Personally I think it would have done better against the PS2 in its later life, once the DVD craze died down. One of the reasons why the PS2 did so well was because it was a killer deal in the era of $1000 DVD players being the norm. But prices fell quick, and near the end of its life just about every home could afford a dedicated player.
Comment on Most under-utilized consoles?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 week ago
The Dreamcast never really got given a chance. They killed it so fast, and even in its short lifespan it had a great library. It might have even been able to keep up with the PS2, at least for the first year or two with what I’ve seen of porting projects where people got shit like GTA3 running on it.
Psythik@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Redkey@programming.dev 1 week ago
I think the DC had the technical strength to go up against the PS2, not just early on, but for quite a while. The PS2 is incredibly flexible in theory, but looking at its library it seems like most developers just used Sony’s default rendering setups. If you ignore the quickie PS1-to-DC ports and only compare titles which got equal effort from developers, it can be hard to tell the difference, and in some cases I’d even say the DC version looks a little nicer.
In this alternate universe where the DC didn’t get killed off prematurely, what might’ve eventually turned the tide for the PS2 would be having between 1.5 and 2 times as much RAM (depending on how you account for different distribution), although that advantage may not have existed if it weren’t for the large gap between their release dates.
But Sony could afford to delay for two years; consumers waited for them. Sega couldn’t sustain launch-pitch marketing for that long, especially with an actual console on store shelves that people could experience firsthand, as opposed to teaser videos of what the console “might” be capable of. Few publishers or consumers wanted to invest in a console before the clear winner of the previous generation had entered the market.
All that being said, I don’t know that the DC was really under-utilized, in technical terms. I feel like a good proportion of the games in its library are using almost all of the power it had under the hood. Perhaps Sega’s management and engineers had learned their lesson from the Saturn, because the DC seems very straightforward from a programming perspective. It’s almost ironic that it lost to the PS2, which took flexibility and parallelism to heart at least as much as the Saturn did, if not more.
yarr@feddit.nl 1 week ago
Sega was so drained after the very distracted years of juggling the SegaCD/32X/Saturn and people were sooo pissed how the Saturn went that even hardcore Sega fans were annoyed when the Dreamcast came out, wondering if it would have a short and frustrating lifetime like the Saturn did. Sega just had so much ADD in regards to their planning and strategy everyone was kind of doing a “wait and see”. Meanwhile, Sony threw the full might into the Playstation, had a great run there and then even the whispers of PS2 was enough to make everyone hyped. The other factor here is that the PS2 could also play DVDs and the Dreamcast could not. That doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but back then there was no online streaming and DVD players were really expensive. Some people bought the PS2 primarily because of the DVD support and the games were almost an afterthought.
It’s all a shame, because the Dreamcast was actually really strong technically. In a vacuum it probably would have done better, but alas, it was not in a vacuum and Sony was able to easily grab up all the market share with the PS2.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 1 week ago
For such a short lifespan the Dreamcast had an abundance of peripherals too which were underutilized. Some of them were ahead of its time but you have to admire the passion!