this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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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 Xbox
The 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.