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Sega was too early with several innovations like online game downloads, which meant they weren’t profitable enough. Technically however they were ages ahead of the competition who later gladly absorbed their knowledge.
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Wasn’t the deeper story on this a bit more sad? I thought Sega made a bunch of rash idiotic decisions with their product lines, not originally because of Nintendo and Sony, but because of NeoGeo?
They were so convinced NeoGeo was going to be the be all end all of gaming, both home and arcade, so they shotgunned a bunch of ideas out then panic killed several of them?
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Ahh no, not saying you were wrong, just checking my decrepit old memory.
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wtf did happen w neogeo
They released 32x, Sega Genesis, then Sega Saturn so freaking close to each other that really left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.
Dreamcast came out with Sonic, Shenmue, Power Stone and then the most perfect version of Marvel Vs Capcom 2 and started to become attractive.
Then everyone discovered how to pirate Dreamcast games. Like it was so stupidly easy. People in my campus started giving copied Dreamcast games away.
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It was actually the opposite problem… they sold plenty of hardware. But they lost money on every sale and didn’t make it back on software purchases as was the plan.
In fact, the Dreamcast had sold more than the Xbox and Gamecube combined for the first several years of their lifespan.
There was also the playstation 2 releasing about 6 months after the dreamcast, with dvd capabilities, when dvd players were expensive as fuck. People were using them as a DVD player. Basically the same reason the playstation 3 sold decently at all in it’s first years.
I’ve heard stories of people buying or being encouraged to buy a PS1 because it also played CDs.
Never heard of that. Audio cd’s have been around for a while by then. And cd players weren’t expensive. But I could be wrong. I was not really in to consoles at that point.
I wasn’t around then but i think the stories I heard was “kid wants his own cd player and gaming console so he buys a PS1”
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I remember nobody trusting Sega to not abandon yet another console after a year like all the others so a lot of people stopped buying their brand.
This motherfucker right here had ONLINE PLAY. You could spin up Phantasy Star Online: Episode 1 & 2 and actually have other people join your game, drop duplicated items, and destroy your droprate. It was fucken sicc.
Pipe me bro.
Pso2 was my high school jam. There’s still running private servers on pc but it ain’t the same when your homies are no longer around to play it.
And all because the PS2 could play DVDs and the Dreamcast couldn’t. Fucking DVDs. As ridiculous as that sounds today, people went apeshit over DVD playback capabilities back in the early 2000s.
But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy. In the 90s alone they released the Sega CD, 32X, the Saturn and the Dreamcast. Not to mention the Genesis 3 and CDX as well. If they would have slowed their roll and stopped cannibalizing their own sales, they might have done alright. The addon idea could have worked out better if done right. Hindsight is 20/20, so if they had a crystal ball they should have done something like this, and they’d still be making consoles today:
- Delay the Sega/Mega CD to allow themselves more time to rewrite the graphics ASIC to include 3D rendering capabilities.
- Cancel the 32X and Saturn; they were never even announced. The Sega CD is the next gen console.
- Sell it as an addon for $199, and cut the price of the base Genesis to $50. Release in 1994, along with bundle deals for $249 with an included game (for people who don’t already own a Genesis), and proceed wipe the floor with Sony before they even get a chance to compete.
I personally don’t think that would have worked. We’ve seen repeatedly from multiple companies that selling anything as an “addon” just results in failure because developers can’t assume that people will have it. You have to bake the function in the lowest SKU or it ends up a novelty.
Perhaps if they rolled out the canceled Neptune as the half-step between Mega Drive and a delayed Saturn. It would have been the an excellent base SKU developers could target, with cheaper CD media as a bonus… but I just don’t see an enhanced Sega CD/32X going up against the PS1 and coming out any better than the Saturn did. I guess they wouldn’t have hemorrhaged all that money on wasted hardware though.
Sega was their own worst enemy
Arguably they still are today. Can’t stop being a fan though!
But to be fair I also think Sega was their own worst enemy.
More true than you might realize. A lot of the missteps of the Sega CD/32X were from fights between Japan and US divisions. There was a push for the next console to be simply a Genesis/CD/32X melded together in one box.
Sony is also incredibly good at taking advantage of its competitors mistakes.
Why in the hell did Sega not put up any sort of anti pirating safeguards on this thing? Even my buddy who was always talking about how dreamcast was the best system, had a stack of all the Dreamcast games copied, because the Dreamcast would read and play copied games.
It was killed by its own fan base and lack of anti pirating
Oh but it did, first the GD-ROM that had 1GB and the only way to get the games into a CD was to cut the assets making it a worse experience and… playing recorded CD-ROMs on a Dreamcast was a very efficient way to destroy its drive.
I don’t think any consoles had decent anti piracy back then. Dreamcast had some, but got beaten. They were routinely being chipped for piracy up to the Xbox 360 era. I remember that well because people at work laughed at me for buying games, and then MS banned them all on one day and they had to buy new ones to be able to carry on playing online.
It was killed by the PS2. That thing was a juggernaut, and Sega just couldn’t compete. Xbox and Gamecube hadn’t even launched before Sega threw the towel in. They just couldn’t get any traction and got out of the console market before they went bankrupt, selling at ever more unsustainable losses.
They’re still around, so it was probably the right decision in hindsight.
I remember original Xbox being the first console that banned people for modding their console. I and everyone I knew had modded PS1 and PS2.
The PS2, bad third-party relationships, and a limp Western market strategy. Even with competent management it’s quite possible, even likely it still would have been the last console Sega produced, but it could have gone a full generation with better support.
Bernie Stolar was also to blame because he was the reason a majority of the Dreamcast library was not localized outside of Japan
My college suitemates had one and I loved powerstone and others. First hand experience. Had an Xbox and PS2. Still didn’t buy one of these.
My Friend: Did you hear? Sega cancelled the Dreamcast.
Me: …
Me: … (still waiting for the punchline)
Too soon…
What makes me happy though is the Dreamcast is still going strong today with fan translations, indie games (and more) and online play.
“Dreamcast” is probably the single best gaming console name of all time, too.
Retro Sega systems stand out with their cool, mystical/sci-fi sounding names: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.
They were unique and felt like they were telling customers that we’d be in awe when using their consoles.
(Master System and Sega CD were pretty boring though)
Most other big systems’ names seem so utilitarian and uninspired:
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GameCube and Xbox are little boxy devices on your shelf that play games.
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The Nintendo Switch can switch between handheld and docked.
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All the PlayStations are stations that you play games on.
Yawn
Mega drive would have sounded cool when it came out, though it’s perhaps the most dated sounding name of the bunch.
It always sounded weird to me. The word drive always made me think of a disk drive or something.
I can only assume they were looking at PC Engine and wanted a similar name.
Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn’t live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.
And yet Atari’s most popular console was just numbers, lol
“Video Computer System” definitely doesn’t sound as appealing lol
All three of those were some newfangled words in the 70’s.
Turbo Grafx was pretty cool tho.
NEC made an amazing system with the PC Engine/TG16. It would have been great if they followed it up with a next generation system
The PC-FX?
For some reason I thought the pcfx was adjacent to the PCEngine. Now I’m reading the wiki article on it and see i was wrong!
Thank you for the info
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Do you know where the sailors are? I’m looking for some sailors.
Be me, not allowed to have pets, and having a VMU with a Chao on it
I had an entire binder of pirated Dreamcast games back when this came out. I can’t remember if I actually owned a genuine copy of a game (it was too easy to run pirated game discs).
I have good memories of the console though.
So did many! It was so easy!
Haha I also had a giant binder full of pirated games. The other thing I remember about it was how loud it was reading the discs
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Didn’t the pirates find out that they could copy the games onto regular CDs using some backdoor from the format of Karaoke CDs? You just need that famous loader CD to swap discs.
I’ve heard the pirates soon optimised the layout of the data on their versions so that there was less strain of the drive.
That was a thing is PS1 I believe. The Dreamcast out of the box just worked with pirated CDs.
We all had binders of pirated Dreamcast games…
I think I’m starting to see why it died.
staying up way too late every night playing pso though
at some point “retro” consoles got popular on GameStops website and I invested in a Dreamcast, 3 controllers, and memory cards. it was all under around $80. so god damn worth it since I can just “find” games online for it. I didn’t grow up with it but it’s definitely been a fun console
You know, I haven’t thought about burning CDs for my Dreamcast before. Is it pretty simple these days?
It was easy like 15 years ago, now you just get a expansion card to hook up a usb thumb drive and have the entire catalog on it.
AliExpress has a part that replaces the disc reader. Let’s you play games on the console from SD card.
For others without a console, redream works pretty well for most games, even on a fairly old PC.
Huh, never thought I’d see a reference to Don McLean in the wild that wasn’t American Pie.
I thought it was a NOFX song for years
But it didn’t fail :)
I still regret selling mine.
