This is a really odd way of putting it seeing as the Dreamcast came out before the PS2 and was discontinued before the other 2 even came out.
They're actually all considered 6th gen consoles. There's only a 3 year gap between the Dreamcast and the Xbox.
Dreamcast was 98
PS2 was 2000
GameCube and Xbox were both 01, the year Dreamcast was discontinued.
Dreamcast could have been a wild success, probably would have been, too. The major issue was that the Playstation was still totally dominating the market. 98 and 99 were both ridiculously strong years for PSX title releases. Then the PS2 released and totally overshadowed it. Sega just couldn't keep up... Nobody could. Not until the market kinda leveled out in 05-06.
Yeah I understand they were all 6th gen. My point was just that it doesn't really make sense to blame the Dreamcast failure on its timing. Dates also matter:
Late 98 was release in Japan
Late 99 was release worldwide
Early 2000 was PS2 in Japan
Late 2000 was PS2 worldwide
Early 2001 Dreamcast was killed
Late 2001/Early 2002 Gamecube and Xbox
The meme makes it look like the Dreamcast popped up late, but timing was not the reason for it's demise at all. PlayStation dominating the market, as you mentioned, was probably the biggest one. People knew the PS2 was around the corner and the Dreamcast had barely been out in the EU by the time the PS2 was strutting it's stuff on the Japanese market.
Don't forget DVD playback. Most people by the year 2000 still only had VHS. DVD players were prohibitively expensive at the time so a lot of people were holding out. PS2 had DVD and cost about half the price of dedicated players. I know a lot of homes bought them purely as a movie machine.
I bet if Dreamcast had DVD playback the history of the Dreamcast would've been very different.
I thought so too at first, but it sort of released in a window between the previous gen and these. They marketed it as "next gen" like they were beating the newer gen to market, but it was just terrible timing.
If they had released later it would have been worse. Sega's downfall was the Saturn which was just garbage compared to the N64 and PS1. Dreamcast was their last ditch effort to release a truly next-gen system before the big boys rocked up with all their cash.
Yeah, I'm of the opinion the Saturn was the real problem. It was not a bad step forward compared to the Megadrive, but compared to the PS1 it was nowhere near as good.
Dreamcast was a great console. It was really ahead of it's time with a bunch of things, the VMUs, the internet connectivity, the range of peripherals and keyboard/mouse integration. It was the first console I ever got relatively near release and never regretted it.
They had everything right with the Dreamcast, but they had no confidence. They killed it after just 1 year while sales were actually rising, and even in that time it managed to get one of the best libraries of that era. Imagine if they had actually continued to support it.
This. Management screwed up multiple times and doomed Sega to be . . . well, whatever it is they are now.
Bad Management (or "good management" if one finanically benefitted from this decision).
It's not that they had no confidence. It's that they took Nintendos approach on hardware. Sell low at a loss, and make the money on software.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour. As the year 2000 went on, websites even made it easier by posting the game files for download. If you didn't have broadband (many didn't at the time. Most had 56k), you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
So every console sold cost them money. And the software was performing abysmally. Plus, PS2 was right around the corner. XBox was an unknown, and Gamecube was assumed to do better than it did.
From a console war perspective, the year 2001 may have been the most competitive year EVER for video games.
Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.
Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.
You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.
So first off, you couldn't read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I'm not counting the "swap" method because it's failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.
Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.
Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn't enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.
Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.
you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.
I don't remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.
USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.
Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren't necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.
Unfortunately I think that Sega themselves weren't the only group lacking confidence in the Dreamcast. In fact, I feel like they put up a valiant fight, with marketing and first-party titles.
Critics and consumers all had an extremely "wait and see" attitude that I think took the theoretical advantage of the incredibly early launch and turned it into a huge liability. People didn't want to commit to buying their next console without seeing what the other offers were going to be. So Sega had to work hard for about two years to keep the real and actually available Dreamcast positioned high in the market while their competitors had the luxury of showing jaw-dropping demos of "potential" hardware (i.e. "Here is some video produced on $50,000 graphics workstation hardware that is made by the same company that's currently in talks to produce our GPU.")
Third-party publishers also didn't want to put any serious budget toward producing games for the Dreamcast, because they didn't want to gamble real money on the install base increasing. This resulted in several low-effort PS1 ports that made very little use of the Dreamcast hardware, which in turn lowered consumer opinion of the console. When some of these games were later ported to PS2 as "upgraded" or "enhanced" versions, that only further entrenched the poor image of the Dreamcast.
I have owned all four major consoles of that generation since they were still having new games published for them. And if I had to choose only one console to keep from that group, it'd be the PlayStation 2, because of the game library. It's huge and varied. I have literally hundreds of games for it, while I only have a few dozen games for the others. But looking at the average quality of the graphics and sound in the games for those systems, I'd also rank the PS2 in last place, even behind the DC.
Sony was a massive juggernaut in the console gaming market at the time. The PlayStation 1 had taken the worldwide market by storm, and become the defacto standard console. It's easy to forget that the console launches for this generation were unusually spaced out over a four year period, and Sony was the company best positioned to turn that to their favour. People weren't going to buy a DC without seeing the PS2, but once they did, many were happy to buy a PS2 without waiting for Nintendo or Microsoft to release their consoles. The added ability to play DVDs at exactly the time when that market was hitting its stride (and more affordably than many dedicated DVD players) absolutely boosted their sales in a big way. Nintendo's GameCube didn't do that, and by the time the original X-Box came to market, it wasn't nearly as much of a consideration.
Firefly and Dreamcast. Two things nerds are never going to fucking get over.
i beg to differ; dreamcast was my life during first and second year uni. i played the hell out of phantasy star online.
I loved the dreamcast!
I have so many fond memories of it.
MVC2, Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio. Loads of fun times had!
Wtf who doesn't mention Power stone 2. Arguably the best pickup brawler game ever made and still holds that title.
Record of Lodoss and Evolution are also top tier.
Hey, tbf, I never owned a Dreamcast, just played the games my mate had. 3 nights of drinking at uni, sleeping on his easy chair, it wasn't ideal. So I'd play all night and he'd wake up with a bunch of unlocked characters lol. He never had Power Stone 2 IIRC. Not my bad!
To be honest a big part of this was that it was a quasi-loot game. You had to do the rpg type mechanic where you plugged a bunch of items together that you get dropped after playing and do a ton of items synthesis. It kept you playing for ages to try new unlocks.
I'm sure the game wasn't balanced well for characters either but for the average little shitass it was great.
I'm going to take a bold position and say they were all good consoles. It was a beautiful time for video games.
Dreamcast finally let me access the internet from the privacy of my own room.
Hey.......I still remember the release date. 9/9/99.
Plus, you could use your dreamcast to talk to a fish. An insulting sarcastic fish.....but the game was narrated by Leonard Nemoy. Sometimes he'd insult you too.....
Seaman is one of those games that I'm intentionally not replaying, because it absolutely blew my mind when I was ten years old, and I just want to leave it that way. I'm guessing the tricks they used to mimic conversation would be very obvious to me now, but back then it seemed completely real. That game turned your CRT TV into a fish tank with an honest to god talking fish inside of it... and Spock gave you updates about how he was doing when you checked on him after school.
Its all fun and games until a frog starts asking about your views on Ronald Reagan
All it needed was a goddamn network pork instead of a dialup modem and it would be alive today. DC was the best.
I love my network pork! Tastes like bacon!
Deinitely never editing that
Dreamcast is still my favorite console of all time.
The memory card ..... It was originally designed to even allow gaming on the card like a mini gameboy when disconnected. By now it would be. A steam deck that acts as a controller.... Huh reminds me of the vita.......
They do exist. For sonic adventure you could load a Chao onto it and it was basically a tamagotchi.
If the Dreamcast hadn't had the misfortune of coming out during the objectively best console generation, it would have done fine - but also, if it hadn't been the latest in a series of flops (Sega CD, 32x, Saturn), then maybe the Dreamcast's failure wouldn't have driven Sega out of the console market. Sega struck gold with the Genesis and they just couldn't replicate it, RIP to a real one,
Umm I'm sorry to break this to you buddy but I pirated every dreamcast game I owned short of sonic adventure and Phantsy star online. That's probably why the dreamcast failed.
They lost money on the hardware and didn't make it back on software, so you're likely right.
Yeah my friend got a Dreamcast and then I pirated all the games for him. It was one of the most awesome consoles ever with amazing games. But the few other people I knew with one at the time also pirated games. It was just so easy because it didn't even need a modchip or anything. Just download, burn a CD, and play.
They just really wanted to release on 9/9/99 no matter what.
Sega’s only console success was Mega Drive/Genesis. Probably because “Sega does what Nintendon’t”. Sega managed to sell themselves as the alternative for the kids who were too cool for the SNES.
They couldn’t compete with Sony on that front. Sony was the new cool guy. Dreamcast failed because everybody was waiting for PS2.
So I’d say failed marketing killed Dreamcast.
Loved the Dreamcast. Other than the lack of DVD player, I still think it was better than the PS2.
Quite a few games that were released on both consoles looked better and played more smoothly on the Dreamcast than they did on the supposedly more powerful PS2. Dave Mirra BMX is one that immediately comes to mind. It was way better on the Dreamcast.
The PSX/N64/Saturn generation would've been better for this meme. Nintendo had its name, Sony had "two ninety nine", Sega had schizophrenic mismanagement and burnt bridges with retailers
If they put a DVD drive in the Dreamcast there's never a PlayStation 3
I'm just gonna say it. Dreamcast was my favorite console until ps4 and ps5.
Poor Sega. There just wasn't room for four consoles.
Vintage gaming community.
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