RetroGaming

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.

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.

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.

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 have so many fond memories of it.

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.

I love my network pork! Tastes like bacon!

Ethernet was available as an option... It was just expensive.

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.

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

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.

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.......

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.

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.