Why Did Sega Dreamcast Failed ?

[Amiga Forever]

I remember when Dreamcast came out and they impressive game line up. They also had acrade games that can port to Dreamcast easily !

So why did the Dreamcast failed? It is because PlayStation 2 had DVD that Dreamcast didn't have!? or Did PlayStation 2 have better games!?

 

[Sardine]

Love the dreamcast.

many many nights pulling the sofa to the tv for nights of Virtua tennis with the Mrs.

I think it was far too easy to run pirated games and the 1gb GDrom was very limiting having to spread games across multiple disks.

Also no backwards compatibility for sega saturn games with the them boss of Sega basically saying don't buy the saturn we have a better console coming called the dreamcast. financial suicide and I guess they didn't recover from the stigma.

PS2 with Sony's financial power and it played PS1 games stole the throne until for me when a year or so later the Xbox arrived adding a hard disk to cache games was genius. a good example is crash bandicoot loading times ps2 vs xbox.

 

[rcade]

Sony kept saying the PS2 was coming soon with better specs (mostly lies) and EA did not support the DC with their garbage sports games.

 

[troubleshooter]

The dreamcast was definetly ahead of its time IMO, maybe others will disagree, but it was such a great console. I actually still have mine... But like Sardine said, it was very easy to run pirated games , that in my opinion was one of the main reasons why the dreamcast failed..

 

[Rasta]

Never understood it. Not as if I as ever to be a fan of the system, but I could see the tech was good for the time. I'd imagine it was down to support, timing and management. I hear there was a resurgence for them regarding homebrew.

 

[Phatboy]

Dreamcast still stands as one of the best consoles ever for me, amazing hardware for the time and great games!

As Rasta says it was all down to timing and support, especially in Europe that the console bombed, where it had some brilliant software houses behind it, a lot of them stayed loyal to Sony and waited on the very close behind PS2. With even better architecture, MASSIVE publisher support born from the massive success these pubs saw with the PS1 and the the DVD media support and movie playback it was a better horse to back

The story of the DC is much much different in Japan, the catalogue of games is I believe 2-3x bigger than Europe/US ever saw. Reason I buy import games and use a boot disc, some many amazing games that we never saw

 

[trixster]

Sony kept saying the PS2 was coming soon with better specs (mostly lies) and EA did not support the DC with their garbage sports games.

Entirely this

 

[FutureVariant]

Remember playing VF on it and being amazed; plus I knew someone who ran up a huge bill (for the time!) playing PSO

Piracy was rampant on the PS1 as well, but that sold bucketloads. Sega squandered the success of the Mega Drive with the 32x and then the Saturn (which I loved) which was rushed to market and undercut by the PlayStation. By the time Dreamcast launched they struggled financially and lost more money on each sale plus bearing the cost of pioneering online console play ( https://www.polygon.com/2013/8/7/45...mcast-fail-segas-marketing-veteran-looks-back ).

Such a shame.

 

[keropi]

It was the games/companies support - never really like the DC ones compared to the PS2.
Also I wouldn't say that the PS2 had worse specs than the DC , on the contrary it was superior but stuck in the realm of tv resolutions at the time. Anyways it's always the software that makes the difference, hardware alone doesn't cut it.

 

[Amiga Forever]

whoa what interesting reading

So what IF Dreamcast had

Backward compatable and would save the Dreamcast?

 

[Phatboy]

Its a sad but amazing tale for the DC. Its great to have all these different inputs on the topic in here

I am really glad that I own one still and around 50 or more games, some of the harder to find ones too . Connected to VGA the system still looks phenomenal, was playing dead or alive 2 a few weeks back.

Check out some of the japan only releases on youtube like Border Down, under defeat, garou mark of the wolves. Was always HUGELY gutted that Alien Front Online never made it over from Japan/USA to europe before the end of the consoles life too

 

[Jameson]

The Dreamcast had a lot going for it - i MUCH preferred it to the PS2. Unfortunately a combination of Sega having burned customers and retailers with the 32X (another good and misunderstood system, but executed terribly), Sega having spent so much money on diversifying their product line up (at one stage they had the Master System, Game Gear, Megadrive, Mega CD, 32X, Saturn and Nomad all being sold at the the same time in some territories!) and so having little money left to advertise and promote the DC and, lastly, the hype surrounding the PS2, which is arguably still the most hyped release of hardware ever (remember the "PS2 Emotion Chip" hype? The "PS2 is powerful enough to be used to launch missiles" hype? The "PS2 will have real time graphics of the same quality as the Toy Story movie rendering" hype?).

To top it off, the smartest thing Sony did with the PS2 was to include a DVD rom in it making it, for a time, the most cost effective way of getting into the then new DVD standard.

The DC, on the other hand, had far better video output quality, colour quality and output options. The DC had 4 controller ports as standard, the very novel (at the time) VMU system, networking capability out of the box, a vastly superior GPU system (very efficient system with 4 times the texture memory of the PS2 and hardware prioritizing of rendering allowing it to only render visible object and ignoring those hidden behind other objects - again, very novel for the time) and superior ports to the PS2 versions of games in almost every case.

The DC was far easier to program for developers, had the option of using the hardware libraries or using the WinCE development environment (making porting of certain apps, utils and games much easier)... in short, other than the PS2 having the DVDrom (which was really not useful for gaming at the time, save for storing heaps of FMV) and a faster CPU (somewhat negated by the less efficient design of the PS2 and the DCs more efficient GPU) and more system RAM, the DC was the better system - arguably better GPU, far more texture RAM, easier to develop for, more controller ports, VMU system, superior video output and out of the box networking. Oh and the DC had far more interesting exclusives - the PS2 was pretty much the usual suspects.

The DC has some absolutely amazing games, and the first couple of generation of PS2 games were not a patch, visually at least, to their DC counterparts. Of course, the PS2 being so popular and having such a long lifespan, developers learned to work around its inefficiencies and really make it do backflips - compare the first generation PS2 games to games like God Of War 2.

It would be interesting to have seen what could have been squeezed out of the DC if it had lasted longer.

....but then I am a Sega fan, so you might want to take what I say with a pinch of salt.

 

[mjnurney]

I think SEGAs muddled sales , the failure of the Saturn and the hype around the PS2 with its DVD. Sega had a reputation of rushing console releases and killing off systems too and this upset many developers and of course Sony was on the full charm offensive with the PS1 at the time.

Sony had the money and advertising and hype. Sega didn't.

Rumours of the ext big thing kill sales, Osbourne , Amiga 1200 , Saturn the list goes on.

i love the dreamcast , it could of hung on for another 6 months but the writing was on the wall and Sega were losing money.

Saturn late 94, early 95 release.
Dreamcast 1998/1999 release.
Xbox 2001 release, 24 million sold
N64 1996/7 release.

PS1 release 1994/5 ,102.49 million sold
PS2 year 2000 release, 155 million sold
N64 1996 , 33 million sold.
Dreamcast, 9.13 million sales sold


The Japanese firm, whose U.S. headquarters are in San Francisco, will immediately halt Dreamcast production. The move brings to an end a 36-year run in the game hardware business, which began in 1965 with a lowly pinball machine.Beginning Sunday, Sega will sell Dreamcast for $99 dollars -- down from $150 -- in an effort to clear remaining units from inventory by March 31.

"When you look at the cost of creating a hardware brand in the face of our competitors, with the war chest of Nintendo and the $500 million Microsoft is spending on Xbox, Sega can't compete with those companies at that game," said Sega spokesman Charles Bellfield.

​

Sega, which has faced an uphill battle since its market share in the hardware business slid from 50 percent to less than 1 percent in the mid-1990s,

WIKI

On May 22, 2000, Okawa replaced Irimajiri as president of Sega. Okawa had long advocated that Sega abandon the console business.His sentiments were not unique; Sega co-founder David Rosen had "always felt it was a bit of a folly for them to be limiting their potential to Sega hardware", and Stolar had previously suggested that Sega should have sold their company to Microsoft. In September 2000, in a meeting with Sega's Japanese executives and the heads of the company's major Japanese game development studios, Moore and Bellfield recommended that Sega abandon its console business and focus on software—prompting the studio heads to walk out.


Nevertheless, on January 31, 2001, Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast after March 31 and the restructuring of the company as a "platform-agnostic" third-party developer.The decision was Moore's.

Sega also announced a Dreamcast price reduction to $99 to eliminate its unsold inventory, which was estimated at 930,000 units as of April 2001.

After a further reduction to $79, the Dreamcast was cleared out of stores at $49.95. The final Dreamcast unit manufactured was autographed by the heads of all nine of Sega's internal game development studios as well as the heads of Visual Concepts and Wave Master and given away with 55 first-party Dreamcast games through a competition organized by GamePro magazine. Okawa, who had previously loaned Sega $500 million in the summer of 1999, died on March 16, 2001; shortly before his death, he forgave Sega's debts to him and returned his $695 million worth of Sega and CSK stock, helping the company survive the third-party transition.As part of this restructuring, nearly one-third of Sega's Tokyo workforce was laid off in 2001.


9.13 million Dreamcast units were sold worldwide.After the Dreamcast's discontinuation, commercial games were still developed and released for the system, particularly in Japan. In the United States, game releases continued until the end of the first half of 2002. Sega of Japan continued to repair Dreamcast units until 2007. As of 2014, the console is still supported through various MIL-CD independent releases.^[ After five consecutive years of financial losses, Sega finally posted a profit for the fiscal year ending March 2003.


Reasons cited for the failure of the Dreamcast include hype for the PS2; a lack of support from EA and Squaresoft, considered the most popular third-parties in the U.S. and Japan respectively; disagreement among Sega executives over the company's future, and Okawa's lack of commitment to the product; Sega's lack of advertising money, with Bellfield doubting that Sega spent even "half" the $100 million it had pledged to promote the Dreamcast in the U.S.; that the market was not yet ready for online gaming;Sega's focus on "hardcore" gamers over the mainstream consumer.

 

[Jameson]

"Sega, which has faced an uphill battle since its market share in the hardware business slid from 50 percent to less than 1 percent in the mid-1990s"

Erm, this has to be a typo - Sega's market share NEVER dropped to "less than 1 percent"! Especially in the mid 90s!

 

[moggsie]

There's not much more I can add that hasn't already been stated. It was Sega's continuous cock ups that meant all the consoles released after the Mega Drive/Genesis failed.

The Mega CD was an interesting concept as optical media was seen as the future of game storage. But £300 for an AD-ON??? Very few people could afford that in 1993. Plus the games that were released were mostly pants - FMV borefests and MD rehashes.

The 32X was a fine example of Sega of America and Japan not having a clue what the other was doing. Producing a 32-bit add-on for the ageing MD when you've got a much better 32-bit replacement just around the corner is absolute madness. No wonder hardly any TPD bothered with it. And, again, pricewise it was simply too expensive at £150. Especially when you consider that there was bugger all games available at launch.

The Saturn should of easily been a match for the PlayStation (in theory) since Sega were the established brand, Nintendo's new console was still 2 years away and Sony were unproven. But an overly complicated internal infrastructure meant it was difficult to programme for and made it's production more expensive - thus you had the PSX cheaper on release and Sony's clout at attracting third parties software houses or simply buying third parties instead. Also, with 2 previous Sega releases abandoned after incredibly short life spans you cannot blame the TPD's from being reluctant to support Sega. A reputation they continued in 1998 when the head of Sega of America announced, "The Saturn is not our future." just 3 years after it's release.

It's no wonder the Dreamcast lifespan turned out as it did. Trust in the company by both TPD's and consumers was shot by 1999. Why would you buy anything from a company that ditches it's products after 2-3 years? And this is coming from a big Sega fan! Sometimes, a company is it's own worst enemy.

 

[Retrograde]

Yeah I think it's mainly down to:
Marketing
Policies
Agreements (or lack thereof) with third parties
So essentially Sega killed it off fairly fast, as others have mentioned.

The hardware is certainly not lacking, and I think you can cram alot of content onto a CD. Look at the N64 and how pitiful that storage is, and it still hade a fairly large following.

The DC is one of my personal favourites, decently beefy GPU/CPU (for it's time) and VGA out, and at the end of its lifespan it actually had a library with a lot of quality titles.

 

[Echolalia]

Who was the french dude who saw the Dreamcast european launch? He was quite funny. Sponsored a few football teams from memory.

 

[motrucker]

I gave up trying understand these trends ages ago. I only know I still treasure my Dreamcast setup. Only wish I had more games for it.