They had everything right with the Dreamcast, but they had no confidence. They killed it after just 1 year, and even in that time it managed to get one of the best libraries of that era. Imagine if they had actually continued to support it.
Poor Sega just didn't get the timing right.
Submitted 4 months ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to retrogaming@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4979241c-8dcc-458f-9678-a237612bcbd4.jpeg
Comments
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 months ago
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
This. Management screwed up multiple times and doomed Sega to be . . . well, whatever it is they are now.
Bad Management (or “good management” if one finanically benefitted from this decision).
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s not that they had no confidence. It’s that they took Nintendos approach on hardware. Sell low at a loss, and make the money on software.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour. As the year 2000 went on, websites even made it easier by posting the game files for download. If you didn’t have broadband (many didn’t at the time. Most had 56k), you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
So every console sold cost them money. And the software was performing abysmally. Plus, PS2 was right around the corner. XBox was an unknown, and Gamecube was assumed to do better than it did.
From a console war perspective, the year 2001 may have been the most competitive year EVER for video games.
Redkey@programming.dev 4 months ago
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.
You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.
So first off, you couldn’t read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I’m not counting the “swap” method because it’s failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.
Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.
Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn’t enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.
Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.
booly@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
I don’t remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.
USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.
Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren’t necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.
frezik@midwest.social 4 months ago
I’m not sure where you’re getting that Nintendo sells at a loss. They don’t have amazing margins on hardware, but they don’t like selling at a loss. IIRC, commodity prices and a price drop meant the GameCube was briefly sold at a loss, but it wasn’t long, and it wasn’t by much.
Whatever else you can say about Nintendo, they are really good at managing manufacturing costs.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Why did the playstation not have the same piracy problem?
Venator@lemmy.nz 4 months ago
Was probably more likely just that they couldn’t afford the initial loss anymore because the lenders or shareholders got scared of the PS2 and xbox when they were announced.
Redkey@programming.dev 4 months ago
Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren’t the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.
Critics and consumers all had an extremely “wait and see” attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn’t want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of “potential” hardware (i.e. “Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that’s currently in talks to produce our GPU.”)
Third-party publishers also didn’t want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn’t want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as “upgraded” or “enhanced” versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.
I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it’d be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It’s huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I’d also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.
Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It’s easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren’t going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo’s GameCube didn’t do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn’t nearly as much of a consideration.
Thcdenton@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I loved the dreamcast!
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I have so many fond memories of it.
PhreakyByNature@feddit.uk 4 months ago
MVC2, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio. Loads of fun times had!
Iheartcheese@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Firefly and Dreamcast. Two things nerds are never going to fucking get over.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 4 months ago
“We may have been on the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.” --Captain Malcolm Reynolds
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
We should have gotten a second season at least.
Fox Media was run by sadists
Nemo@midwest.social 4 months ago
Damn straight!
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Hey…I still remember the release date. 9/9/99.
Plus, you could use your dreamcast to talk to a fish. An insulting sarcastic fish…but the game was narrated by Leonard Nemoy. Sometimes he’d insult you too…
tuckerm@supermeter.social 4 months ago
Seaman is one of those games that I'm intentionally not replaying, because it absolutely blew my mind when I was ten years old, and I just want to leave it that way. I'm guessing the tricks they used to mimic conversation would be very obvious to me now, but back then it seemed completely real. That game turned your CRT TV into a fish tank with an honest to god talking fish inside of it... and Spock gave you updates about how he was doing when you checked on him after school.
snugglebutt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
Its all fun and games until a frog starts asking about your views on Ronald Reagan
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 4 months ago
avgn has a pretty good episode on this
Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
In an age of LLM, Seaman needs a remake.
tuckerm@supermeter.social 4 months ago
Yes! It's the only kind of game where an LLM would be a good addition.
dezmd@lemmy.world 4 months ago
All it needed was a goddamn network pork instead of a dialup modem and it would be alive today. DC was the best.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
I love my network pork! Tastes like bacon!
dezmd@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Deinitely never editing that
scottywh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ethernet was available as an option… It was just expensive.
blindbunny@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
Umm I’m sorry to break this to you buddy but I pirated every dreamcast game I owned short of sonic adventure and Phantsy star online. That’s probably why the dreamcast failed.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They lost money on the hardware and didn’t make it back on software, so you’re likely right.
Zarxrax@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yeah my friend got a Dreamcast and then I pirated all the games for him. It was one of the most awesome consoles ever with amazing games. But the few other people I knew with one at the time also pirated games. It was just so easy because it didn’t even need a modchip or anything. Just download, burn a CD, and play.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
A vast majority of the public didn’t do this or know how to do this.
It failed because the PS2 was dominating at the time, and Sega didn’t know how to launch a console, even if they had a gun pointed at their head.
xyzzy@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Yes, all the pirates killed it. I was in college at the time and there were a few of us with Dreamcasts. I bought my games (and still have them), but there were guys with literally every single game in the library burned to disc.
blindbunny@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
That was me. After it failed I felt like such an asshole 😔
bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
They just really wanted to release on 9/9/99 no matter what.
01011@monero.town 4 months ago
Dreamcast is still my favorite console of all time.
this_1_is_mine@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The memory card … It was originally designed to even allow gaming on the card like a mini gameboy when disconnected. By now it would be. A steam deck that acts as a controller… Huh reminds me of the vita…
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They do exist. For sonic adventure you could load a Chao onto it and it was basically a tamagotchi.
ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
The fact that nobody has done “screen in a controller” since Nintendo toyed around with a handful of Gamecube-GBA games is a crime. It was a cool ass idea that got displaced by internet lobbies before it got off the ground.
InternetUser2012@midwest.social 4 months ago
I still do a play through on tokyo import tuner at least once a year
ErrorCode@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I really like my Dreamcast!
tuckerm@supermeter.social 4 months ago
Me too; in fact I have two games for it on the way right now! Games made in the last few years! Intrepid Izzy and Postal.
magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 4 months ago
Sega’s only console success was Mega Drive/Genesis. Probably because “Sega does what Nintendon’t”. Sega was the console for the kids who were too cool for the SNES.
They couldn’t compete with Sony on that front. Sony was the new cool guy. Dreamcast failed because everybody was waiting for PS2.
So I’d say failed marketing killed Dreamcast.
_NetNomad@kbin.run 4 months ago
Sega’s only console success was Mega Drive/Genesis.
i mean that's really only true in the northwest. the master system was huge in south america and the saturn was a bigger success than the mega drive was in japan
magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 4 months ago
The numbers I can find of Master System is that it sold between 10 to 13 million units worldwide, so not that much better compared to the short lifespan of Dreamcast.
Mega Drive’s sales numbers isn’t too far off from SNES.
Rookwood@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Nah, they failed because of the Saturn which is one of the worst console flops in history. Dreamcast was just a last ditch effort to regain relevancy and beat the other guys to the punch. Too late once the PS1 was successful.
Also, Genesis was more appealing to adults. That’s why it competed with the SNES so well. American adults at the time (prime aged boomers) were much more won over by Genesis’s more mature marketing and appeal to American values versus Nintendo which was decidedly marketed to children.
fah_Q@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Enjoy your mortal Kombat without blood you Nintendo fanboy lol.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 months ago
WELCOM
ETOTHEN
EXTLEVEL
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
If they put a DVD drive in the Dreamcast there’s never a PlayStation 3
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’m just gonna say it. Dreamcast was my favorite console until ps4 and ps5.
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Meanwhile I got a free PS4 from Taco Bell and can’t stand the thing because it isn’t backwards compatible AT ALL. I use it mostly to watch Netflix.
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Ya I was disappointed in that too
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
i beg to differ; dreamcast was my life during first and second year uni. i played the hell out of phantasy star online.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 months ago
The PSX/N64/Saturn generation would’ve been better. Nintendo had its name, Sony had “two ninety nine”, Sega had schizophrenic mismanagement and burnt bridges with retailers
ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
You could put the Sega CD or 32X into this meme and it would still work, the Dreamcast was just the last in a series of flops.
thejoker954@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sega was awesome. Fuck the gameboy. The brick that was gamegear was so much better.
(Not that young me saw the difference) but the 32x or whatever it was called.
And Dreamcast. That shit was so ahead of its time.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 months ago
I’m pretty sure the gamegear lost that war because it couldn’t really be used as a handheld. Not with that battery life.
The game boy may have been a very limited system, but you could bring it with you and play Tetris for hours and hours… or for its second wind, show your pokémon to everyone at school.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I remember reading about how mind-blowing and “next gen” the graphics on the Dreamcast were at the time. All the kids seemed really interested in it, but we hadn’t had long enough with the previous gen to justify our parents buying a new system already.
One friend wound up actually getting it, and we played the hell out of it for a few years.
xyzzy@lemm.ee 4 months ago
The Game Gear was only good for 2-3 hours on six AA batteries, so you basically had to play tethered to the wall or invest in lots of rechargeable batteries. The library also wasn’t as strong overall as the Game Boy’s, although its top games were previous-gen console quality (because they literally were in other territories).
Both screens were also just awful about blurring during fast movement. Nintendo wisely avoided it altogether, while Sega was bound by their flagship brand. When you really got going in something like Sonic Chaos, particularly considering the small viewing window, you were really just letting Jesus take the wheel.
Source: I was a Game Gear kid.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 months ago
Both screens were also just awful about blurring during fast movement. Nintendo wisely avoided it altogether,
While mostly true, they should have told Rare too. Between motion blur and bad contrast, Donkey Kong Land was almost unplayable.
constantokra@lemmy.one 4 months ago
My gamegear was great, for about 20 minutes with the lame ass rechargeable batteries you could get at the time. Took hours to charge too.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I’m going to take a bold position and say they were all good consoles. It was a beautiful time for video games.
AgentGrimstone@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Dreamcast finally let me access the internet from the privacy of my own room.
sirico@feddit.uk 4 months ago
The only console piracy massacred
Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 months ago
Poor Sega. There just wasn’t room for four consoles.
doubletwist@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Loved the Dreamcast. Other than the lack of DVD player, I still think it was better than the PS2.
Quite a few games that were released on both consoles looked better and played more smoothly on the Dreamcast than they did on the supposedly more powerful PS2. Dave Mirra BMX is one that immediately comes to mind. It was way better on the Dreamcast.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 4 months ago
There are so many reasons why it failed but we all love it so.
ssj2marx@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
If the Dreamcast hadn’t had the misfortune of coming out during the objectively best console generation, it would have done fine - but also, if the Sega Saturn hadn’t been such a huge flop, then maybe the Dreamcast’s failure wouldn’t have driven Sega out of the console market. Sega struck gold with the Genesis and they just couldn’t replicate it.
Guntrigger@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
This is a really odd way of putting it seeing as the Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and was discontinued before the other 2 even came out.
capt_wolf@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They’re actually all considered 6th gen consoles. There’s only a 3 year gap between the Dreamcast and the Xbox.
Dreamcast was 98 PS2 was 2000 GameCube and Xbox were both 01, the year Dreamcast was discontinued.
Dreamcast could have been a wild success, probably would have been, too. The major issue was that the Playstation was still totally dominating the market. 98 and 99 were both a ridiculously strong years for PSX title releases. Then the PS2 released and totally overshadowed it. Sega just couldn’t keep up… Nobody could. Not until the market kinda leveled out in 05-06.
Guntrigger@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
Yeah I understand they were all 6th gen. My point was just that it doesn’t really make sense to blame the Dreamcast failure on its timing. Dates also matter:
Late 98 was release in Japan Late 99 was release worldwide Early 2000 was PS2 in Japan Late 2000 was PS2 worldwide Early 2001 Dreamcast was killed Late 2001/Early 2002 Gamecube and Xbox
The meme makes it look like the Dreamcast popped up late, but that was not the reason for it’s demise at all. PlayStation dominating the market, as you mentioned, was probably the biggest one. People knew the PS2 was around the corner and the Dreamcast had barely been out in the EU by the time the PS2 was strutting it’s stuff on the Japanese market.
MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Don’t forget DVD playback. Most people by the year 2000 VHS. DVD players were prohibitively expensive at the time so a lot of people were holding out. PS2 had DVD and cost about half the price of dedicated players. I know a lot of homes bought them purely as a movie machine.
The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I thought so too at first, but it sort of released in a window between the previous gen and these. They marketed it as “next gen” like they were beating the newer gen to market, but it was just terrible timing.
Rookwood@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If they had released later it would have been worse. Sega’s downfall was the Saturn which was just garbage compared to the N64 and PS1. Dreamcast was their last ditch effort to release a truly next-gen system before the big boys rocked up with all their cash.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s the best time to market. They simply didn’t have the big IP that Nintendo and Sony had been marketing at the time. Sega at that time led with Sonic - as they always do - and then a few properties that were really fun and original, but required an expensive console to even try and get aquatinted with.
This is not even bringing up the prior hardware failures they had launched. They just miscalculated on the popularity of Sonic globally. It’s not enough to get people with consoles that are working just fine and still have years of games to come to switch.