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.
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 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.
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 XboxThe meme makes it look like the Dreamcast popped up late, but timing 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.
Don’t forget DVD playback. Most people by the year 2000 still only had 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.
I bet if Dreamcast had DVD playback the history of the Dreamcast would’ve been very different.
Absolutely, getting a PS2 was a game changer for me. DVD playback AND backward compatability. You had PS2, PSX, CD, and DVD all in one. I dumped my VCR shortly after getting it and mothballed my PSX. My 5 disc stereo collected dust until I sold it. Rigged it to my 5.1 speaker system to run on the same line as my computer. Between the PS2 and a properly equipped gaming PC, my bedroom was practically a movie theater, albeit with a tiny ass 22" crt.
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.
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.
Yeah, I’m of the opinion the Saturn was the real problem. It was not a bad step forward compared to the Megadrive, but compared to the PS1 it was nowhere near as good.
Dreamcast was a great console. It was really ahead of it’s time with a bunch of things, the VMUs, the internet connectivity, the range of peripherals and keyboard/mouse integration. It was the first console I ever got relatively near release and never regretted it.
Compounding this was the Sega CD and 32X addons for the Genesis. Both were projects the scale of a new console, but they were built as addons to the Genesis so they limited their audience to people who already had a Genesis. Neither really brought much to the table in terms of software libraries; lots of Sega CD games were Genesis titles with red book CD audio instead of FM synth chip tunes, or the occasional FMV title.
Then they brought out the Saturn, which some people even bought. It was a Sega console that had no Sonic game.
So going into the Dreamcast, Sega had three poorly performing consoles in their back catalog. I don’t think the Dreamcast could have been a big enough success to save Sega’s console division, and especially not with Sony about to dominate the 6th AND 7th generations with the PS2.
I’d say the 32X didn’t just compound the problems; it was the problem.
The 32X only existed because of infighting between Sega of America and Sega Japan, and accomplished fuck-all except to almost directly compete against Saturn, cannibalizing sales, causing consumer confusion, serving as a distraction that caused Saturn to come out six months late in NA, etc. If 32x hadn’t existed, Sega could’ve just released Saturn worldwide that same day instead ('cause that’s when it came out in Japan). And, for all we know, Saturn itself might have turned out technologically better if Sega had devoted all of its engineering resources to it instead of splitting them with the 32X.
It was also just a dumb unforced error that 32X and Saturn used almost the same hardware but weren’t mutually compatible. If 32X had been “a Saturn, but slightly cheaper because it’s piggybacking off a Genesis and MegaCD” instead of its own oddball platform, it might have been a raging success instead of a raging failure.
There was a project where the next console would have been the Genesis, 32X, and CD in one box with a new name. I don’t know if that would work, or if it’d be viewed as something of an in-between generation, like the Turbografx, and people ignore it.
It’s probably be easier to develop games for, unlike the Saturn. It’s not the only thing that held the Saturn back, but it didn’t help.
They also had a gargantuan library of games for every single console they had produced that just didn’t work. Everyone likes to rag on Nintendo for Silver Surfer, or that one Superman game for being unplayable, but Sega had so many of those unplayable games that no one remembers their names. Sega wasn’t known for quality after the console wars. They were known for having much cheaper games than Nintendo. I remember looking at the cartridges in the store, and Sega had a huge selection compared to Nintendo, and those cartridges were in the $45-$50 range brand new. Nintendo had about ½ to ⅓ the selection of titles, and they ran $50-$70 per game, but you knew you were getting good games 99% of the time, especially if you had a subscription to one of the various gaming magazines. PlayStation was Nintendo’s first real competition, and the PS1 was just eating Nintendo for breakfast.
You could say the same thing of the NES. The crash of '83 had as much to do with the mountains of shovelware on the market for the early consoles and microcomputers that might not even load and run. You got a lot of knockoffs, branded merchandise, and other low effort crap the programmer didn’t actually give a shit about flooding the market, which inflated the bubble, then it burst.
A large part of Nintendo’s strategy for entering a crashed market was to address this with their Seal Of Quality. Using anything from the design patent of the cartridge shell to security chips, they enforced a monopoly on manufacturing cartridges for their systems; Nintendo was the only manufacturer of Nintendo cartridges. And their Seal Of Quality meant they had inspected the game and made sure it is functional software, that it loads and runs without crashing. They don’t guarantee the game is fun, which is why Superman 64 was allowed to be published. It’s a garbage game but it doesn’t crash an N64.
Other platforms aren’t as strict with their libraries, which means there’s more and cheaper games out there for it. The extreme example is Steam on PC, where their algorithm is “publish whatever is submitted and pull it down if someone raises a legitimate complaint.” There’s a lot of great games on Steam, there’s a lot of Unity tutorial projects on Steam. Their excellent refund policies make this acceptable.
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.
I don’t remember what Sonic game came out for the DC. I’m sure they ran ads, but the DC game that I remember above all is Ecco the Dolphin. Never got to play the game.
Yep. That was a property from the Master System and Game Gear that got a 3D revamp for DC, but don’t think it was really very popular to begin with, so naturally wasn’t a huge selling point.
They had everything right with the Dreamcast, but they had no confidence. They killed it after just 1 year while sales were actually rising, 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I remember similarly. I was going to say that thumb drives weren’t even invented until 2005-2006, but I looked it up and they were invented in 1999. I guess I forgot that those tiny ones even existed since I was doing all my external storage on DVD-R or CD-RW.
I still have the lanyard to my 128 MB PNY Attaché.
I think my first one was 512 MB, but I don’t have it anymore.
Why did the playstation not have the same piracy problem?
There’s a little wiggle track burned into PSX discs that’s impossible to duplicate with burners, and it won’t boot up unless it sees that. There’s workarounds that eventually came out, but console copy protection doesn’t have to last forever. It only has to last most of its primary life until the next gen comes out, and PSX managed that.
Everyone knew a shady guy who promised to mod your PlayStation to play burned games, but few wanted to risk turning their console into a brick.
Unless you lived where the Playstation wasn’t officially released, then every console come modded and ready to play pirate games!
They did, but apparently everyone has forgotten how prevalent swap discs and modchips were.
They did, eventually. The first PlayStation was relatively easy to pirate for (with a mod chip), but it took a while for that stuff to become available. Someone had to go and manufacture the chips, or reverse engineer the check.
By the time that scene matured, Sega released the Dreamcast right into a more sophisticated piracy scene that could apply lessons learned to the Dreamcast right away.
On paper, Sega had more sophisticated copy protection than the first PlayStation did. But it also released 4 years later.
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.
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.
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.
I loved the dreamcast!
I have so many fond memories of it.
MVC2, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio. Loads of fun times had!
Wtf who doesn’t mention Power stone 2. Arguably the best pickup brawler game ever made and still holds that title.
Record of Lodoss and Evolution are also top tier.
Power Stone (both) were great but inevitably there’s always the one person who hangs back and avoids combat to stealthily get all the stones to transform, making it unfun for casual or new players.
I know because I was that person. I was a big fan of a little known game called Armada on the DC, as well as Jambo Safari and the 2k Sports games.
Project justice 2 was my jam and I still regard it as a great fighting game that deserves a remake or an anime at least!
I’m amazed neither of you mentioned Ecco. That dolphin game is the only DC exclusive game I remember.
Hey, tbf, I never owned a Dreamcast, just played the games my mate had. 3 nights of drinking at uni, sleeping on his easy chair, it wasn’t ideal. So I’d play all night and he’d wake up with a bunch of unlocked characters lol. He never had Power Stone 2 IIRC. Not my bad!
To be honest a big part of this was that it was a quasi-loot game. You had to do the rpg type mechanic where you plugged a bunch of items together that you get dropped after playing and do a ton of items synthesis. It kept you playing for ages to try new unlocks.
I’m sure the game wasn’t balanced well for characters either but for the average little shitass it was great.
Firefly and Dreamcast. Two things nerds are never going to fucking get over.
“We may have been on the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.” --Captain Malcolm Reynolds
Firefly?
Firefly.
Must’ve been before my time cause I have no clue what that is
Firefly is a cult sci fi show that got one season before being cancelled by fox. It got a tie in movie called Serenity to try and wrap the story.
Space western, kind of cowboy bebop-ish with Nathan Fillion as the lead.
If you had a Dreamcast you could look it up
It could do that?!
Yeah Sega was way ahead of its time. Dreamcasts had a built-in modem so you could go online and access (the very new) game services, it also included a browser able to access (at the time) most websites.
Damn straight!
We should have gotten a second season at least.
Fox Media was run by sadists
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…
In an age of LLM, Seaman needs a remake.
Yes! It’s the only kind of game where an LLM would be a good addition.
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.
Its all fun and games until a frog starts asking about your views on Ronald Reagan
Joe Rogan wasn’t involved in that project.
/s
avgn has a pretty good episode on this
All it needed was a goddamn network pork instead of a dialup modem and it would be alive today. DC was the best.
I love my network pork! Tastes like bacon!
Deinitely never editing that
Ethernet was available as an option… It was just expensive.
I really like my Dreamcast!
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.
They just really wanted to release on 9/9/99 no matter what.
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.
They lost money on the hardware and didn’t make it back on software, so you’re likely right.
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.
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.
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.
That was me. After it failed I felt like such an asshole 😔
Dreamcast is still my favorite console of all time.
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…
They do exist. For sonic adventure you could load a Chao onto it and it was basically a tamagotchi.
Dude yes I remember you could race the entire race on Wacky Racers with the controller. Felt so ahead of its time.
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I still do a play through on tokyo import tuner at least once a year
Sega’s only console success was Mega Drive/Genesis. Probably because “Sega does what Nintendon’t”. Sega managed to sell themselves as the alternative 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.
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.
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
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.
10-13 not including the additional 8 million Tectoy sales, which together meets or exceeds the Saturn and Dreamcast sales combined (with the former outselling the latter)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_consoles
WELCOM
ETOTHEN
EXTLEVELEnjoy your mortal Kombat without blood you Nintendo fanboy lol.
If they put a DVD drive in the Dreamcast there’s never a PlayStation 3
i beg to differ; dreamcast was my life during first and second year uni. i played the hell out of phantasy star online.
I’m just gonna say it. Dreamcast was my favorite console until ps4 and ps5.
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.
Ya I was disappointed in that too
The PSX/N64/Saturn generation would’ve been better for this meme. Nintendo had its name, Sony had “two ninety nine”, Sega had schizophrenic mismanagement and burnt bridges with retailers
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