Ian on the failure of the Sega Dreamcast

iansanity:

marco:

Ian cites good reasons, including:

  • The awful timing of its release: 6 months before the PS2. Hardware-wise, it fit in with its market timing: it was more advanced than the Nintendo 64 but less advanced than the PS2 (and couldn’t play DVDs). So it was only the best system on the market for those 6 months.
  • Game piracy. I think this was less of an issue than Ian thinks — sure, geeks pirated Dreamcast games, but most Dreamcast owners didn’t. Piracy was more widespread after the system’s demise when only geeks wanted them, knowing they could pirate all of the games.

But the failure of the Dreamcast was about more than the hardware or market timing. The real killers, by far, were the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn. Most of the Sega faithful had purchased at least one of these and been burned: the Sega CD and 32X for having small, awful game libraries, and the Saturn for being one of the worst-timed systems in history — it was optimized for rendering 2D games incredibly well, right when the entire industry moved to 3D-everything with the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and it launched with a small number of terrible games for $400 in 1995. It rendered 3D games horribly, and the best third-party developers opted to publish for the better, easier, more popular, cheaper PlayStation. Then, with the relatively early launch of the Dreamcast, Sega cut off the lifecycle of the Saturn early, just as they had done to the 32X.

Sega had alienated their own fanbase so much and abandoned so many platforms that nobody ever gave the Dreamcast a chance. And I think that was perfectly fair.

Very true. Multiple costly crappy releases and better competitors just fueled the fire that had already begun to burn. 3 bad systems all released in a very short time period, they flooded the market with crap.

Yeah… I completely overestimated it, but mostly because I was involved in that scene indirectly, I never even owned the system, couldn’t afford it, and my parents would let me have it. All very good points. (More valid than my own)

It was fair, I’m just sad because it could have become more. Jet Set Radio and Crazy Taxi will never be the same.

I have a dreamcast, still fully functional and 30-ish games (including jet set radio and crazy taxi). At the time the dreamcast was the best console on the market, it was certainly the only one at the time that provided arcade standard graphics to the home market (largely in part to the fact that the dreamcast was built on the same platform as the current generation (then) of sega arcade machines). The only real issue I have at the moment is that my dreamcast is a uk (pal) version which has issue with playing through an ntsc based television.

Source: iansanity