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[SmokedMeat]

Because of...
-Sega CD poor support
-Sega 32X poor support
-Sega Saturn let's kill it early and sell our next console
-Playstation got all the big games
- Dreamcast falling flat on its face right at the Japanese launch
- PS2 you say? I'd rather wait for the system from the company that can deliver

 

[Exile20]

Piracy was huge on the DC also.

 

[Interceptor]

Piracy was huge on the DC also.

Thats actually an advantage. Helped the PS1 immensely to claim the top.

 

[Cynn]

I'm reading alot of shit here but the stealing takes the cake. Bill gates personally talked with both Hideki Sato and Isao Okawa, to first get in on the Dreamcast deal. He was told by the venerable shareholder that they wanted to get out of the hardware business.

They did not steal anything.😉

Steal was the wrong choice of word. Let's just say they wanted to make a Sega console with or without Sega. The Xbox meant a lot to me. I absolutely adored it and it became my gateway into the industry. As I said before, I liked it because of its Sega DNA.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

because shenmue turned out to be an overhyped pile of shit

Way to shit up a thread, yourself.

 

[kyoya]

This led to internal bickering much of which we likely only hear bits of pieces of now. Rather than working together as a team and doing what's best for the overall company by combining strengths the two branches instead tried to one up each other and compete for brownie points with the top brass.

This.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but the following anecdote from Peter Moore, former CEO of Sega of America just clearly shows the in-fighting going on between Sega of Japan and Sega of America:

During the time the Dreamcast was available, he gathered focus groups of young gamers to see what they thought of Sega and other gaming companies, asking them, "If these brands were people, who would they be?". Apparently, the consensus among the members of the focus group said Sega was the "granddad with dementia who used to be cool but you couldn't remember why." The focus group was recorded, and Moore went to Japan, bringing Japanese-dubbed tapes of the focus group to the company's headquarters to present the results. Naka, who Moore said was being "a tad conceited", accused Moore of tampering with the results.

"I lost it," remembers Moore. "I turned to the interpreter and said 'Tell him, "f*** you"'."

The translator refused to translate his message to Naka, Moore is sure that Naka got the message.

"Naka had lived in the US for three years, so I knew he understood. I walked out and never returned."

Moore also revealed some of the results for other companies from the focus group in the interview, with Rockstar being the "drunken uncle who'd show up with a hooker from Vegas" and EA - who Moore currently works for - was considered "the high-school quarter back who always got the cheerleader - an arrogant son of a bitch."

http://sega.wikia.com/wiki/News:Peter_Moore_remembers_when_he_told_Yuji_Naka_"F***_you"

On the other hand, I'd love to know what went on between Sega and Capcom - the amount of titles released for the Dreamcast was awesome. Sega and Capcom appeared to have had a great working relationship at that time.

 

[rjc571]

I'm talking about games that were released during the time the Dreamcast was still actively in the market, not tech demos. GT3 only came out in 2001, half a year after Sega announced it was leaving the market.

Launch games like Tekken Tag and SSX still bitch slapped the DC pretty hard, as did The Bouncer and Zone of the Enders a few months later (before the DC was discontinued). But the point is that it was obvious that the PS2 was leagues beyond the DC based on games that we knew were in the pipeline since before the PS2 launched.

 

[encephalon]

Japanese third party support wasn't what it seemed. It was pretty awful, in fact. The failure of the saturn to capture the west was mirrored by the dreamcast's abysmal Japanese presence. It wasn't going to compete with a console set to both dominate and be supported by both east and west.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

Launch games like Tekken Tag and SSX still bitch slapped the DC pretty hard, as did The Bouncer

No they didn't. Now you're just playing revisionists history.

Every Sega thread, every damn time. It's annoying.

 

[The Albatross]

The Dreamcast failed because of one reason:

NFL 2K1 had an online mode that allowed 4 people to play with each other, 2 on each console. If it was 2 vs 1, then you could pause the game, go to controller select, and one of the people on the other console could switch onto the opposing team and sabotage the team from the inside. It was... insane.

(that's not why it failed, but it's awesome how early online console games didn't think about a lot of these things)

Launch games like Tekken Tag and SSX still bitch slapped the DC pretty hard, as did The Bouncer and Zone of the Enders a few months later (before the DC was discontinued). But the point is that it was obvious that the PS2 was leagues beyond the DC based on games that we knew were in the pipeline since before the PS2 launched.

Other points aside, wasn't The Bouncer a critical and sales flop?

 

[Xpliskin]

No, that's totally wrong.

US (NPD numbers, from a time when the NPD was not entirely reliable):
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=130137491#post130137491


Also (from later in that thread)
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=130207634&postcount=64

The key here is the claim of 1.45 million shipped to the US. I thought it was higher, myself -- the SCD and its games seem more, not less, common than the Saturn here, and the Saturn sold 2 million in the US -- but it's believable, I guess.

Japan:
http://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega-CD#Japan says 100,000 sales in the first year of release, that is late '91 to late '92. The system pretty much died in Japan after the end of '94, with VERY few releases in 1995.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メガCD Japanese Wikipedia says 380,000 Mega CD systems sold in Japan overall. I don't know if that source is reliable or not, though; http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/メガCD#cite_note-2 Isn't that a European magazine? The number does sound accurate however. 380,000 is 11% of the Genesis/MD's Japanese sales total, a pretty good attach rate for an addon. The Turbo CD did do better in Japan, but even that didn't sell to a majority of the base PC Engine's ownership base.


Europe:
Unknown, except that only 60,000 Sega CDs had sold in the UK as of August 1993, if citation #11 is accurate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD#Launch Considering that in the UK sales weren't great, and that the Genesis sold 7-8 million systems or so in Europe, I have trouble imagining that more than a few hundred thousand SCDs could have sold in Europe by the end of its life in early '96.

Corroborating that, Sega-Retro says:

4% of ~7.5 million is 300,000.


You add these numbers up and you get 2.13 million systems sold. Add to that the unknown but surely low Australian (unless they were included in Europe?) and Brazilian numbers to get a total that's probably only slightly higher than that 2.13 million number. If I under-estimated European Genesis sales (and thus also EU SCD sales as well), then add a little bit for that. But those numbers are probably small, so even 2.5 million total sold is perhaps an overly-optimistic guess. I wish it was higher, but these numbers are all very plausible.



That 2.7 million number may or may not come from there, but that it sold 2 point something million systems doesn't.


They were many of the most popular games, though. It's easy to find the FMV games in large numbers, but the better, non-FMV stuff is often much less common!

Finally, a very informative post. Thanks.

 

[DarkKyo]

Sega.

Lol when I read this post the Sega title screen voice was how I heard it in my head

 

[rjc571]

Other points aside, wasn't The Bouncer a critical and sales flop?

Yeah it was a shit game, but it still looked amazing at the time.

 

[antibolo]

- Sega's previous missteps over the previous two generations had alienated consumers and retailers alike, making it DOA
- PS2 hype was so overwhelming that people waited for it instead
- EA decided to be jerks and refused to properly support it
- Piracy was way too easy
- Not enough buttons on the controller

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

Yeah it was a shit game, but it still looked amazing at the time.

No, it didn't. It looked like a crisco-smeared blurry mess with a super-bad case of teenage acne splattered all over the screen.

Looked decent for a few months in screens, was outdated-looking the moment it hit the shelves.

 

[JordanN]

I don't think the problem was money. I remember reading Peter Moore said they only needed a few more months and Dreamcast would have been profitable.

I just think SEGA's time was over and they failed to read the market right.

The SEGA Saturn was an ill conceived machine that tried to put 2D gaming first when it was 3D gaming that would change the industry. Arcades were also going out of style, something SEGA heavily relied upon.

I'm still not sure how SEGA would have a released a console in 2005/2006. They either had to invent the Wii first, or beat the PS3/360 at HD gaming.

Management at SEGA was damaged beyond repair. They would need new business orientated people to survive.

 

[Azelover]

It didn't fail, this is a misconception.

Sega ran out of money. It had less to do with the PS2 than videogame historians like to say. They were supporting it too agressively, but it was doing fine.

The president of Sega split all the teams into separate companies about one year before discontinuing the DC because he was already planning to turn Sega into a third party publisher. They needed to make money, and the DC was bleeding like the PS3. They couldn't continue supporting it. But it was doing pretty well, the Gamecube, the Xbox and Dreamcast did comparably well to a certain point.

 

[Nekofrog]

has anyone said bernie stolar yet

because he didnt help

 

[Kagoshima_Luke]

• Lack of EA support
• Lack of DVD drive
• People felt burned after the way they handled the Saturn

 

[ReBurn]

The Dreamcast didn't fail.

Agreed. Everyone else just got more successful.

 

[Brocken]

No they didn't.

No, they were. DC could not run them with the same amount of polygon and effect. Even Ridge Racer V was out of reach for the Dreamcast. This console is one of my favorites of all time, but it seems to me that you are the revisionist here

 

[MisterGrey3000]

The console failed mainly because of SEGA's awful business decisions (32X, SEGA CD, surprise Saturn launch, no 3D Sonic on the Saturn, etc.) and inept management (squabbling branches with different philosophies, and fussy primadonna devs); the PS2 didn't kill and neither did EA, it was all SEGA.

 

[3rdman]

- Sega's previous missteps over the previous two generations had alienated consumers and retailers alike, making it DOA
- PS2 hype was so overwhelming that people waited for it instead
- EA decided to be jerks and refused to properly support it
- Piracy was way too easy
- Not enough buttons on the controller

These are all true but in retrospect, SEGA only have themselves to blame.

You're right about the PS2 but what really kept people awaiting its arrival was DVD...for many, this machine was their first DVD experience and the joke at the time was that the most popular game for it was "The Matrix".

Although I am no fan of EA, they had a point in ignoring the Dreamcast...they had spent a good deal of cash developing a Saturn title only to see it become irrelevant as they weren't clued into the dev of the DC...they had to scrap the game and they were (rightly) pissed (as I understand it).

Piracy was easy but I have yet to see that it had any real impact...The PS2 simply outsold it by huge margins in spite of the piracy.

Buttons??? Nobody cares about that...it was a wacky controller though and it did strain my (large) hands after a while.

Ultimately, Sony had secured all the big exclusives and even though people had to wait for them (FFX), it was enough. In the end, I remembered a black Friday where the DC was selling for $50.00/unit and even that wasn't enough to outsell the PS2...Sega through in the towel soon after.

 

[deedeedaydee]

Because Sega pissed away millions advertising clouds in magazines and putting logos on football shirts, when they should have just been running footage of Soul Calibur on TV - which pissed over anything else from a great height.

 

[Brocken]

What the hell are you talking about?!!?

Did you see Soul Calibur on DC in 1999? It looked amazing!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIuof0w0DnU

Soul Calibur was insane in 1999, for me was the most graphically impressive game ever.

 

[3rdman]

Soul Calibur was insane in 1999, for me was the most graphically impressive game ever.

I remember walking into the store and seeing this run for the first time...it was amazing for its time! Butter-Smooth 60fps and beautiful animation.

 

[captmcblack]

People everywhere were willing to wait for PS2's "Toy Story graphics" and rocket-launching supercomputer CPU. They were jumping on board the PS2 hype train for the DVD drive alone, ever. DC actually had very good third-party support from pretty much everyone, right up to when it died; essentially whatever of note came out for PS1 and N64 (and early PS2) had a DC version. They didn't get EA stuff though - and as much as that was mitigated by having arguably superior Sega Sports titles to fill in the gaps, that early period where EA was moving units with SSX, NBA Street and Fight Night was time Sega would've loved having those titles - and wasn't getting them.

DC came out the box lacking that DVD drive (and the game capacity/video quality/capacity that would entail, as well as the casual "omg dvd drive" value proposition). DC came out the box with the Sega stigma of preemptive failure on it from years of post-Genesis floundering. DC had a shitload of aces across pretty much every genre from 1999 - 2001, but it didn't matter because people weren't passing on PS2 for it. The marketing was good (arguably great). The system had good support too, and the piracy didn't make or break the machine either.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

No, they were. DC could not run them with the same amount of polygon and effect. Even Ridge Racer V was out of reach for the Dreamcast. This console is one of my favorites of all time, but it seems to me that you are the revisionist here

Unless those games were pushing 4+ million polygons per second, Dreamcast could have ran them. You seem to forget the DOA2 fiasco, where the Dreamcast version looked much better.

Of course PS2 games would eventually look better, but that's partly due to the tech and partly to do w/ time. But very, very few of PS2's launch games looked "leagues better" than Dreamcast's best lookers at that time. Even magazine editors back in the day said so here and there.

Not to mention almost every PS2 launch game had aliasing issues DC games at that point didn't suffer, and DC games also had somewhat better resolution, mipmapping, and color depth. That was pretty obvious even with mag scan in the day.

No reason for me to play revisionist here.

 

[KC-Slater]

Releasing a new console in the middle of a generation rarely bodes well.

You're competing against both yourself (cannibalizing your own user base) and your competition's existing user-base.

Your hardware is dated by the time your competition refreshes their hardware, and you've already used up quite a bit of your brand's goodwill convincing existing users to upgrade.

It's unlikely that you have garnered enough momentum (in this case, a large and committed enough user base) to sustain your brand without being forced to release something else to compete before the consumer-expected lifespan of your "1.5" console.

 

[flak57]

What the hell are you talking about?!!?

Did you see Soul Calibur on DC in 1999? It looked amazing!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIuof0w0DnU

A work of art

 

[Celine]

It didn't fail, this is a misconception.

Sega ran out of money. It had less to do with the PS2 than videogame historians like to say. They were supporting it too agressively, but it was doing fine.

They were supporting it too aggressively and yet here what happened the second year (the first one was the first 4 months of the launch period) in the only market where the system was relevant (note: there was a $50 price cut in September 2000).

Do you note anything? Are you really sure it was doing fine?

 

[Clear]

I still feel Sega's software offerings were just wrong for the mass-market at the time. Crazy Taxi and Sega Tennis were great games for sure, but they represented an arcade sensibility that was straight-up out of tune with peoples expectations at the time.

When PS1 launched Tekken and Ridge Racer were huge, but by the time PS2 came around those franchises were seriously declining - certainly as system sellers.

 

[Seik]

It was just too fucking cool, they built a beast that was too cool for them so it resulted in their ultimate demise as a console giant.

 

[Biker19]

Not that it helped Sega much. A fair amount of those games they released on the system were commercial disappointments despite being critically well-received-largely in part of the Xbox being a Western-oriented system whose most successful games were FPS and sports games.

I think that a part of this was because of Microsoft heavily advertising the Xbox as a Western gaming console along it being the console to play FPS & Sports games on, instead of advertising their console that targets all genres of gamers involved like Sony usually does. Did the same thing with Xbox 360 & probably Xbox One as well.

It's the reason why most other genres like fighting games & JRPG's suffer in sales compared to the Playstation platforms.

 

[Nikodemos]

Sega's downfall in the '90s is the perfect example of a company ruined by infighting and ethnocentric attitudes. The Japanese arm refusing to accept that the MegaDrive was a cash cow, just not in Japan, the whole shitfest around MegaDrive add-ons, the US arm refusing to port Japanese games for the Saturn, the Saturn stealth launch debacle, the atrocious thrid-party relations, Stolar's "Saturn is not our future", the maddening number of systems they had at one point on the market (MegaDrive, MegaCD, 32X, Saturn, Game Gear, Nomad). It was like a super-strength money shredder.

Nakayama really messed up (though it's not like Stolar was blameless).

By the time they came up with the Dreamcast, it was already too late. And the Dreamcast itself was too ambitious. The VMU was feasible in theory but good (cheap) rechargeable cells were about 5 years away, packing in a modem with the console was pointless, the easily exploitable music player software was a terrible oversight and the choice of hardware a mistake (the 3dfx version used Glide, which pretty much every programmer knew, as the de facto API standard of the period).

 

[To Far Away Times]

The Dreamcast didn't fail, we failed the Dreamcast.

 

[HoodWinked]

cause this is a shitty cruel world.

 

[Ovek]

I thought it was because people pirated the shit out of the 10 games worth playing on the thing.

 

[Gamemaster_ca_2003]

The Reason why Dreamcast failed in two words.


Electronic Arts

 

[Brocken]

Unless those games were pushing 4+ million polygons per second, Dreamcast could have ran them. You seem to forget the DOA2 fiasco, where the Dreamcast version looked much better.

Of course PS2 games would eventually look better, but that's partly due to the tech and partly to do w/ time. But very, very few of PS2's launch games looked "leagues better" than Dreamcast's best lookers at that time. Even magazine editors back in the day said so here and there.

Not to mention almost every PS2 launch game had aliasing issues DC games at that point didn't suffer, and DC games also had somewhat better resolution, mipmapping, and color depth. That was pretty obvious even with mag scan in the day.

No reason for me to play revisionist here.

I don't say that the launch games and those of the early life of the PS2 were "leagues better" but that some of them (Tekken Tag Tournament, Ridge Racer or The Bouncer) could not run on the same way on Deamcast for a number of technical reasons. I remember very well the jaggy mess of Doa 2 on PS2, and also all the subsequent problems that have been with other porting like F355. Also, to be honest, I don't think Ps2 could never replicate the quality of the textures of Shenmue/2 or Sonic Adventure/2. But there is a difference between this and say that all Ps2 games launch were shit.

 

[Crowza]

I previously addressed the theory that "piracy" killed the Dreamcast in another thread.

19th June 2000 was the date that of the first pirate release on the Dreamcast (Gameshark CDX). June 22, 2000 was the date that the Boot Loader first hit the scene.

Sega discontinued the system in Jan 2001.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=129205538&highlight=#post129205538

If the Dreamcast would have continued, then yes - piracy would certainly have been a huge problem. But, the time frame for the piracy to become an overwhelming force to make Sega give up on their console simply does not add up in my opinion. Note that the June 2000 date was the very first time that anything was released piracy-wise on the Internet. It takes a while for the news to trickle out, and then it takes a lot of people participating on a mass scale, before anyone in the mainstream would catch on to it.

Basically, in 2001 you had people who had never heard of piracy on game consoles before being introduced to piracy through the Dreamcast. But, this was after the system was already cancelled.

With Sega throwing in the towel in January, it made have justified the act of illegally copying games for many people (who wouldn't normally do it) who then saw the Dreamcast as a "dead" console.

However, the reason the Dreamcast was killed off by Sega had more to do with Sega of Japan bleeding cash than it did with piracy. I firmly believe that it would have been cancelled regardless of whether the boot loader was developed. Of course, piracy could have then forced Sega to cancel the console or hurry up in production of a new platform. There is no argument, that piracy would have been a major problem if the system continued (especially because it did not require a modchip in order to copy games). Although, Sega addressed this quickly after the exploit was found by modifying its newer console shipments to close the exploit to prevent piracy (IIRC, another exploit was found later). Besides that, there was millions of Dreamcasts already in the marketplace that could play the copied games.

Basically, looking back on it, many people thought "piracy killed it" because the scene exploded after it was already pronounced dead. Since those two items happened approximately at the same time, I believe it makes people mistakenly attribute one to the other.

 

[Alchemy]

If Sega just traded out the modem for a DVD drive the battle would have been a lot closer. I love Online gaming, and Sega was really ahead of its time on that front. But they were ahead of the market, there wasn't much demand at the time and Sega didn't have the pockets to sit around and be pioneers years before it would become financially viable.

 

[Daniel Jackson]

So what did Sega do to piss off EA?

 

[AegisScott]

This may has been posted here already, but: ". The console had shipped to four retailers that were seemingly chosen out of a hat. Babbages, Electronics Boutique, and Software Etc (now all collectively known as Gamestop) and Toys ‘R Us"

This pissed off a lot of other retailers- Walmart, Target, K-Mart, Sears, KB Toys- who then refused to stock or give priority to Sega hardware and releases. It really hamstrung their retail presence.

 

[MrCunningham]

So what did Sega do to piss off EA?

As far as I know EA would only agree to make sports games for the Dreamcast if they had complete exclusivity on the console. Meaning, that no other publisher would be allowed to release sports games for the Dreamcast outside of EA if Bernie Stolar agreed to this deal. But since Sega already purchased Visual Concepts and wanted them to revitalize the "Sega Sports" brand name, Stolar quickly disagreed to those terms, and EA didn't bother supporting the console because of this.

At least from what I understand, this is what happened.

 

[jhmtehgamr20xx]

I don't say that the launch games and those of the early life of the PS2 were "leagues better" but that some of them (Tekken Tag Tournament, Ridge Racer or The Bouncer) could not run on the same way on Deamcast for a number of technical reasons. I remember very well the jaggy mess of Doa 2 on PS2, and also all the subsequent problems that have been with other porting like F355. Also, to be honest, I don't think Ps2 could never replicate the quality of the textures of Shenmue/2 or Sonic Adventure/2. But there is a difference between this and say that all Ps2 games launch were shit.

I didn't say all PS2 launch games were shit. I was just replying to The Bouncer being tripe (play-wise and visually), RR5 and TTT not being that beyond Dreamcast's capabilities, and the same with SSX. Other launch games (like this one JRPG,...I think it starts with an "S") actually looked inferior to DC offerings around that time. But I never said all PS2 launch games were bad, and just want to get that out there in case it was misconstrued that way.

That said though I do agree about the Shenmue/Sonic stuff. A lot of the those PS2 games mentioned didn't push heavy particle effects like ZOE, which is one of the reasons I'm figuring they'd work on DC, some small workarounds notwithstanding. Yeah they'd look a bit different, but it wouldn't be a night-and-day scenario. Same with porting Shenmue/Sonic to PS2. Also consider VF4; that was on Naomi hardware iirc. Maybe Naomi 2. If Dreamcast stuck around it would've gone there and looked about the same, as it already did on PS2 when it got ported there instead. AA would've been better though.

With more time for devs to get used to the system tricks, I think a lot of early PS2 games (again, aside from particle-heavy ones like ZOE, and even then you're just talking about cutting down on particle effects. It's not like the game revolves around them) could've been done on DC.

It's only maybe around 2003 or so where I think you enter the realm of PS2 games being technically impossible for DC on a very real level. But by then DC would be in the end of its cycle, so that'd be normal I guess.

 

[meanspartan]

Sega CD.

Not directly, but that's when it all started crumbling. Dreamcast was their first good console in several years, but by then, too few people trusted them any more.

 

[Maligna]

I'm only just now forgiving Sony for thier part in killing my precious Dreamcast.

 

[To Far Away Times]

If Sega just traded out the modem for a DVD drive the battle would have been a lot closer. I love Online gaming, and Sega was really ahead of its time on that front. But they were ahead of the market, there wasn't much demand at the time and Sega didn't have the pockets to sit around and be pioneers years before it would become financially viable.

DVD in 1998 (Japan) would have been awfully expensive. The PS2 was the one of the most affordable DVD players around when it launched at $300 in 2000.

The Dreamcast had a lot going against it unfortunately. The Sony hype machine did a number on it, but Sega did a lot of damage to their own brand beforehand.

 

[Herne]

• It had more advanced tech than its competition the PS1 and N64.

1. Of course it had a more advanced and more powerful chipset, it was developed and produced years later.

2. It was not designed nor meant to be in competition with the PS1 and N64, it just happened to be as it was released at the tail end of their lifetimes, before both companies could get their next-generation machines out, which Sega saw as key to it's strategy.