The rise, fall and comeback of SEGA: From 65% market share to $1.5B in losses?!

In May 1995, a guy named Todd Kolinsky walked up on a stage at a conference called E3, and he destroyed his whole company. He just didn't know he'd done it yet. Todd was the CEO of Sega of America. And at that moment, he was basically a hero. He had taken Sega from basically nothing to having beaten Nintendo at its own game for four holiday seasons in a row to 65% market share. That morning at the conference, he was supposed to be announcing their new console, the Saturn. But his bosses back in Japan had made him make some decisions that would later prove catastrophic. And turns out he knew it. The biggest of those decisions was that they were rushing the console out to market. It would be 5 months until it was really ready. But his bosses back in Japan, they wanted it out right now. This one bad decision would put Sega into a death spiral. A decision that would cause them to eventually a few years later lose out not only to Nintendo but $400 million in a single year alone. But here's the crazy twist. Even after all of this and abandoning the console business, Sega's now a pretty profitable company. Sonic the Hedgehog movies have done over a billion dollars at the box office and they're releasing hit games. So, how did Sega go from conquering Nintendo to near collapse to becoming a hit again? This is the rise, fall, and redemption of Sega. And thanks Subscribe for sponsoring this video. More on them later. The story of Sega actually starts with an American Air Force officer named David Rosen who was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. And Rosen decided after the end of the war to stay in Japan and live there. And he saw something happening. The economy was booming. Uh people had disposable incomes. So he started a business importing American amusement machines. Despite 200% import duties, the bet paid off. People love those machines. And in 1965, uh, he merged his business with a local Japanese company, creating Sega. By the late 1970s, the company was pulling in over hund00 million a year from arcade games. And then the cons revolution started. Sega released the SG-1000 back in 1983. And in 1985, they released the Master System. It turned out they were losing. Nintendo owned over 90% of market share by 1988. The gap was stunning. Uh Nintendo had sold over 60 million consoles. Uh Sega just 13 million and only 2 million of those were in the United States. They were getting crushed. See, Nintendo had been pretty smart. What makes consoles really valuable is other people building consoles for your platform. And Nintendo had required people to only build games for their console, effectively locking them out from putting games on Sega. Because Sega was the perpetual underdog, they had to do something audacious. So in 1988, Sega decided to win based on technology. They released something called the Mega Drive uh in Japan. In the US, it would be called the Genesis, >> the most advanced video game system in the universe. >> Yes, >> Mega Drive from Sega. >> And it made a huge leap in terms of technology. Uh whereas Nintendo's was an 8-bit system, suddenly the Genesis was 16 bits, meaning more colors and more power. >> With thousands of colors, 16bit graphic technology, and 10 channel mega stereo sound. >> But here's something you'll learn. Better technology doesn't often win. There's lots of better operating systems than Windows. There's lots of violence than the iPhone. Uh and that just didn't work. Sega tried everything. First thing they tried was a branding campaign called Nintend Don't. I get it. Very punny. Uh, didn't work. Sega still just had 8% market share. Then Japan's president, a man named Hyo Nakayyama. He hired our protagonist, a man named Tom Kolinsky. He was a legend in the toy industry. Ed Mattel. He'd revived Barbie. He made Hot Wheels a thing. Like, he was a guy who knew how to sell stuff to kids. Kolinsky spent a month analyzing the situation. Then he hopped a plane to Japan to pitch them on his plane. The first thing he wanted to do was slash the prices. He reduced the console from $189 to $149. The second thing he did was produce games specifically for American taste, especially sports games. Third, he wanted to go nuclear on advertising. He wanted to increase Sega's advertising budget from 10 million a year to 60 million a year. The last thing, and perhaps the most important, is he wanted to replace their bundled game, which had been called Altered Beast, a game so ignominious I've never even heard of it until I researched this video. And the new game would be called Sonic the Hedgehog. In Japan, they hated the plan. They practically in the boardroom begged that they would fire this new American. But Nakayyama overruled him. He basically went to the board and said, "I don't care what you think. I'm going to allow this new American we hired and trusted to go make some moves." And so Tom did. This dynamic of the American CEO versus the Japanese board, well, it would prove to be uh kind of important later on in the story. And so the plan got put into action. Sonic the Hedgehog was launched in June 1991. It would prove to be a game that would change the entire console industry. >> Now get Sonic free when you buy a Sega Genesis system at its new price of $149.99. >> The game was faster, brighter colors, and more tied to culture than anything else that was on the market. Mario was cool for Nintendo, but he didn't really reflect anything going on in the culture. In fact, the guys at Sega were so in tune with tough that they tried to make Sonic's shoes be reminiscent of Michael Jackson at the time. There's a can do kind of guy moving fast, breaking stuff. All these moves paid off during the 1991 holiday season. On the back of Sonic the Little Hedgehog, the Sega console outsold Nintendo by 2 to1. By January 1992, Sega had 65% of the console market. Uh, basically, they'd been getting trounced by Nintendo before, and it was the first time Nintendo hadn't been in the lead for almost 7 years. And all that advertising spend had totally worked. Uh, Sega kept up their pressure. They were on MTV. They were uh basically on rock concerts, everything that could target a teenager who had access to disposable income from their parents. Well, Sega was out trying to reach them. They were so edgy targeting teenagers that eventually it led to congressional hearings on video games >> to advertise that it it includes deadly new weapons, six levels of monster bashing, mayhem, and killer special moves. >> Remember, this is back in the era with parental uh lyric uh labels and stuff like that on CDs. Yeah, it was a bit of a different time. The uh Sega guys, they pushed it. In 1993, a game came out called Mortal Kombat. Nintendo by default basically censored all the blood, gore, and guts. It's pretty pretty crazy game. Sega basically allowed you to unlock all that stuff with a secret code. Uh they just didn't they just didn't care about catering to little kids. They were going to push the envelope. >> Finish him. By 1993, just three years in, Sega had over half the console market, which is pretty crazy considering Nintendo just a few years before at the start of the decade had over 90%. Under Kolinsky, uh the uh revenue of the company grew from 72 million a year to 1.5 billion a year. Market cap from 2 billion to 5 billion. And right at the moment, it looked like they couldn't do any wrong. Well, that's when things started to change for Sega. Despite being at the top of their triumph, Sega had been quietly planting the seeds of their own destruction. See, the way console makers have to work is they release one big console at a time, getting all their video game publishers around them to release at the same time and work on the new platform. Uh, but Sega hadn't been doing that. They had been basically producing add-on after add-on for the Genesis rather than focusing on big platform releases one at a time. In 1992, they created a $300 add-on for the Genesis. It was a CD ROM thing. basically just created some crappy movies uh that were uh run on the on the Sega platform. Uh and the publishers didn't sign up for it. It was just a mess. In 1994, they created a thing called the 32X. Uh it was a flop. They basically just extended the life of the existing Genesis. Uh they sold barely 800,000 units. Drop in the bucket. And all this stuff meant if you were going to buy all these add-ons for the Genesis as a consumer, the entire platform to take full use of it will cost you over $1,200. It's a lot of money back then. Heck, when I was a kid in the 90s, you could still buy a pretty decent car for $1,200. I mean, it was a used beater, but it was still a used car. Uh, that was a lot of bucks for a teenager. In just 5 years, Sega asked consumers to support five different pieces of hardware. Eventually, many of them just gave up. Internally, the drama that I talked about between the American CEO and the Japanese uh board, it was starting to percolate. And if you've been a fan of this channel, you probably saw my video on Nissan. Same exact thing happened to them. and the board and Tom kept drifting apart. Tom would later talk about that being a product of his success. Uh there was jealousy at headquarters that this overseas stuff was outshadowing everything going on back in Japan. The hubris was pretty amazing. In 1996, the internal strategy team uh at Sega basically drafted a big vision document that at the time saw them toppling industry giant Sony. Uh but within a couple years uh they would be actually exiting the console business entirely. And part of that downfall was meanwhile their cross-country neighbor Sony the giant was trying to enter the console business themselves. And here's the crazy thing. Sega actually helped Sony come in and eventually, you know, kill them from the business. And how they did it? Well, Tom actually instructed his team to help the Sony engineers learn how to make their own console. The reason was there had been talks at that point about Sony and Sega working together to create a super console between the two of them. And that could have happened, but it turns out the Sega leadership didn't believe that Sony was serious about entering the console business. But it turned out they were really serious. And on top of that, uh, famous at the time graphics company called Silicon Graphics had offered Sega their new 64-bit technology, which would push things even further for their next console. Well, they said no to it at Sega. Nintendo would use that for their Nintendo 64 to come out later. Sega was so set on milking their existing customer base that they were forgetting that they had to keep building and staying aggressive and paranoid to win in the future. This would all come back to haunt them. Have you ever started writing a quick how-to doc and then an hour disappears? That's why I'm excited to talk about today's video sponsor, Scribe. Scribe is a tool that automatically turns workflows into step-by-step guides as you do them. is that of manually documenting a process. You just record yourself completing a task once and Scribe automatically generates a step-by-step guide complete with screenshots and steps for you. What I love is how fast it is. You don't have to overthink it or spend extra time copying and pasting screenshots or writing out instructions. Scribe simply runs in the background and instantly turns your workflow into something super clear and sharable. 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Sega had originally planned to release the Saturn on September 2nd, 1995. Uh, a Saturday. They were going to call it Saturn Day. Get it? Very punny. But Sega was getting freaked out. And the thing they were getting freaked out about was they had learned that Sony was about to release the PlayStation. So management back in Japan pushed Tom to go up on stage and announce the thing immediately. Kolinsky wanted to actually put it off almost a whole another year to be released. Uh and ultimately he got so pissed about being forced to release something that wasn't ready, he'd eventually leave Sega. Tom announced that that very day retailers like Toys R Us, which was still a thing back then, would be selling the new Saturn for $399 available that day. But here's the thing. retailers, including Toys R Us, and all the other folks, Eevee Games, Babages, if you're around for those guys, uh they were all like not informed that they were starting to carry these things. Customers showed up asking where the new Saturn was, and these guys were pissed. Many of them would refuse to even carry the new console from Sega because of this move. Third party game developers were blindsided, too, because they'd rushed it too early. That meant that only six games were available at launch. And then after Tom, the head of PlayStation, a guy named Steve Race, came on board and he just basically said one word, >> $299. >> $299. Well, it's worth a word, but you see what I'm saying? Uh, in telling everybody about the PlayStation, the room erupted. Sony was going to be undercutting Sega by over 100 bucks. Within 2 days of the PlayStation's launch, it had outsold the entirety of uh of the Saturn's 5-month head start. Saturn would never recover. Within the first year, the PlayStation would jump to over 20% market share against well, pretty long-standing competition. Worse, there was no flagship game for the Saturn. Uh there was no Sonic the Hedgehog game. They had been trying to make a 3D version of it. Uh and that was mired by technical problems. By 1996, they'd cancelled the game entirely, never releasing it. Nintendo had Mario, Sega had Sonic, and they launched a console without a Sonic game. It's incredible. By 1996, Kolinsky had had enough of the internal politics and jealousy and all that kind of stuff, and he resigned as CEO uh of the company. And here's the deal. When you are an owner or a CEO of the business and you have a great person on your team, your job number one needs to be making sure they don't go anywhere. And there's a combination of ways to do that. But first and foremost, you got to make sure their job is pleasant and they feel like they could be successful. Tom had neither of those things. Tom's replacement, a guy named Bernie Stler, went on the stage at E3 in 1997. And he announced basically the Saturn has no future, which basically well killed the whole platform again. In early 1998, they killed the Saturn entirely. Uh to put it in perspective, it sold only 9.8 million units. The PlayStation had sold over 100 million. You remember Hayo Nakayyama, the longtime Sega, you know, chairman and president who had backed Kolinsky uh and those early gambles that had paid off. Uh he ended up having to resign as well. From 1998 to 2002, Sega started bleeding out. They lost over a billion and a half dollars. But look, why not start from scratch? And their next move would be the Dreamcast. >> Sega is rolling out a new video game console this week, hoping to win back a larger share of the market. >> The graphics. Graphics. the graphics. Better graphics means it's more realistic. >> Sega's new Dreamcast video game console is graphically better. The Dreamcast was your classic effort that tried to do everything. And remember how before they had tried to win based on technology? Well, they really tried it this time. Dreamcast was the first console built for online play. It had an integrated portable unit that would move it around, a gigabyte of storage. Well, CDROM, and if it had a bell or a whistle, they added it. On $99.99, they launched the thing. and it would be the biggest launch of any console in history. They sold $225,000 units in 24 hours, garnering almost $und00 million in revenue in one day. This time they hadn't screwed up everything. They made sure that they were good games to come out with it. They had NFL 2K, a new Sonic game, bunch of other games as well. Right, the publishers at least, well, they hadn't made the mistakes that they did before with the Saturn. But then Sony made an announcement and in 1999 they had announced the PlayStation 2 with specs that would make it even more powerful than the Dreamcast. >> Sony PlayStation 2 will be the biggest thing to come along since TV was invented. The buzz on this product is that strong. >> PlayStation 2. >> PlayStation. >> PlayStation 2. Newest, fastest video game system ever. >> And here's something about the economics of these console wars. Uh the way it works is the razor and razor blade situation. kind of the way Gillette does it. Well, not for me recently. I have a beard. But basically, they sell you the razor for cheap or even at a discount or even at a loss and then they make money by selling you the blades. Uh, and this whole deal, like the consoles as well, is the same thing. For the longest time, including the PlayStation business, they would sell the consoles on a loss. The reason they could do that is the deals they had with the publishers who wrote the games, well, they would get a cut of their revenue. So, they make the big money on the games, lose money on the consoles. And Sony's genius move was to realize you could push this way of doing stuff really far. And at the time in around the year 2000, it was expensive to buy a DVD player. Wasn't like today uh where those things are basically obsolete. Basically, a PlayStation 2 was going to sell for cheaper than a DVD player was. And the reason was cuz Sony was subsidizing at a loss. They were big. They could afford to lose money temporarily. Basically, this announcement stunned the entire market. uh because it was so cheap and going to be such a good deal, customers started to wait and sales for the Dreamcast started to decline as early as the middle of the year 2000. Then there was another problem. Electronic Arts, the biggest publisher in the world for the Dreamcast, well, they had decided they weren't going to make games for the platform. Sega had made a mistake of getting into the game production business. They paid $10 million for their own game developer. It just turns out that game developer had been making games around sports and EA wanted to be the only one making sports games for the Dreamcast. No Madden, no FIFA, no NHL. Those games, they went to the PlayStation instead. Sega responded by cutting prices and heck, they tried everything. They'd back up the truck and give you free subscriptions to their Dreamcast service, uh, free games, cheap prices, uh, basically nothing worked. And the reason was there wasn't good content to run on the platform. In September 2000, uh, with things looking very bleak for the platform, uh, executives of Sega and America, Tom Moore and Charles Bellfield, they flew to Japan to meet with their Japanese counterparts in the console business. Their recommendation was kind of revolutionary. Sega should abandon making consoles at this point, leave that to the other guys, and focus on making games instead. The numbers made their case for them. The Dreamcast needed to sell 5 million units that year to be viable. it would go on to sell only 3 million. At the end of January 2001, Sega made it official. Uh they would get out of the Dreamcast and the console business entirely and for good and go on to just make games for other people's consoles. After 18 years in the business, the SG-1000, uh the Dreamcast, the Saturn, all the saga, uh they were out and the company would be forever different. The PlayStation 2 would sell 155 million units. The Dreamcast only 9 million. And today, Sega might be dead except for one thing. Sega's largest and wealthiest shareholder, man named Isao Ogawa. And uh he basically personally loaned the company $500 million. And also he forgave a lot of that loan and took it back as stock. It was basically his entire personal fortune. That one man alone is responsible for well basically keeping Sonic the Hedgehog alive. Otherwise, he wouldn't be around. And at this point, most people would have expected Sega to fade away. another victim of the losing side of the uh console wars alongside, you know, Kico and a television and Commodore and on down the like. But that wasn't what was about to happen. Instead, our beloved Sonic the Hedgehog and other IP, he started to appear on other platforms, the Xbox, the PlayStation, heck, even Nintendo, their longtime rival. In 2004, they made a pretty smart move. They uh merged with a company called the Sammy Corporation, who made gambling machines called Pikico Machines, if you've ever seen one, back in Japan. uh that provided steady revenue beyond just the game making. Sonic, the Yakuza series through their subunit Altus, uh other ones, they kept the franchise and the business alive. In 2008, they did the unthinkable. They put Mario and Sonic together in one game on the Nintendo platform. In 2020, they took that IP and tried to make even more money from it. Uh they released a movie about Sonic the Hedgehog. Uh basically where he would be in a movie. Pretty crazy. problem was the trailer was so poorly received because of the CGI being so bad that they had to redo the entire movie. But it totally worked. The first film made $319 million. Does that go $400 million? And the third one above that as well, $424 million as of the time of this recording. Sonic is now the second highest grossing franchise uh from a video game of all time uh behind only our buddy Mario. Over a billion dollars of a little hedgehog. Crazy. In 2025, the uh enterprise content, in other words, the video game and licensing component of the Sammy Corporation, more than doubled its profits year-over-year. And today, it's the most valuable part of the entire corporation. And what had been a pretty bad business, trying to fight it out in the console war against Microsoft, Nintendo, and uh Sony has turned into an amazing business where they took that own IP and uh now they're printing money arguably in a better business to be in than the console one. The reality is a lot of times the best way to find out a great business to be in is to start out in the wrong business. Activity basically allows you to learn things about the world that you didn't otherwise know. In this case, that's what Sega learned. After five iterations of their console, some wins and some losses, they learned, man, there's just better businesses to be in. And fortunately, at this point, because everybody loves Sonic, they had a great opportunity to do it. All right, this is my uh second most request requested video of the recent couple of months. The other one being Joan Fabrics, which has come out lately. If you enjoyed this, please let me know that you enjoyed it. It encourages me to make more. And if you have an opinion about what happened to Sega, or of course, if you're somebody who thinks I got a fact wrong, I apologize. Uh, let me know in the comments below. None of you seem to be very bashful about that. Catch you next time.

Try Scribe for free: http://scribe.how/girdley What happened to Sega? Scribe’s Workflow AI platform instantly turns workflows into step-by-step guides, SOPs, training manuals, and how-to documentation to help teams get work done right and improve how work gets done. Automatically capture your clicks and keystrokes to generate visual process documentation in seconds - perfect for employee onboarding, standard operating procedures, workflow documentation, internal knowledge bases, and team knowledge sharing. In the early 1990s, Sega pulled off one of the most dramatic power shifts in business history. After years of losing to Nintendo, Sega launched the Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog, slashed prices, spent aggressively on marketing, and captured 65% of the U.S. console market. Revenue exploded from $72 million to $1.5 billion in just a few years. For a moment, Sega looked unstoppable. Get the 2-minute cheat sheet for this video → https://girdley.com/youtube 👇 SUBSCRIBE for more business breakdowns https://www.youtube.com/@Michael-Girdley?sub_confirmation=1 ------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Get my weekly letter to business owners: essential insights to run, grow, and stay ahead in your business → https://links.girdley.com/newsletter-yt ► For sponsorships or inquiries please reach out to: Contact@girdley.com ► Do you have a hat I should wear in a video? Send it to us: Contact@girdley.com ► Free events on all things small business: https://links.girdley.com/lectures-yt ► Deep dives on businesses for sale: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquisitionsAnonymousPodcast ► Follow me on Twitter/X: https://x.com/girdley ------------------------------------------------------------------ But The rise and fall of Sega is ultimately a story about strategic overreach, internal conflict, and catastrophic product timing. Instead of focusing on a single next-generation console, Sega fragmented its customer base with expensive add-ons like the Sega CD and 32X. Then came the Saturn. Rushed to market at $399 and launched months early without retailer coordination or a flagship Sonic title, the Saturn was undermined almost instantly when Sony revealed the $299 PlayStation. Within a year, the PlayStation had overtaken Sega, eventually selling over 100 million units. The Dreamcast was Sega’s last attempt to reclaim its position. Technologically ambitious and initially successful, it became the first console built for online play. But Sony’s PlayStation 2 announcement, combined with Electronic Arts pulling support, sealed Sega’s fate. By 2001, Sega exited the console business entirely after massive losses. This Sega documentary breaks down the strategic mistakes that led to collapse — from hardware fragmentation to misaligned global leadership — and the surprising pivot that saved the company. Instead of disappearing, Sega transformed. Backed by key financial support, it shifted to software, IP licensing, and eventually merged with Sammy Corporation. Sonic the Hedgehog became a cross-platform franchise, culminating in a billion-dollar film series and a revitalized publishing business. Today, Sega is profitable again — not as a console maker, but as a content and IP powerhouse. This business breakdown explores: - Platform strategy mistakes - Pricing wars and the razor-and-blade model - Retail channel mismanagement - Third-party publisher power - The economics of console ecosystems - Why exiting a market can be the smartest move The rise and fall of Sega is more than a gaming story — it’s a case study in leadership, ego, innovation cycles, and the importance of strategic focus.