It is undeniable that the dreamcast was a solid machine that had good games and a sleek look, but was ultimately overshadowed by the goliath that is the PS2.

What do you guys think, how could the Dreamcast kept surviving? Should SEGA thought reeling back the Saturn?

It certainly was praised, but didn't get the chance it needed, personally I considered it to be a part of the prior gen (N64, PS1)

Let me know your thoughts!

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[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

The 32X was a disaster and it was bred from a conflict between Sega USA and Sega Japan.

In the US, the Sega CD had been a HIT. Japan wanted to drop it, US said "we'll take it!" and it ended up being the #1 peripheral with more games for it than any other console add on ever. Over 200 games.

So when Sega Japan wanted to get the Saturn rolling, Sega US demanded a stop gap between the Genesis and Saturn. Japan resisted, and US went "Yeah, well look at Sega CD, what do you know?" and went with the 32X.

From the start, Japan wasn't interested, did everything to ignore the product and effectively killed it.

In retaliation, US chose to launch Saturn several months too early. I think they knew going head to head with the Playstation was a death sentence, so they dropped it 5 months early to "select retailers".

This had 2 problems:

The games were janky and not ready. The first version of Virtua Fighter was so bad they had to later issue a re-mix version for free.

https://youtu.be/ubJSL5GhSZU

The "non-select" retailers were pissed to be cut out of the early launch. So when the wide release happened in the fall, they leaned in more to support the Playstation than the Saturn.