this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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What is the Dreamcast and why did it fail?
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.
Ironically enough the discs were suppose to be the protection against piracy. They developed their own goofy format with Yamaha. Of course that didn’t take people long to figure out though…
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.)
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.
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
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
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.
The easy copying really helps justify this.
Were they at all networkable?
Better believe I was playing Phantasy Star Online with folks!