Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…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. Listeners, as you can imagine, there is a tough path that they have to now traverse to get to the 2023 Sega that we're going to talk about and what they look like as a games business today. David, I have a couple of stories that I don't think you know about how they made that transition. I'm curious to know if I will stump you with that or not. Okay, David, here are a few things that I was curious if you knew about. I planted the seed earlier with the idea that some people personally accumulated a lot of wealth through Sega. One of these people was Isao Okawa. Yes, the chairman of CSK, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.