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Looks like it’s infodump time.
Sega released the Genesis/Mega Drive in 1988, then to extend its capabilities they released the Sega CD/Mega CD addon in 1991, which was followed by a second addon, the 32X, in 1994. There were even some games that required both add-ons, resulting in a high initial investment from consumers. The base Genesis/Mega Drive was massively successful outside of Japan and the Sega CD/Mega CD did reasonably well, but the 32X flopped. This was due to a lack of interest, partially because they also released the Genesis’/Mega Drive’s successor, the Sega Saturn, in 1994 (the 32X actually released after the Saturn in Japan).
In the fourth-generation console war Sega only had to deal with Nintendo as their main competitor. For the fifth-generation there was a second front. PlayStation came out in 1994 in Japan and was a success from launch. Sega was terrified. Both the Saturn and PlayStation would debut internationally in September 1995 and Sega knew they had to do something decisive to get ahead. E3 1995 would make or break Saturn in America and Sega had a plan to beat Sony. At their presentation Sega declared that Saturn would be available immediately, four months ahead of the previous release date, at select retailers at a price of $399. This gamble backfired massively on Sega. The retailers that weren’t part of the early release were pissed and some even boycotted Sega over this. The second blow came from Sony. At the PlayStation presentation they had one of their presenter walk on stage, say “299” and leave. This number was PlayStation’s price.
By the time Dreamcast came out in 1998 Sega had tanked their reputation with consumers and retailers and they never stood a chance against the PlayStation 2. Additionally, the PS2 had almost complete backwards compatibility with its predecessor and it played DVDs. It had better specs than the Dreamcast, but not GameCube and Xbox. It is also worth noting that the PS2 was so successful that it actually outsold all three of it’s competitors combined.
It’s difficult to overstate how much the DVD player boosted the PS2. Many people bought the PS2 mainly as a DVD player and the games were just a bonus.
Also remember when they said Saddam Hussein was using PS2s to control missiles or some bullshit like that?
At the time a DVD player cost about the same as a PS2. I remember someone buying a DVD player when the PS2 was $20 more.
The dreams cast was an amazing piece of hardware that was ahead of it’s time. The friends that owned them, loved them. The friends that didn’t own them, didn’t care about them. They were the first and only to have a memory card that you could play games on.
I’m in this post, and I don’t like it.
What is the Dreamcast and why did it fail?
It was Sega’s last console. The PlayStation 2 obliterated it, among other factors.
Fun fact, Microsoft used the Dreamcast controller scheme as a starting point for the Xbox controller.
And they used the Naomi (arcade dreamcast) as the starting point for the main board
Did not know that. Cool
Imo, zero DRM. You could copy any Dreamcast game and burn a copy and it just worked. No modding required. That easily kills sales.
Amazing console, I owned 3.
Honestly, it never got big enough for that to even matter. It just lost the content war to the PS2 Xbox and GameCube. Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure aren’t exactly enough great exclusives to justify buying the non-Halo machine or the console built by the company that “won” the previous generation.
Sony also maintained backwards compatibility and sold the PS2 as the world’s cheapest DVD player.
The fact that it could play DVDs was the primary reason I bought one of the second-gen slim PS2s! (I was previously a Nintendo-only console gamer, and have since gone full PC gamer, so that was my one and only foray into Sony’s garden.)
Amazing console, I owned 3.
The easy copying really helps justify this.
Were they at all networkable?
Better believe I was playing Phantasy Star Online with folks!
Piracy did not kill the Dreamcast.
Third party developers’s fear of piracy didn’t help the console, but primarily it was released at the wrong time for the wrong price with the wrong features. If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn, it would not have failed. Piracy didn’t have much to do with it.
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn
The problem here is roughly 4 years, Sega was one of the big players in 1994, waiting until the Dreamcast was ready at the very end of 1998 and living off the Mega Drive (Genesis) + Arcades would be financial suicide
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
True, both PS1 and PS2 absolutely ruled sales in Brazil given how cheap and easy it was to get pirate games, which usually sold for BRL10 from 1999-2006, while original games would cost well over 10x that.
The 32X and Saturn releases were confusingly close to each other and could easily lead to some confusion with consumers. Releasing both a disk console and a disk addon for the existing console in the same year could confuse people on whether they needed the new console or just the disk addon, especially with marketing that didn’t exactly make it clear. Similar issue the WiiU had with people thinking it was an addon for the Wii and determining they didnt need it. If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
SEGA just didn’t pick the right console features for the right time. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time releasing in 1998, but by the time the PS2, GameCube, and especially Xbox launched just 2-3 years later, the Dreamcast hardware looked extremely outdated, because it was.
I mostly agree, except for this
If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
You’re effectively saying that development of the Dreamcast should’ve begun before the tech for it even existed. The Saturn’s development began back in 1992, after the release of the Model 1, when 3D graphics were a wild dream for home consumers. The Sega Model 3, which served as a basis for the Dreamcast, saw its first arcade release in 1996. M3 was super powerful, but in 1996 it’d also be prohibitively expensive for any home consumer to afford. The Dreamcast that the world saw in 1998/1999 was literally impossible to achieve back in 1996, the “best” thing would’ve been something like a Saturn 2.5 which maaayyybeee could’ve run Model 3 games at significantly lower quality.
Not necessarily. Even if the hardware wasn’t exactly the same, it came out too close to the Saturn. Had there never been a Saturn and the Dreamcast, even if it was slightly weaker like a Saturn 2.5, would have launched in 1996, the console would not have done so poorly. It also would not have been so quickly outclassed by its competition, as it would have directly competed with the PS1 and Nintendo64 the same year.
Its really all to my point that piracy had nothing to do with the console’s failure. There were other problems with the Dreamcast that caused its death.
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Dreamcast was a console from Sega: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
That’s all I know. 🙃
Still own mine… It failed because Sega was terrible at marketing their consoles.
Sega Master System, Sega CD, Game Gear, and Dreamcast were all better than their competitors when they came out, but they were all pretty big flops comparatively.
More expensive than a ps1 way fewer games and only or a year or so before ps2. Ps2 also teased backward compatibility. Just bad timing during extremely quick console update releases.
Oh God…
It seems obvious now that you mention that, that Sony went with backwards compatibility because Sega released so many systems in the 90s(ish). Immediate support from a lot of Sega fans that felt betrayed. Aaaand the is also a way to stick it to nintendo while doing it. They didnt have to give up the hate of nintendo(i remember sega/nintendo rivalrly every bit as dumb and real as ford/chevy rivalry)
And nintendo ALWAYs making bad medium choices for their games. Ps1 was already black eye to nintendo. Sony gave you mutiple devices in every device. Cds, dvds, blueray. From Sony an already mammoth device manufacturer for those technologies. Man if toshiba or someone had bought nintendo to push new hardware could have been interesting. Nintendo having HD dvd could have been good for n64/gamecube/wii would have very different timeline
“PS2”
More importantly: the PS2 could play DVDs, and was cheaper than DVD players of the time.
Same strategy they used for the PS3; cause when Blu Ray players were $1000, $600 for a console that could play the same discs suddenly seemed like a reasonable deal.
Discontinued March 31, 2001
Still mad. 😡
One thing I rarely see pointed out is the generations that made 8 and 16-bit a huge success were aging out, or heading to college and/or the workforce. The casuals I knew stopped buying systems after the SNES and Genesis.
Me explaining how Quake is actually two franchises but how id software has never really had good creative direction, so they mostly got lucky with their hits.
