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I really wish Dreamcast had a longer life most people underestimated how great of a console it was. However I believe this was completely Sega's fault for not p

I really wish Dreamcast had a longer life most people underestimated how great of a console it was. However I believe this was completely Sega's fault for not pushing the system harder. The hardware was vastly superior to the PS2 which launched the same year. I think Sega didn't consider how much more expensive the Dreamcast was against the competition. Of course XBOX sealed it's fate.

aesh2Xa1 2y ago
The Dreamcast launch price in Sep 1999 was $199 (US market). The PlayStation 2 launch price in Mar 2000 was $299 (US market). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 So the Dreamcast was much less expensive than the PlayStation 2. Did you mean to say that rather than saying it was more expensive, or am I missing some detail?
- Dwedit 2y ago
  The PS2 was basically you buying your first DVD player and also getting a game console with it.
  - varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
  - anthk 2y ago
    This. You got a cheap-ass "home cinema lite" setup and a PSX retrocompatible console with it.
    - scheeseman486 2y ago
      I wouldn't even call it "lite". The PS2 was, in terms of features, one of the best DVD players on the market at the time. Component video, DD/DTS 5.1 optical out, if you had a good quality CRT you didn't need anything better (though you might want to chip it to go region free).
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    Two game consoles! Full back-compatibility with PS1, if you didn't already have one or were short on space or TV inputs. Wasn't the PS3 the cheapest Blu-Ray player available at its launch? Like, it was a free console if you wanted a Blu-Ray player.
    - thfuran 2y ago
      And it was cheap enough relative to its other specs that the DoD bought a ton and built a top 50 supercomputer out of them.
  - vanattab 2y ago
    This I think was one of the main reasons for the ps2 success. DVD players at the time costed hundreds of dollars and were often not that good. The ps2 as one of if not the best and with backwards compatibility so you had access to the huge ps1 library.
    - superultra 2y ago
      I managed an EB Games during the Dreamcast and ps2 launches. You can’t overstate the value proposition of the ps2 as a dvd player. It made the ps2’s extra $100 over the Dreamcast completely tenable. The second biggest reason for the success of the ps2 over the Dreamcast was that EA Sports never came to Dreamcast. Sega made the 2k series to compensate and it was definitely a good try, with some 2k titles definitely better in gameplay to their EA Sports competitor. But none of the 2k series ever sold anywhere near EA Sports.
- Sparkyte 2y ago
  It wasn't the price but the cost of production. Most consoles are loss leaders. Also the lack of backwards compatibility made the library so small compared to PS2.
  - MegaDeKay 2y ago
    The lineup of early PS2 games was pretty weak but yeah, back compat with PS1 helped them a lot. Dreamcast was surprisingly strong out of the gate as console launches go.
  - rasz 2y ago
    Dreamcast was muuuuch cheaper to manufacture than PS2. Seems Sega finally learned their lesson from 32x and terribly complicated Saturn. Too little too late.
- 77779863515 2y ago
  [flagged]
thevagrant 2y ago
At the time, Sega did ok marketing the dreamcast. They had a huge line up of titles. It was almost everything one could ask for. The issue was Sony released the PS2 a year later and convinced almost everyone it was far superior with the emotion engine. Most people I knew at the time were convinced PS2 was next coming of Jesus and worth waitng for. Few people had multiple consoles, so Sega really got crushed by the competitive market and accumulated losses from their past mistakes.
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  Give "The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2" a read. Sega America did well marketing-wise but Sega Japan was a shitshow and really dragged them down. Sega could have done much better with the Dreamcast than they did given the cheaper price point, one year head start, and solid lineup of games.
  - scheeseman486 2y ago
    Going too early would mean a hardware spec that'd inevitably get demolished by PS2. I think delaying a year, going DVD and maybe bumping the RAM up would have resulted in a product more competitive, but Sega were completely dead outside of Japan by 99 and they probably couldn't afford to wait They were screwed either way. The Dreamcast, no matter what form it took, could never have saved them. Saturn was the fatal blow, it's weirdly esoteric tech choices, over-complicated and expensive design making it impossible to compete with Sony's simple, cheap polygon pusher. It just took them a while to bleed out. Kinda seeing it play out again with the Xbox brand, interestingly.
    - canadianfella 2y ago
      [dead]
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
Dwedit 2y ago
The Dreamcast was pretty much on par with the PS2, GameCube, and XBOX. I'm surprised it didn't keep getting games.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  Sega's announcement that they were discontinuing the console relatively early on while it still had a lot of life in it put a stake through its heart. Nobody wanted to develop for a console that was a Dead Man Walking when they could develop for PS2 instead.
- lozenge 2y ago
  Not in sales which is what matters. It isn't like today where you can port a game pretty quickly. The architectures were hugely different.
epcoa 2y ago
The PS2 released more than a year later in Japan, and while only a few months after the DC in North America, but straddling the holiday season, so essentially the following year. But the announcement seriously gimped the DC launch. I love the Dreamcast, own multiple, started hacking with KallistiOS back in the day, it has much more significance to me than the PS2, but it’s just not the case that the hardware was vastly superior. It’s no slouch, there are aspects that are better. The GPU had some neat tricks and more VRAM+HWTC was nice, you get better image quality, but it was plainly bested in most of the metrics that mattered more, geometry, lighting and fill rate, and most people did not use VGA out at the time. The “Emotion Engine” is absolutely ungainly compared to the elegance of the SH-4 simply tied to the PowerVR and AICA, but you simply can get more out of it both in raw FP/SIMD (geometry) and DMA. Simplicity of architecture doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers. Some of the early titles looked like shit due to the difficulty of leveraging the hardware, but look at the longevity and late stage PS2 games (especially Konami), quite beyond DC capabilities. And a DVD was objectively superior to GDROM (and it made a good movie player). The Xbox was released after Sega already shitcanned the Dreamcast, its fate was sealed before. Sony overstated the PS2 capabilities, but it did have DVD drive and the graphics were better after developer learned how to use it, it had strong franchises and simply more S tier ones. The Dreamcast was too arcade port heavy. The Dreamcast simply got fucked in the winner take all market at the time. Maybe if they released in 1998 with a larger library they might have had enough run way.
- XzetaU8 2y ago
  Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 was a techical marvel http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-colossus-pal-ps2/ https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c...
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    I was about to ask if the DC could do the odd shading (fur shells, bloom) that SotC did on PS2. IIRC it used the vector units in addition to the GPU. An SotC decompile would be killer...
hnlmorg 2y ago
In addition to what the others said, Xbox was released long after the DC was already discontinued. What’s more, some of the same people behind the DC were also behind the Xbox. In a way, the Xbox is kind of like the Dreamcast 2
deergomoo 2y ago
The PS2 had DVD playback, huge popular franchise support, and the very positive reception of the PS1 going for it. I don't know how it compares to the Dreamcast in raw horsepower, but compared to the GameCube and Xbox it was firmly at the bottom of the pack in that regard. It ended up not mattering in light of the games and its ability to play DVDs.
- randall 2y ago
  i think dvd playback was THE feature that sealed the dreamcast’s fate.
  - ZFH 2y ago
    The PS1 monstrous success sealed the DC's fate. It created a huge new demographic of first time gamers that equated "PlayStation" to "console".
    - bunny720 2y ago
      You are really underestimating how many people bought ps2s as a dvd player+ both “gamers” and everyone else.
      - ZFH 2y ago
        Probably true for the US. In Europe, it was very country-dependent. Here PS2 sold simply because it was the new PlayStation, to a public that for the vast majority wasn't even aware there was competition.
      - olyjohn 2y ago
        Weren't a good chunk of DVD players almost as expensive as the PS2? You basically got a free gaming console with your DVD player.
      - alexjplant 2y ago
        This. Thrifty parents with no interest in gaming saw the PS2 and thought "Sony DVD player". The GameCube was merely an expensive Nintendo time sink. To this end my brother and I took out a loan to buy out GameCube but could have gotten the PS2 for free for Christmas - we wanted to play Super Smash Brothers et al that much and knew that we couldn't avail ourselves of the PS2's better-selling titles anyhow due to their M ratings. As I write this it does feel like both Sony and Microsoft really started to push the whole living room entertainment convergence thing around this time while Nintendo happily stayed in their lane. The same dynamic continues to this day.
crest 2y ago
In what way(s) do you consider the Dreamcast hardware vastly superior? It had a slower CPU, slower GPU, and less memory if I remember correctly.
- epcoa 2y ago
  The DC had double the VRAM (and 4MB on the PS2 was paltry) and hardware texture compression, texture quality was better, and the analog video output path was better and most games run 480p vs 480i. 480p on the Dreamcast looks better (an advantage that most North American consumers using the included composite cable would not have been able to appreciate). All said, indeed it was not vastly superior.

aesh2Xa1 2y ago

The Dreamcast launch price in Sep 1999 was $199 (US market). The PlayStation 2 launch price in Mar 2000 was $299 (US market). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2 So the Dreamcast was much less expensive than the PlayStation 2. Did you mean to say that rather than saying it was more expensive, or am I missing some detail?

Dwedit 2y ago
The PS2 was basically you buying your first DVD player and also getting a game console with it.
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
- anthk 2y ago
  This. You got a cheap-ass "home cinema lite" setup and a PSX retrocompatible console with it.
  - scheeseman486 2y ago
    I wouldn't even call it "lite". The PS2 was, in terms of features, one of the best DVD players on the market at the time. Component video, DD/DTS 5.1 optical out, if you had a good quality CRT you didn't need anything better (though you might want to chip it to go region free).
- devilbunny 2y ago
  Two game consoles! Full back-compatibility with PS1, if you didn't already have one or were short on space or TV inputs. Wasn't the PS3 the cheapest Blu-Ray player available at its launch? Like, it was a free console if you wanted a Blu-Ray player.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    And it was cheap enough relative to its other specs that the DoD bought a ton and built a top 50 supercomputer out of them.
- vanattab 2y ago
  This I think was one of the main reasons for the ps2 success. DVD players at the time costed hundreds of dollars and were often not that good. The ps2 as one of if not the best and with backwards compatibility so you had access to the huge ps1 library.
  - superultra 2y ago
    I managed an EB Games during the Dreamcast and ps2 launches. You can’t overstate the value proposition of the ps2 as a dvd player. It made the ps2’s extra $100 over the Dreamcast completely tenable. The second biggest reason for the success of the ps2 over the Dreamcast was that EA Sports never came to Dreamcast. Sega made the 2k series to compensate and it was definitely a good try, with some 2k titles definitely better in gameplay to their EA Sports competitor. But none of the 2k series ever sold anywhere near EA Sports.
Sparkyte 2y ago
It wasn't the price but the cost of production. Most consoles are loss leaders. Also the lack of backwards compatibility made the library so small compared to PS2.
- MegaDeKay 2y ago
  The lineup of early PS2 games was pretty weak but yeah, back compat with PS1 helped them a lot. Dreamcast was surprisingly strong out of the gate as console launches go.
- rasz 2y ago
  Dreamcast was muuuuch cheaper to manufacture than PS2. Seems Sega finally learned their lesson from 32x and terribly complicated Saturn. Too little too late.
77779863515 2y ago
[flagged]

thevagrant 2y ago

At the time, Sega did ok marketing the dreamcast. They had a huge line up of titles. It was almost everything one could ask for. The issue was Sony released the PS2 a year later and convinced almost everyone it was far superior with the emotion engine. Most people I knew at the time were convinced PS2 was next coming of Jesus and worth waitng for. Few people had multiple consoles, so Sega really got crushed by the competitive market and accumulated losses from their past mistakes.

varelse 2y ago
[dead]
MegaDeKay 2y ago
Give "The Ultimate History of Video Games, Volume 2" a read. Sega America did well marketing-wise but Sega Japan was a shitshow and really dragged them down. Sega could have done much better with the Dreamcast than they did given the cheaper price point, one year head start, and solid lineup of games.
- scheeseman486 2y ago
  Going too early would mean a hardware spec that'd inevitably get demolished by PS2. I think delaying a year, going DVD and maybe bumping the RAM up would have resulted in a product more competitive, but Sega were completely dead outside of Japan by 99 and they probably couldn't afford to wait They were screwed either way. The Dreamcast, no matter what form it took, could never have saved them. Saturn was the fatal blow, it's weirdly esoteric tech choices, over-complicated and expensive design making it impossible to compete with Sony's simple, cheap polygon pusher. It just took them a while to bleed out. Kinda seeing it play out again with the Xbox brand, interestingly.
  - canadianfella 2y ago
    [dead]
  - hnlmorg 2y ago

Dwedit 2y ago

The Dreamcast was pretty much on par with the PS2, GameCube, and XBOX. I'm surprised it didn't keep getting games.

MegaDeKay 2y ago
Sega's announcement that they were discontinuing the console relatively early on while it still had a lot of life in it put a stake through its heart. Nobody wanted to develop for a console that was a Dead Man Walking when they could develop for PS2 instead.
lozenge 2y ago
Not in sales which is what matters. It isn't like today where you can port a game pretty quickly. The architectures were hugely different.

epcoa 2y ago

The PS2 released more than a year later in Japan, and while only a few months after the DC in North America, but straddling the holiday season, so essentially the following year. But the announcement seriously gimped the DC launch. I love the Dreamcast, own multiple, started hacking with KallistiOS back in the day, it has much more significance to me than the PS2, but it’s just not the case that the hardware was vastly superior. It’s no slouch, there are aspects that are better. The GPU had some neat tricks and more VRAM+HWTC was nice, you get better image quality, but it was plainly bested in most of the metrics that mattered more, geometry, lighting and fill rate, and most people did not use VGA out at the time. The “Emotion Engine” is absolutely ungainly compared to the elegance of the SH-4 simply tied to the PowerVR and AICA, but you simply can get more out of it both in raw FP/SIMD (geometry) and DMA. Simplicity of architecture doesn’t matter to the vast majority of gamers. Some of the early titles looked like shit due to the difficulty of leveraging the hardware, but look at the longevity and late stage PS2 games (especially Konami), quite beyond DC capabilities. And a DVD was objectively superior to GDROM (and it made a good movie player). The Xbox was released after Sega already shitcanned the Dreamcast, its fate was sealed before. Sony overstated the PS2 capabilities, but it did have DVD drive and the graphics were better after developer learned how to use it, it had strong franchises and simply more S tier ones. The Dreamcast was too arcade port heavy. The Dreamcast simply got fucked in the winner take all market at the time. Maybe if they released in 1998 with a larger library they might have had enough run way.

XzetaU8 2y ago
Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 was a techical marvel http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf http://lukasz.dk/files/making_of_sotc.pdf https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-colossus-pal-ps2/ https://www.froyok.fr/blog/2012-10-breakdown-shadow-of-the-c...
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  I was about to ask if the DC could do the odd shading (fur shells, bloom) that SotC did on PS2. IIRC it used the vector units in addition to the GPU. An SotC decompile would be killer...

hnlmorg 2y ago

In addition to what the others said, Xbox was released long after the DC was already discontinued. What’s more, some of the same people behind the DC were also behind the Xbox. In a way, the Xbox is kind of like the Dreamcast 2

deergomoo 2y ago

The PS2 had DVD playback, huge popular franchise support, and the very positive reception of the PS1 going for it. I don't know how it compares to the Dreamcast in raw horsepower, but compared to the GameCube and Xbox it was firmly at the bottom of the pack in that regard. It ended up not mattering in light of the games and its ability to play DVDs.

randall 2y ago
i think dvd playback was THE feature that sealed the dreamcast’s fate.
- ZFH 2y ago
  The PS1 monstrous success sealed the DC's fate. It created a huge new demographic of first time gamers that equated "PlayStation" to "console".
  - bunny720 2y ago
    You are really underestimating how many people bought ps2s as a dvd player+ both “gamers” and everyone else.
    - ZFH 2y ago
      Probably true for the US. In Europe, it was very country-dependent. Here PS2 sold simply because it was the new PlayStation, to a public that for the vast majority wasn't even aware there was competition.
    - olyjohn 2y ago
      Weren't a good chunk of DVD players almost as expensive as the PS2? You basically got a free gaming console with your DVD player.
    - alexjplant 2y ago
      This. Thrifty parents with no interest in gaming saw the PS2 and thought "Sony DVD player". The GameCube was merely an expensive Nintendo time sink. To this end my brother and I took out a loan to buy out GameCube but could have gotten the PS2 for free for Christmas - we wanted to play Super Smash Brothers et al that much and knew that we couldn't avail ourselves of the PS2's better-selling titles anyhow due to their M ratings. As I write this it does feel like both Sony and Microsoft really started to push the whole living room entertainment convergence thing around this time while Nintendo happily stayed in their lane. The same dynamic continues to this day.

crest 2y ago

In what way(s) do you consider the Dreamcast hardware vastly superior? It had a slower CPU, slower GPU, and less memory if I remember correctly.

epcoa 2y ago
The DC had double the VRAM (and 4MB on the PS2 was paltry) and hardware texture compression, texture quality was better, and the analog video output path was better and most games run 480p vs 480i. 480p on the Dreamcast looks better (an advantage that most North American consumers using the included composite cable would not have been able to appreciate). All said, indeed it was not vastly superior.