Hivebrain, on 20 July 2013 - 01:53 PM, said:
CD burners weren't uncommon in 2000 (I got one off ebay in 2001). The problem is no-one could copy GD-ROMs, and most people still had dialup or slow broadband connections.
Well yeah, GD-ROMs were proprietary, but people VERY quickly figured out that the Dreamcast, for some reason, could still boot games from standard CDs. There was a little-used Japanese format called MilCD that could include pictures and video when inserted in a computer, and the Dreamcast could also boot them. Hackers used this to trick the DC into loading commercial games from CD. VERY late models removed this functionality. A lot of games could fit fully on one CD, but games like Shenmue had to have the voices downsampled.
Black Squirrel, on 20 July 2013 - 05:04 AM, said:
I stand by the fact normal people didn't own CD burners (and even if they did, word didn't spread of the Dreamacst's loose protection amongst the mainstream until well after this stuff could have affected sales).
Maybe, but a lot of "normal" people didn't yet own computers in 1999, either. My point was that everybody I could think of with a computer (which was getting to be pretty substantial by that point) had a CD burner by 2000 or so, unless of course they owned one of those clunky old laptops.
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And I'm genuinely not convinced the Sega brand had been tarnished all that much in the UK - 32Xes, Mega CDs, Saturns - they weren't so much "damaging" systems as they were "forgettable" ones (and I suspect Mega CD and Saturn owners were reasonably satisfied with the product - not like an Atari 5200 which you can barely use). I mean look at how much support the Amstrad CPC received over the course of its life - the UK games market was very keen to keep the underdogs in the race. But there's lots of little factors that could affect things - the Dreamcast retailed for something like £199 at launch, which might make up for the fact previous systems hadn't delivered - that sort of thing
Well, the UK was always an incredibly loyal stronghold for Sega, so that may well have been the impression on that side of the pond. I mean, I'm pretty sure you guys had the only market where the Master System squashed the NES, and that's just mind-blowing from my perspective, haha. In the US though, it was a different story. You know how these days, even though Sonic's had a couple great games in a row now, every gaming journalist just HAS to start their preview of Sonic Lost World by babbling about the Sonic Cycle and "let's see if Sega can finaly get it right," and whatnot? That was kind of what a good chunk of gaming press was doing to the Dreamcast at the time. It was treated with a TON of skepticism, and every preview of the system pontificated whether you should get a Dreamcast or just wait on the PS2.
As for piracy itself, according to the old SegaBase history pages, the first Utopia Bootdisc came out in June of 2000, and coincided nicely with virtually ALL of Sega's second-wave software titles completely failing to get anywhere near sales expectations.
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It has been estimated by the Dreamcast bootleggers themselves that they averaged between one and three million hits a day on their pirate file servers whenever popular Dreamcast titles, such as Shenmue, Grandia 2, Resident Evil 2 or the Sega Sports games came up on the Dreamcast bootleg release schedule. The millions of people illegally downloading Dreamcast games from the Internet for the most part didn't care that Sega was losing millions of dollars in lost software revenue as a result of their actions. In the words of one proud FXPer, "F--K SEGA I'LL LEECH THEM DRY." Dreamcast software piracy was more than just an annoyance to Sega. It was one of the major factors, if not the major factor, that kept the console from ever turning a profit.
I don't know if I agree that it was THE major factor, as we've talked about. But I mean... a few years back, an independent duo called Duane and Brando released their first album online for around $8. It was paid for thousands of times and pirated hundreds of thousands of times. For a big name music group with a record label and a touring schedule and merch deals, piracy wouldn't hurt them so much. But when you're a smaller outfit, struggling along as Sega was at the time, it definitely impacted them pretty hard.
It's easy to say what Sega should have done in retrospect. The Sega PlayStation could've turned the industry on its ear, but Hayao Nakayama certainly thought he was right to disregard Sony at the time, and given what he knew, I'd have agreed with him. Sega should have cut the price of the Dreamcast after holiday 1999 and built up as much of an install base as possible before the PS2 happened. Sega should've remembered that the Dreamcast could boot MilCDs, and included its planned protection against piracy with their games. Sega should NOT have spent so much money developing stuff like the zip drive, the DC MP3 player, and letting Yu Suzuki run wild with Shenmue when they were in no position to finance it.
I think Sega knew that if the Dreamcast was anything other than a resounding success, they were going to have to drop out of the hardware market, and they blindingly pushed forward with everything they had to try to make it a success. That attitude shows through in the games of the time, in the marketing, and it's a big part of the reason the DC is so well-loved and remembered today.
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