Little things you wish Sega had done differently

The DVD player half of it was a massive reason people bought the machine, especially in the US (the other half was backwards compat and positive buzz around the Playstation brand). I assume it wasn't a huge selling point in the UK/Europe, considering how people on Retro speak of it. But DVD had America by storm in a very, very short time.

The graphics on Metal Gear Solid 2 vs Sega Rally or whatever was only ever going to matter to us nerds reading gaming mags. If MGS2 left any imprint on why people bought a PS2 instead, it was that it existed at all. And of course Sony was going to make sure they had it on their system after the first one did so monstrously well, so that's a no-brainer.

EA skipping Dreamcast makes a little more sense to affect sales, but considering the acclaim and popularity the 2K brand has built up since (and that EA Sports wasn't truly the monolithic titan of the sports genre until the mid-later 2000s) I don't think that was the definitive killer of DC's success. You could count other games they made of the time too, sure, but EA wasn't really on Nintendo 64 either. Most of EA's fans were just going to stick to Playstation consoles the same way Square Enix fans would.

I think it was a lot of things piling up. A controller with fewer buttons than last time while the competition was making room for more. Not only no DVD player; but a format easily pirated in short-term and unviable in storage space for long-term. A company with a poor reputation it had to rebuild versus two others in great standing. A mountain of debt that the company needed to thread the eye of a needle to wave off. It all played a part.

 

The idea that piracy had any substantial impact on the Dreamcast's demise is nonsense. Dreamcast sales were already declining by January 2000, and Sega posted a $400 million loss for FY2000 in March. This was months before the MIL-CD vulnerability was discovered. Not to mention, the PS1 had the same piracy problems the Dreamcast did on a much greater scale, yet that didn't affect sales at all.

Sega's poor management and reputation, poor third-party support, weak marketing, and the popularity of the PlayStation brand are what killed the Dreamcast. Piracy didn't have anything to do with it.

 

Alright. Just because there was a decline starting earlier doesn't mean it couldn't turn around, nor that the piracy didn't affect anything. But I digress.

We really could try to point at what's to blame and call each other wrong back and forth all day on these things, but my greater point is what you're also saying. It was a number of things all hitting at once.

But if I were to pick the greatest one, above all else imo, it's the accumulated debt from the 32X/Saturn double whammy. If Nintendo survived from making many similar mistakes during Gamecube (inferior disc format, lack of third party support, Virtual Boy and N64DD being flops and total missteps, weak marketing, everyone wanting PlayStation) then the only true answer is how much money they had on hand. Nintendo had a lot of saved up money, but Sega was deep in the red by the time they even started DC's development. Had the 32X and Saturn's missteps not truly bled them dry, could the Dreamcast era have made made all these mistakes and still survived through the gen?

 

I'm British and was there - DVD was a selling point. But it did coincide with DVD players becoming more and more affordable - in December 2000 you could buy a Dreamcast and a (more capable) DVD player for £299.99 (the same price of a PS2) - a few months later, you could get the two for less.

Piracy I've talked about before. Metal Gear Solid 2 didn't release until November 2001 - it was at E3 2000, but did it start affecting Dreamcast sales 18 months before launch? I wouldn't want to call it.

 

200+ games support the modem - it wasn't an under-utilised feature, but almost certainly a misunderstood one. But I'm not sure you can get around that - in Japan it was marketed as a information tool - DLC, online leaderboards, general news and of course as a basic web browser, (because they knew the infrastructure wasn't there), but in the West, "games machine" + "online" = "online games machine".

I'm not sure if Japan's tactics actually paid off, but for 1998/1999, the Dreamcast was very good at being a tailored internet box thing.

Really they should have had a competitive online game at the Western launch, even if it was something simple, just to prove it could be done, but I guess it's hard to put yourself in that mindset - you're already struggling to explain what the internet is, nevermind "what it could be".

 

I disagree. Early games made extensive use of online. Plenty of them had free DLC, SA1 had online competitions and leaderboards with physical rewards, and the ability to share Chao online. One of the websites included by default in the web browser's bookmarks allowed players to share savegames of any Dreamcast game. Then there were the official game boards accessible in-game, which were a big part of the experience, as a big selling point of the online feature was the communities and interactions between players.

It might not have had online multiplayer from the onset, which is what you think of when you hear "online gaming" nowadays. But back in the day when the internet was relatively new and online gaming was niche and most people had no experience with it, the online integration in a console out of the box was pretty amazing for most people.

An extra screen per player that could be detached and turned into a handheld mini-console.

Well, the PS1 copied the VMU with the PocketStation, but the latter lacked the "extra screen" feature.

 

A brief history lesson:

The Dreamcast would likely not exist without the modem.

Prior to the Dreamcast, there was already strong pressure within Sega to withdraw from the hardware market. There was no sense of "defeat" about this - it was just a sound business move. The horrible third-party restrictions that Nintendo imposed were no longer a concern, and Sony offered a great deal.

Enter Isao Okawa - Sega chairman and founder/president of Sega parent company, CSK. CSK was not doing well at the time, and Okawa was focusing more of his attention on Sega, which was having some leadership problems under Nakayama. Okawa began to take an active role in Sega, despite having basically no familiarity with the game industry.

Okawa had one very broad dream: To create a "Sega CSK", a company that combined CSK's software business with Sega's consumer business. The immediate goal he latched onto was to release a home internet-capable device through Sega (the Dreamcast). He didn't care about the gaming aspect of the device. He simply wanted an affordable way for the average person to access the internet without a PC. There was much debate at Sega over this. Nakayama firmly believed that any hardware they released must be solely gaming-focused. Others believed Sega should not attempt another console release.

Okawa then made an unbeatable offer: If the modem-equipped Dreamcast failed, he would use his vast fortune to bail the company out. He would cover all of the losses associated with the Dreamcast. Nakayama had lost the debate, and he quit Sega entirely over it.

The Dreamcast launched, but it failed to become the internet device that Okawa had hoped it would be. With the experiment a failure and Sega deeply in the red, the plug was pulled on the Dreamcast early. As he lay dying from throat cancer, Okawa signed over approximately $850 million from his personal fortune to Sega, cancelling out the $800 million hole the Dreamcast had put Sega in.

To understand the Dreamcast, you have to understand that it was the dream of one man, Isao Okawa, and that in his eyes it had nothing to do with gaming.

 

There was one interview with Yu Suzuki that mentioned that Sega should have made a motion controller. I agree with this. Sega's expertise was location based, special controls entertainment, not internet based stuff.

 

I lost the list but there are precise records of when games were made available by the pirates (i.e. edited in such a way that they could be burnt to a CD-R). It took a few months to build up the library - it wasn't actually possible to pirate most Dreamcast titles en masse for a while (especially games which actually benefited from the GD-ROM's extra capacity).

A friend had a big box of pirated PS1 games (most of which didn't work properly), but I would imagine by the time the Dreamcast got to that stage, we'd be well into 2001. Combined with the fact most Dreamcast owners were probably Sega loyalists, I'd guess the market just wasn't there.

Unless you were living in Russia, where it absolutely was. But we're talking 2002/2003 at that point - it's not going to make a difference to Sega's bottom line.

 

Piracy didn't hit the Dreamcast until July 2000, when a hacking group discovered and publicized the ability to exploit MIL-CD support to boot games off of CDs. The thing is,

(A) this happened when the writing was already on the wall. Sales had already tanked and Sega was burning through money fast. Piracy didn't move the needle; the needle had already been moved. To use a Pendersian phrase, it was too late to the draw.
(B) Pirating games wasn't as simple as just burning the files to a CD. CDs couldn't hold as much as GD-ROMs so many games needed to get hacked down to be burnable, and this was a very time-consuming process. It could take months before it was possible to burn a specific game.

By the time Dreamcast piracy was widespread, Sega had already abandoned the Dreamcast and moved to third-party development.

 

For anyone who's never seen that advert, here it is for your viewing pleasure:



That advert has stuck in my memory ever since I first saw it on TV, because for me it's is right up there as one of the most facepalm-worthy things Sega ever did (and there are a lot to choose from).

 

Konami did a thing where they sold their PCs powering their arcade machines:

https://www.konami.com/amusement/arespear/desktops/index.html