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Why did the Dreamcast fail?

D

Drilbit777

Member
Okay I was wondering how did the dreamcast exactly fail so quick in only 2 years?

  • It had more advanced tech than its competition the PS1 and N64.
  • Easier to develop games which made it easy for devs to port and release new titles on it
  • Critically acclaimed first party titles( Shemune, Skies Of Arcadia, Sonic Adventure)
  • Good third party support (alot of great games were released for the system like RE Code Veronica, Grandia 2, Soul Reaver, Rayman,Power stone, Marvel 2, etc.).
  • Near Arcade perfect ports. This was something that the PS1 couldn't pull off due to RAM limitations and games like Marvel vs Capcom 1 ran horribly on it while the dreamcast version was near perfect. Lots of events still use the dreamcast version of Marvel 2 since it runs almost perfect compared to the PS2 and xbox versions which suffered from lag. Soul Calibur even ran better on Dreamcast and improved on its visuals compared to the arcade versions
  • Very good launch lineup. This is what systems are usually lacking early in their early life. The US Dreamcast Launch Lineup had a lot of great titles released for such as Power Stone, Soul Calibur, and even Sonic Adventure which moved the series to 3D.
All these things would have made it a good contender against the PS2/Xbox/GC but even then it still failed shortly after the next generation of consoles arrived.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Sega ran out of money, and despite a strong lanch in the US, all momentum evaporated to the point where they literally couldn't give them away. And I mean literally in the correct sense - you could get a Dreamcast free by signing up with SegaNet and they still couldn't move the systems.

In reality, Sega simply did not have enough money to support a successor to the Saturn. The Dreamcast needed to be an unprecedented runaway success to be sustainable. It had a good run but couldn't withstand any period of not selling, as consoles tend to go through from time to time.
 
D

Dio

Banned
They launched it at a ridiculously low price where they'd be losing money for several years before they saw any profit. This had a great effect on short term sales, but ruined the system in the long term - and trust between Sega and the people making games for it was tarnished.
 
K

KalBalboa

Banned
Drilbit777 said:
It had more advanced tech than its competition the PS1 and N64.
Click to expand...

Considering the PS1 hit the market in 1994 and Dreamcast hit in 4-5 years later... I'd sure hope so.

Critically acclaimed first party titles( Shemune, Skies Of Arcadia, Sonic Adventure)
Click to expand...

Sonic Adventure wasn't as strong a mascot title as something along the lines of Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, etc. These titles had appeal to the hardcore but evidently not enough for enough mainstream/casual gamers to jump on board.

Good third party support (alot of great games were released for the system like RE Code Veronica, Grandia 2, Soul Reaver, Rayman,Power stone, Marvel 2, etc.)
Click to expand...

Not good enough, I'm afraid. Electronic Arts alone really hurt the Dreamcast in the third party offerings department, and a lot of the other games were either ports or available with more features on other consoles.
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
Sega had no money to support it and while it had a great library with a lot of crazy niche games that's not what moves systems.
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
The ability to pirate games was already removed from later dreamcasts, that's not the reason it died. And the Dreamcast was effectively dead by the time the PS2 launched in general, and the dreamcast itself opened to record sales. You can't blame the death of the dreamcast on the PS2. The reality is that Sega simply didn't have the money to support the system.
 
W

whitehawk

Banned
I think it launched too early. More powerful than PS1/N64, less powerful than PS2/GCN/Xbox. Wasn't clear what it was competing with. It was also coming from past failures so Sega wasn't doing great anyway.

Granted I was like 6 when it came out.
 
Shpeshal Nick

Shpeshal Nick

aka Collingwood
So many factors.

Sega being Sega
Sega having no more money to bleed
Saturn leaving a bad taste in the mouth
Impending PS2 release
PS2 being a DVD player
Little bit was the market not knowing a good thing when they had it too.
 
B

Biker19

Banned
It didn't fail at all. The situations were much different.

Sega had an extremely bad reputation within both 3rd party publishers & gamers since the Genesis/MegaDrive where they were constantly launching unnecessary add-ons for the console (one of the reasons why Nintendo managed to overtake them altogether with the SNES/Super Famicon after they've struggled for quite a while against Sega), followed by rushing & launching the Sega Saturn too early along with a steep price tag (not to mention the platform was very un-developer friendly for developers; probably a lot worse than with PS3).

Granted, they got everything right with Dreamcast, but it was too little, too late for them to be redeemed within everyone. Add to the fact that they didn't have the money to keep sustaining the platform with, along with Sony having an overwhelmingly amount of popularity within PS2, & it was a recipe for disaster for Sega as a whole.
 
S

samus4ever

Banned
Metal Gear Solid 2 demo.

Really though, dvd and the ps2 coming out. I know a lot of my friends held off for the PS2 despite loving NFL 2k when we played it.
 
K

klee123

Member
Sega pretty much killed whatever goodwill they had left with the blunders of the Mega Drive Addons and the Sega Saturn outside of Japan.

It had no support from EA and of course, the hype from the PS2 also didn't help.
 
¡

¡HarlequinPanic!

Member
Hell, the format alone was a huge sticking point. Look at how much more PS2 games were able to do even by 2001, the year that the dreamcast called it quits. A title like Silent Hill 2 even probably couldn't run on the dreamcast.

Despite a lot of the forward thinking tech it came at a time where both arcades were dying out (making its place as a perfect home arcade machine) and the cd rom format (or whatever iterations therein) was quickly drying up.

The system will always be known as being a hotbed for experimentation and companies being wild and crazy, and even as great as it is to look back on the dreamcast fondly, it needs to be said that all the consoles back then were on fire, and the ps2/gcn/xbox/dc era of consoles almost all did things that you could only see on those respective consoles.

Really a great time for gaming. The dreamcast being a casualty is a bummer but I simply don't think the tech was long for the gen that was coming.

EDIT-didn't help that a LOT of the consoles library were cross-gen ports of n64 and psx games.

A shame those supposed talks to make the xbox play dreamcast games never worked out into anything.
 
F

Fraeon

Member
The Dreamcast wasn't even too bad of a failure before Sega calling it quits. But Sega really couldn't handle even mild failure after royally fumbling with the Saturn (pissing off Wal-Mart so that they refuse to even stock your console for example) and the Genesis/Mega Drive expansions.

So yeah, had Sega not fucked up the Saturn and not gone for the stupid expansions, we might actually see them with a console today.
 
M

Mr. Enigma

Member
playstation-2.gif
 
D

Drilbit777

Member
Oh wow I didn't know so many people would respond :O. Thanks for letting me know guys, now I learned alot about the systems demise.
 
Freshmaker

Freshmaker

I am Korean.
Astarte said:
PS2 having DVD support and piracy being really easy I think
Click to expand...

More than that, it didn't really have any third party interest. Most were gearing up for the PS2, and they were treating the DC as a stopgap at best until the PS2 launched. (This was painfully apparent at the 2000 E3 I went to.)

Also Sega had managed to piss off EA during the Saturn era to the point that EA wouldn't touch the DC at all. Losing stuff like Madden was rather huge. NFL2k was great and all, but Madden always had that extra weight behind it.

"Good third party support" consisted of Capcom. Mainly because they had bet on Naomi in the arcades which made ports super easy. Acclaim was there too, but... It was Acclaim. Can't really remember any other biggies at the time.

Square, EA, Konami etc didn't touch the system any more than they had to if at all. (Konami's support was abysmal to the point that it might as well have not existed.)
 
¡

¡HarlequinPanic!

Member
I know its worth noting the power of the system considering it came out in japan in 1998, but I dunno maybe a lot of companies just weren't ready for the extra headroom just yet?
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
Freshmaker said:
More than that, it didn't really have any third party interest. Most were gearing up for the PS2, and they were treating the DC as a stopgap at best until the PS2 launched. (This was painfully apparent at the 2000 E3 I went to.)

Also Sega had managed to piss off EA during the Saturn era to the point that EA wouldn't touch the DC at all. Losing stuff like Madden was rather huge. NFL2k was great and all, but Madden always had that extra weight behind it.

"Good third party support" consisted of Capcom. Mainly because they had bet on Naomi in the arcades which made ports super easy. Acclaim was there too, but... It was Acclaim. Can't really remember any other biggies at the time.

Square, EA, Konami etc didn't touch the system any more than they had to if at all. (Konami's support was abysmal to the point that it might as well have not existed.)
Click to expand...

Midway had decent Dreamcast support. Konami was at least developing a 3D castlevania until the DC died.
 
M

Man God

Non-Canon Member
Krejlooc said:
Sega ran out of money, and despite a strong lanch in the US, all momentum evaporated to the point where they literally couldn't give them away. And I mean literally in the correct sense - you could get a Dreamcast free by signing up with SegaNet and they still couldn't move the systems.

In reality, Sega simply did not have enough money to support a successor to the Saturn. The Dreamcast needed to be an unprecedented runaway success to be sustainable. It had a good run but couldn't withstand any period of not selling, as consoles tend to go through from time to time.
Click to expand...

It was dead before it even launched. They didn't have enough money yet did it anyways as a final last ditch effort.
 
B

Beren the Empty-Handed

Member
Sega failed, not the Dreamcast.

Also, it was competing with the PS2, not the PS1. It didn't matter that the PS2 came out later - everyone was hyped to hell for that system and talking about how powerful it was going to be. Nobody wanted to spend money on a Dreamcast when that was right around the corner. There were wild rumors of the PS2 being so powerful that it could function as a missile guidance system. Obviously that was absurd, but with wild speculation like that, how could the Dreamcast possibly match up in the public's eyes? It lost to a system that hadn't even come out yet.
 
A

Anth0ny

Member
PS2 was the competition.

Also, it was the CD/32x/Saturn that killed the Dreamcast more than anything else. Wii U was (is?) doing sub Dreamcast numbers, but they aren't coming off three massive bombs like Sega was at the time.
 
Hellraider

Hellraider

Member
Rygar 8 Bit said:
piracy was very easy just get the game iso and a boot disk done
Click to expand...

I've been hearing a lot about this but do we have actual software numbers to back it up? Do we have third parties talking about how their games aren't selling, or Sega itself, on the console because of pirating? Honest question.
 
S

Sami+

Member
SEGA. They had pissed away all consumer and developer trust by 1999, so it was impossible for them to carry on doing what they were doing. They nearly went bankrupt trying to save the Dreamcast.
 
R

Rygar 8 Bit

Jaguar 64-bit
Hellraider said:
I've been hearing a lot about this but do we have actual software numbers to back it up? Do we have third parties talking about how their games aren't selling, or Sega itself, on the console because of pirating? Honest question.
Click to expand...

not really but just going by all the people i hung out with in high school none of them owned any retail games except a few and most had binders and binders of burned disks

paulgandersman said:
didn't even need a boot disc for lots of them. just a blank cd-r and you're good to go.
Click to expand...

early on you did they started adding the boot information later on
 
K

Krejlooc

Banned
paulgandersman said:
didn't even need a boot disc for lots of them. just a blank cd-r and you're good to go.
Click to expand...

All of these posts seemingly don't know that only dreamcasts manufactured prior to October, 2000 could play burned games. Dreamcasts after October 2000 had the piracy ability stripped of them.
 
M

Mandius

Member
Krejlooc said:
The Mega CD actually sold really well for an add-on. 1 in 3 megadrives around the world had a Mega CD, and it had sustained and pretty good support throughout it's life.
Click to expand...

2.7million were sold and the library was mostly FMV trash or ports. The Mega CD was the beginning of when the public began to lose faith in the Sega brand.
 
Alx

Alx

Member
Lack of trust, mostly, and Sega couldn't afford it.
The lack of support from EA or Square was a big drawback (the console would have sold more if it had a FIFA or a FF game, which most gamers were expecting). And even if Sega managed to have decent sales and a great lineup, it wasn't enough to keep them afloat.
I suppose other companies in the same situation could have kept it alive for a few years more, but Sega had to recover from the Saturn failure.

The most annoying part about that is it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people weren't so eager to say "Dreamcast doesn't have a chance, it will fail", maybe the console wouldn't have failed.
 
MidgarBlowedUp

MidgarBlowedUp

Member
It was loud
Made grinding/whine noise like it was scratching records or something
The graphics were almost ps1 level polygon counts
Long loading times

I just never really enjoyed the thing.
although it did offer my first online gaming experience
 
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