I just want to argue for the sake of arguing tbh I’m a habitually argument I’ve person to My own detriment
A marketing campaign that did a lot of harm to its competitors.
Not really. Sony didn't spend a lot of time directly marketing against Sega, anywhere near what Sega did to Nintendo in the gen just prior. Off the top of my head, only a few of the Crash ads did (which also made fun of Mario/Nintendo, FWIW). The vast majority of SCEA & SCEE's marketing was focused on selling people on the PS1, they didn't really directly (or indirectly) go after Sega or Nintendo.
I dunno about SCEJ, but I doubt they did much of that either, especially since that's not really a style you saw from the Japanese side of companies during the '90s.
Well lets start with this game that was canceled due to ”hardware limitations.”
en.wikipedia.org
Tomb Raider 1 already struggled to run on the Saturn; you should watch the DF Retro episode on it that John did. It shows you how the Saturn did its 3D; basically it was distorted sprites (quads). A supercharged version of the Superscaler sprite technology from hardware like the System Y arcade board and the boards that powered Outrun, Outrunners, Afterburner etc.
By the time Tomb Raider 2 was in development and due for market, the Saturn was already mostly dead in the West and Bernie Stolar finished it off with that "The Saturn is not our future" comment at E3 1997. After that, TONS of 3P devs started cancelling Saturn titles in the middle of development, left and right. So, PS1 got a ton of defacto exclusives as a result; even the N64 got a boost in 3P support because of Sega's horrible mismanagement of Saturn outside of Japan and signaling the platform was effectively dead by mid-1997.
Sega did not randomly decide to just put a 3d chip into their console. It was designed the way it was from the beginning and did have better 2D textures in-game compared to the ps1.
No it wasn't. Saturn was primarily designed with 2D in mind when it went under the name 'GigaDrive'. It supported 3D from the beginning, but rudimentary 3D closer to Model 1. AFAIK it was not even planned to handle texturing in hardware, though I suppose the CPU would've helped there (like it did with 32X, which has no 3D acceleration hardware and relies on its second SH2 to do 3D in software mode).
So it's half-true that Saturn had 3D in mind from the get-go. However, it was not to the level it would eventually have, because the 2nd VDP and SH2 weren't part of the original design spec. Only after they got word of the PS1's specs, did Nakayama have the 'Away Team' scramble to beef up Saturn's 3D without needing a delay, so they turned to parallel programming and made it a dual-CPU and dual-graphics processor system (but failed to adjust the system bus to compensate, among other things).
I’m pretty sure it’s the same situation sony is facing right now.
More than a little too soon to say. If there are issues happening with SIE 1P studios ATM, I wouldn't say they're anywhere near the level of mismanagement Sega had over their studios in the mid '90s. It'd also, whatever issues there are with 1P studio management at SIE, they have already identified those issues and are putting together solutions to address them. SOA and SOJ were never on the same page to realize their management problems until it was way too late, and also rushed yet another system (Dreamcast) out to market to try fixing perceived issues while repeating some of the same mistakes they did with Saturn.
Also; Sony naturally gained the vast majority of their software support from 3P who saw that Sony provided a superior solution for the market compared to Sega and Nintendo, so they chose to focus their efforts on PS1. Even after acquiring Psygnosis (btw, Sega acquired a SDK manufacturer a year prior to that), Sony's 1P and publishing label was still smaller in overall output than Sega (who published 155 games in 1995 alone), and arguably not that much larger than Nintendo's if at all when going by total software sales and revenue.
In other words, Sony didn't buy up big chunks of the 3P market to bolster their platform's own software support when said platform was otherwise failing to resonate with 3P devs, pubs and majority of consumers. In other
other words, they didn't (haven't) done what Microsoft has resorted to doing to try gaining or maintaining relevance.
So basically, the situations Sega faced then, and Sony face now, are not the same.
