their stores that they know they're not going to be able to sell now. They are so mad at Sega. I think it was KB Toys, which then was a big franchise in America. They dropped Sega entirely. They're like, we're not carrying your stuff anymore. Goodbye, you're gone. You've got the most important piece, the developers. All the third-party developers who are sitting there at E3 watching these keynotes, they're like, wow, we're going to make a ton of money on Sony, and Saturn has no chance of building a meaningful install base. If I was planning on developing games for the Saturn, I am now canceling those plans. This is just the worst thing that could possibly happen to Sega, the Saturn, and the arcade business.…

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