SEGA of America 1997 internal documents posted online, showing e-mails and revealing profit margins
Have you ever wanted to know what SEGA of America talked about privately about SEGA as a brand going into 1997? You know, the time period when SEGA was going against the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 in America? When they lost most of the market share they gained with the SEGA Genesis? You can now thanks to a 272-page leaked internal document posted over at SEGA Retro.
In this document you can see SEGA of America discussing stuff like manufacturing costs, how badly the Saturn was selling, retail profit margins, and a lot more. For example, retailers only made a measly 6% per SEGA Saturn sold, that means they made $15 dollars per console. Why would they push it? Another surprising piece of information is that in 1996 it only cost SEGA $232 to manufacture a Saturn console which is a lot lower than we all thought.