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> The Dreamcast had so much potential, a year's head start over the PS2, a decent selection of launch titles, and online games, but I guess the damage was already done

The damage was done with third party developers. I think the public was ready for the Dreamcast/PS2 showdown, but the Dreamcast barely had games that anyone cared about. Nintendo had clearly dropped the ball with the "hardcore" (for lack of a better term) game audience by this point, so the real battle was supposed to be between Sega and Sony.

I can't remember if the story was that Sony had effectively bought everyone's loyalty, or if the devs had decided they hated Sega.

It wasn't that the Dreamcast wasn't any good, but that Sega got blindsided by Sony's back room dealing. Sony wanted in and they were willing to throw small mountains of cash around to make it happen.

When faced with a choice between a company taking your loyalty for granted and one willing to pay for the privilege, it's not surprising how many jumped.

The same thing played out later with the introduction of the Xbox where Microsoft muscled, bullied, and bought companies to make their platform happen.

Dreamcast was spectacular. I bought it for my young children and I was stunned by how beautiful the graphics were and how smooth the games were. Sonic the Hedgehog was the main one that (I think) I remember.

It really was an amazing console. The Saturn was also the best-in-class when it came out, the 2D performance absolutely crushed anything else on the market, but Sony's push for 3D made that irrelevant and the Saturn's 3D capabilities were weak, even weaker than the fairly feeble PlayStation.

The Dreamcast showed how Sega took 3D seriously and it was an amazing console, easily competitive with the PS2 and Xbox. The only problem was Sega'd lost their de-facto leadership position and were scrambling to stay relevant.

It's interesting, however, that I've met several people who had their first internet experience on the Dreamcast because it had several modules that made that possible.

> "the Dreamcast barely had games that anyone cared about"

I'm guessing you didn't play one. The Dreamcast had an amazing game library, especially considering the short time it was actively supported. Admittedly 3rd party support was thin on the ground, but the games that did make it to that system were some of the best of that generation IMO.

> "I can't remember if the story was that Sony had effectively bought everyone's loyalty, or if the devs had decided they hated Sega."

My understanding was that 3rd party devs had been burned three times in a row by Sega on products that were poorly supported by Sega (MegaCD, 32X, Saturn). There was also the piracy problem on the Dreamcast, and the fact that the PS2 was a DVD player as well as a games console. If the Dreamcast had used a DVD drive instead of the GD-ROM option they went with I could see it easily adding another 2 years onto the Dreamcast's life.

The silver lining is that the piracy issues also helped the Dreamcast be one of the best supported homebrew gaming platforms.

The Dreamcast was well thought out(unlike the Saturn) and incredibly easy to develop for(Sega learnt at least in this regard) which lead to such an embrace from the homebrew scene.

I remember one development house saying something along the lines of, Developing for the PS2 is like writing a sentence with a paint bush while for the Dreamcast it was like using a fine point pen.

> I'm guessing you didn't play one. The Dreamcast had an amazing game library, especially considering the short time it was actively supported. Admittedly 3rd party support was thin on the ground, but the games that did make it to that system were some of the best of that generation IMO.

The Dreamcast had an amazing game library, true, but it almost entirely consisted of niche games that the general public didn't care about. The Sonic Adventure games were the only ones with mainstream appeal.

The market then was different from the market now. Nowadays, Steam is full of awesome quirky niche indie games that are successful, and if a console launched now with that kind of library, it would probably be successful, but back then if you didn't have AAA games with name recognition, you were dead in the water. You'd only recognize how awesome the Dreamcast's library was if you were interested in taking huge gambles on stuff you've never heard of before.

> "You'd only recognize how awesome the Dreamcast's library was if you were interested in taking huge gambles on stuff you've never heard of before."

You didn't have to take a huge gamble, you just had to play one to see quality that was on offer.

As for games with mainstream appeal, aside from the Sonic Adventure games there were a number of decent sports titles for the system (Virtua Tennis 2 probably being my personal favourite, but the 2K Sports franchises seemed to make amends for the lack of EA support). I'd also say games like Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Metropolis Street Racer and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 had broad appeal.

Think about when the PS2 was released, what was the big draw at the time? Tekken Tag Tournament is the only thing that sticks out as a memorable PS2 exclusive in the initial period when it was competing with the Dreamcast. I personally don't think the PS2 had the superior game library at the time the Dreamcast was discontinued.

   > The damage was done with third party developers. I
   > think the public was ready for the Dreamcast/PS2    
   > showdown

I strongly believe that the Dreamcast would have competed quite well against the PS2 if only they'd been able to get EA on board. The Madden football franchise sells systems and it was even more true in those days before the game market grew and diversified.

Sports games like Madden and the NBA games were huge killer apps for a very large segment of the audience. Probably even moreso than they are today; entire genres of games (MMO, FPS, etc) had yet to make a meaningful impact on consoles back in 1999.

Ironically, Sega's own NFL2K on the Dreamcast actually was amazing - way better than any Madden game released up to that point. And it sold pretty well, too! And the Dreamcast's 4 controller ports meant that you didn't need an adapter for 4-player action.

But it wasn't enough. Name recognition matters. Entire legions of 18-24 year olds passed up the Dreamcast because they waited for the PS2 and the EA Sports franchises that would never appear on the Dreamcast thanks to EA's experience with the whole Saturn fiasco.

   > but the Dreamcast barely had games that    
   > anyone cared about.

Yeah. I mean, they did, but it was a lot of niche stuff like fighting games and offbeat quirky titles like Jet Set Radio that appealed more to geeky/hardcore gamers and not Joe Sixpack.

> niche stuff

Anyone remember Ready to Rumble boxing? That game was so much fun...

No. I loved the games Dreamcast had, as did many other folks.

Unfortunately, the Dreamcast didn't stand a chance because of Sega's crippling debt. Only a phenomenon on the level of Super Mario Bros., Tetris (gameboy), Pokemon, World of Warcraft, Wii Sports or Minecraft could've kept them from closing down production.

>as did many other folks.

Sales say otherwise, with only 9MM units sold. The PS1 sold over 100MM.

The context for that number is Dreamcast being discontinued after roughly one year in the US.

9 million is still a lot of people, regardless of how you want to downplay it.

Piracy was a huge problem on the Dreamcast. The bios devs accidentally left some code in from the developer consoles that would allow home consoles to run games from standard CD-Rs. Developers didn't want to invest in a system that had effectively no copy protection.

You are wrong about this. Developer were skeptical to commit to the Dreamcast right out the gate(before even the console's launch). EA saying later on it would never support the console(it seemed like there was even bad blood between EA and Sega). Developers didnt want to commit large amounts of resources to development into another Sega console. Simply put they were burnt by the Saturn and Sega didnt have the resources to throw money at them.

No, wmil is not wrong about piracy on the Dreamcast. It clearly was a contributing factor for developers not supporting the Dreamcast, it just wasn't the only reason.

why is that clear? the post to which you responded notes that piracy didn't hurt PS2. why should it hurt dreamcast?

but more importantly, suppose it did hurt dreamcast. wmil already said that. if you're convinced that this is the correct position, why not point to interviews or news articles of the time to prove your point, instead of just endorsing someone (as if that proves anything)?

Piracy did hurt the PS2, it just had a high enough install base to counteract the negative effects.

I remember buying a second hand PS2 for Guitar Hero. The aforementioned game was pretty much the only original game that came with it, it was also bundled with a Swap Magic disc and about 100 pirated games. Clearly pirated PS2 games weren't hard to come by. However, the PS2 was hugely successful, so from the point of view of a game publisher even if you lose a high proportion of potential sales to piracy you can still make a profit.

This article gives some insight into how important strong software sales were to the survival of the Dreamcast:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/8/7/4599588/why-did-the-dreamcas...

Whilst the Dreamcast did not have the worst ever attach rate, any downturn in sales was not something sustainable. As I said in a different comment, if the Dreamcast had been released with a DVD drive (even if this bumped up the retail price) then this would have helped immensely, not only to counteract piracy (DVD burners were much rarer at the time), but also to take away one of the big reasons for waiting for a PS2. Whether they could've afforded to do so in 1998 is another matter.

The PS2 needed a modchip for piracy. Most people don't want to go through that trouble. Pirates realized that it was possible to boot games on CD-R on an unmodded Dreamcast.

Sega and game devs weren't eager to advertise that fact, so you're not going to find any articles. But once that happened developers weren't putting money into new releases.

It might seem like this but you really don't seem to have an idea of the state Sega was in and their poor relationship with developers.

I'm as aware of that as any other armchair expert.

PS2 games were just as heavily pirated as Dreamcast games.

How many developers abandoned Sony because of that?

Konami, EA, Squaresoft, etc - all these developers had already decided they wouldn't have anything to do with the Dreamcast before it launched. Had nothing to do with the piracy scene that cropped up a year or so after the DC launched.

Konami released games for the Dreamcast:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Konami_games

Part of the job in creating a console is to appeal to 3rd party devs though, you can't put the blame on them. It's likely that since the ps1 had a huge user base it was just a safe bet to develop for the ps2 over the Dreamcast. And I guess you can argue that Nintendo had dropped the ball at this point, but Sega hadn't done anything good since the Genesis, as OP pointed out, that includes Sega CD, 32x, Game Gear and Saturn.

> First they tried incremental updates to the Genesis with the CD and 32X and failed to bring anything worthwhile. Then they had the disaster of the Saturn, which was so complex that few developers were able to release any appealing games.

It's worse than that. Each of Sega's divisions didn't know or care what the others were doing. The 32X was developed behind the backs of the Saturn developers. There was no grand plan here to first release an incremental update to the Genesis and then follow up with a new console. Sega's divisions were flat-out competing with each other to follow up on the Genesis.

> Sega themselves didn't even manage to release a flagship Sonic game.

More terrible decision making here: STI did significant work on a Sonic game for the Saturn, Sonic X-Treme, but the CEO was absolutely insistent on launching a Sonic game before Christmas. When Sonic X-Treme ran into delays and wouldn't make the Christmas launch window, the CEO cancelled it and replaced it with a port of Sonic 3D Blast, a Genesis game that wasn't particularly well-received the first time around.

Oh, and half of the reason for the delays was because STI's staff were fighting among themselves (Yuji Naka threatening to quit if they used an engine he wrote for another game took the cake: the team had to throw out two weeks of work because of that), and the other half of the reason was that the the lead developer and designer were both deathly ill (not exaggerating with the "deathly": one of them was actually told by his doctor that he had six months to live, though he wound up pulling a miracle and making it through).

>> Sega as a company that had one good breakthrough with the Genesis that they could never replicate, rather than a once great company who failed.

Perhaps Sega just wasn't good at the home market. Sega's strength was in the arcades.

With this in mind, the success of the Genesis makes more sense: it was basically one of their Arcade boards squashed into console size.

I remember reading years ago that the reason they went with a Motorola 68000 for the Genesis was because that was what their arcade machines at the time were using, so they already had experience with the hardware, and it would make porting arcade games easier.

EA really torpedoed them, but the GD ROM was the biggest mistake on Dreamcast

To be fair, the leadership of Sega of America was opposed to most of the mistakes, but was overruled by Sega of Japan. The autonomy mentioned in the article didn't last.

> In hindsight, perhaps it's more accurate to look at Sega as a company that had one good breakthrough with the Genesis that they could never replicate, rather than a once great company who failed. It was a long series of bad decisions after that, not just a single failure.

From a startup frame of mind, I have to wonder if this is the case of a company that did not understand why they succeeded, thus making it very hard to replicate the success.