Project Dreamcast: Serious Play at Sega Enterprises Ltd.
1- Describe the challenge faced by Sega in the context of 3-D CE; what must they do in product development, process development, and supply chain development.
Challenges faced by Sega can be broken down into several categories:
Consumer:
o Sega wants to provide the consumer with a quality home video game that provides the top of the line graphics and animation capabilities at a low price as the consumer is highly sensitive to the price. Thus providing such a quality product to a price sensitive consumer is a big challenge to overcome.
Games development
o As Sega is developing games for all of its games markets: arcade, PC, and home video, it is of great value to have the same games portable across different platforms. However, such portability is very hard to accomplish as it highly minimizes making use of the different capabilities of the different hardware platforms.
Software houses:
o A home video game is nothing without games to play on it. The wider variety of games developed for a specific home video game, the more popular this home video game becomes. At the same time, software houses would not invest in developing games for a specific platform unless they make sure that this platform will become popular. Thus it becomes an endless loop. Thus a big challenge for Sega is to convince many software houses to develop games for its unreleased products to be ready once the product is in the market.
o Another challenge in relation to software houses is related to the libraries developed by Sega for its graphical engines. A major requirement of software houses is to ease the development of games by having easy to use and simple libraries. At the same time, as the graphical engine becomes more powerful for optimum graphical performance, the libraries for it become more and more complex. Balancing out the performance of the libraries and its simplicity is a big challenge for Sega.
Competition.
o In a price sensitive market, competition plays huge
Challenges faced by Sega can be broken down into several categories:
Consumer:
o Sega wants to provide the consumer with a quality home video game that provides the top of the line graphics and animation capabilities at a low price as the consumer is highly sensitive to the price. Thus providing such a quality product to a price sensitive consumer is a big challenge to overcome.
Games development
o As Sega is developing games for all of its games markets: arcade, PC, and home video, it is of great value to have the same games portable across different platforms. However, such portability is very hard to accomplish as it highly minimizes making use of the different capabilities of the different hardware platforms.
Software houses:
o A home video game is nothing without games to play on it. The wider variety of games developed for a specific home video game, the more popular this home video game becomes. At the same time, software houses would not invest in developing games for a specific platform unless they make sure that this platform will become popular. Thus it becomes an endless loop. Thus a big challenge for Sega is to convince many software houses to develop games for its unreleased products to be ready once the product is in the market.
o Another challenge in relation to software houses is related to the libraries developed by Sega for its graphical engines. A major requirement of software houses is to ease the development of games by having easy to use and simple libraries. At the same time, as the graphical engine becomes more powerful for optimum graphical performance, the libraries for it become more and more complex. Balancing out the performance of the libraries and its simplicity is a big challenge for Sega.
Competition.
o In a price sensitive market, competition plays huge