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21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 25
Take this job and post it! Tech-style "help wanted" ads for the rest of us.
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I wrote the code and got in early on the stock -- but was it worth so much trouble?
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[08/12/99]

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[08/12/99]

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The Web gives bands like the Beastie Boys a place to market music and merchandise -- but only if they can hold onto their digital rights.
By Janelle Brown
[08/11/99]

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After all, the Dreamcast is Sega's best, and maybe last, hope. The new 128-bit gaming console is impressive, the graphics are incredible, it moves fast, costs only $199 -- and it comes with a built-in 56K modem for online play purposes, a first for a console. But right now that is not enough; it needs to be a smashing success.

Dreamcast has to turn Sega around. In 1993, Sega controlled more than 50 percent of the video game market. Its Genesis console, released in 1989, was enormously popular; at the time many a kid joked that SEGA stood for System Eating Grade point Average because of the amount of time spent playing it. But the Saturn, Sega's 32-bit console released in 1995, suffered from all kinds of problems -- including a lack of third-party developer support, few titles at launch, and an expensive $400 price tag. Sega lost its market share rapidly as Sony's PlayStation became the platform of choice, and Sega eventually stopped supporting Saturn, much to the ire of the gamers who had made the pricey commitment to its platform.

Now, folks like Jarett McCarthy, 19, a hardcore gamer and a hardcore Sega fan, are wary. "I think that they burned us by going into [Saturn] half-assed. If you look back, [Sega was] able to succeed against the superior Super Nintendo Entertainment System with their Genesis by advertising aggressively and releasing games that were as good as, if not better than, their Nintendo counterparts. With the Saturn though, it seemed as if they gave up ... after the PlayStation started to beat them out in console sales. Then they started releasing fewer good games and not porting certain excellent Japanese titles," he says.

McCarthy expresses only "cautious" excitement about the Dreamcast. "I think that they are going to have to win people all over again," he says.

Sega knows this -- and is going all out, with a $100 million marketing campaign and efforts to entice game makers to build cool games for the new platform. If the console fails to win over huge numbers of gamers, conventional industry wisdom says, it will be the end of Sega. The company has been hemorrhaging money of late -- it reported a net loss of almost $400 million in April -- and its market share has dwindled a pathetic 5 percent, according to some reports. Meanwhile, the Dreamcast hasn't done as well as expected in Japan, missing its target of 1 million units sold by last March.

So, a great deal of weight has been placed on the United States launch, which is why it's so surprising that Sega would make such a major and unexpected executive change so close to Sept. 9 -- launch day.

Next page | Sega wants gamers to know it's changed