The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good).
The article mentions Ikaruga a lot. It worth noting that Ikaruga for the Dreamcast was released a year after the Dreamcast was cancelled. They probably weren’t hugely concerned about piracy at this point.
From memory it was an easy port for them, because the arcade board that Ikaruga ran on is also the same as the Dreamcast.
> The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast.
Sega led to the failure of the Dreamcast. They had failed fans with the SegaCD. Released the 32X as a "bridge" between the 16bit and 32bit consoles (then promptly abandoned it). They released the Saturn with almost no fanfare in the US, and with last minute architectural hacks to make it pass as a 3D console (just barely).
By the time the Dreamcast came out, people were just tired of Sega's shit.
The success of the PS1 didn’t help either. Sony had already stolen Sega’s market (and some of Nintendo’s too where people were annoyed with the cartridge decision).
Ironically the N64 was a more interesting console than the PS1 and the Dreamcast was more interesting than the PS2; but most people didn’t care. Sony really understood what the lion share of gamers wanted - or perhaps it was just good fortune to step into the market when the other giants misstepped?
Ironically Sony tried to work with both Sega and Nintendo and got rejected by both after investing substantial time on a collaboration. It’s funny how quickly the market turned.
The price of a PS3 and Blu-ray player was approximately identical (here, for basically the whole lifetime of a PS3), except a PS3 could do much, much more. There are of course good reasons for why this was the case but from a consumer standpoint it's always seemed hilariously weird to buy a Blu-ray player.
> What ultimately did it in was the PS2 -- a superior console in virtually every respect
I beg to differ. Graphically it was, but it should be given it was two years younger. Sound quality it was too but honestly very few people would have noticed on the typical set up of that era.
However the Dreamcast has 4 controller ports built into the console itself, rumble packs from day one, a portable gaming unit (ok, that was a bit of a novelty), support for using your save games on actual arcades, easy way of sharing save games, online gaming (a good 4 years before the competition too!), downloadable content (which was typically free back then).
The Dreamcast was easily the more interesting console out of the two of them. If the reputation of the two companies had been equal then the DC would likely have won out. But the PS1 was already a proven success and Sega had messed their fans about with all the failed Megadrive /Genesis addons. So a great many gamers didn’t even give the Dreamcast a chance. In a sense, their expectations became a self fulfilling prophecy.
I was gutted when the DC failed. No console before nor since has really captured my imagination quite as much as the Dreamcast did. But ultimately I wasn’t surprised either because Sony had already won even before releasing the PS2. Few people cared about Sega (or Nintendo) at that point.
AS I remember it, the mindshare of the PS2 even so long before launch was immense. Sony's marketing killed the Dreamcast with ridiculous promises that really didn't pan out. You can't just look back and compare the systems, the idea of the PS2 killed the DC.
Yep. A good example was the branding of the PS2's processor as the "Emotion Engine," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine) which in the runup to release got hyped as some kind of fundamental breakthrough in computing that would let the PS2 render things like faces with so much detail they'd be able to break your heart. This was all bunkum, of course, but it ensured that all the media oxygen got sucked into debates about how amazing the PS2 was going to be when it eventually shipped, instead of talking about consoles like the Dreamcast that you could buy right then.
> A good example was the branding of the PS2's processor as the "Emotion Engine," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine) which in the runup to release got hyped as some kind of fundamental breakthrough in computing that would let the PS2 render things like faces with so much detail they'd be able to break your heart.
That reminds me of the hype around the PS3's cell processor. There was a lot of videos comparing the graphics between the PS3 and the Xbox360 that showed really no difference between the two. I don't know enough about processor architectures to know how awesome it really was. However, I imagine that a game studio making a game for both platforms would use the least common denominator of both consoles, causing them to look the same. Also, it's probably in the best interest of the studio for a game to have a consistent look across platforms.
I wonder if the cell processor was really as awesome as it was made out to be. Going by what one heard, you'd think Sony was losing money from manufacturing costs with each console sold. Then again, maybe it's true in a sense. While the PS3 was $600 and had bluray movie playback as some small feature, bluray players cost around a $1000. It was crazy to see people eyeing those things, considering buying them.
If that's true, it explains why Sony removed the feature allowing you to install a custom OS on the PS3. There was at least one group that was building a supercomputer out of PS3s. Removing the feature was probably to limit losses from sales to people that were not buying their PS3s to play games on them.
It was still shitty of them (and I wish illegal) to remove a feature, but now it makes sense. I wish they had limited the removal to only units not yet sold though. It's not like people that were using their PS3s for supercomputing would run the update anyway. It would only be those that were playing games and were restricted without running the latests updates.
the cell processor was a great processor. It's actually more powerful than what's in the PS4 at the moment but no where near as friendly to develop for.
I don’t recall Sony marketing the PS2 that heavily compared to the DC (nor even the Xbox). But memory can be fallible.
The argument I was proposing was that the mindshare was in anticipation of the PS2 because of how the PS1 vs Saturn war panned out. Gamers can be loyal pack animals and Sega had already lost their fan base before the DC was even released thanks to the success of the PS1.
> Dreamcast with ridiculous promises that really didn't pan out.
I don’t get your point there. Everything the DC promised to do it delivered on. Technically speaking it was a success - very much ahead of its time in a great many ways. It just didn’t sell.
Sony did all sorts of marketing stunts to keep the idea of the PS2 in the limelight. They spread stories about how Iraq was trying to buy them for their weapons program because they were so powerful, etc.
None of those superior features were things people particularly cared about. Most people didn't have good enough internet for online gaming at the time. Most people never went to arcades (isn't the point of a console that you don't need to), 4 ports is nice but an adapter fixes that easily, and it's not meaningfully more portable than a PS2.
> Most people didn't have good enough internet for online gaming at the time.
That's not really true though because the requirements for online gaming were also lower back then. I agree people didn't have broadband but the DC's online games worked fine with a dialup modem and in fact it used a slower modem than was common in PCs at that era (33k baud as opposed to 56k) that people also used for online gaming.
> Most people never went to arcades (isn't the point of a console that you don't need to)
Consoles were always intended as a compliment to arcades, not a flat out replacement for them. Plus Sega often had a Crazy Taxi (or whatever) cabinet in student bars and other trendy places as well as the usual places dedicated for gaming.
> 4 ports is nice but an adapter fixes that easily,
I agree it's hardly innovative but it's yet another thing you need to buy. Another expense and another device you need to have the foresight of owning before your mates pop round with a handful of controllers. So I think the real question should be: "why the hell didn't the PS2 have 4 ports when every other console of that generation did (Gamecube, Xbox, Dreamcast)?"
The thing I remember as a kid was the hype for the PS2 building right as the Dreamcast was released. This was still in the era where most families would only have one console, so they ended up saving their money aiming for a PS2 instead of a Dreamcast.
I think if the Dreamcast was released sooner or later it would have done better than it did. Either before the PS2 hype, or closer to the PS2 so the hype died down a bit.
> The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good).
This is correct. In the gaming space this is called "attach rate". Consoles tend to have higher attach rates than handhelds (because, for instance, multiple children in a family own a handheld but share software, while a console is typically one-per-family). Attach rates generally go up over time because the geometric mean of owner-weeks generally goes up over time -- there are some exceptions when hardware sales take off as a rocket like in the first 2-3 years of the Nintendo Wii.
When Dreamcast software stopped in the US around 2003, it had an attach rate of about 4 according to NPD figures, which is fairly standard for a console that had been around for 2 years.
That's not to say there wasn't widespread piracy or whatever, it just means that as you note we don't see an obvious absence of software sales where there ought be software sales.
"The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good)."
If memory serves me... and it doesn't always terribly well, but still... I think you can make the even stronger argument that by the time the piracy was widespread and convenient, the console had already visibly failed. It took a while to get to the point where you could torrent an arbitrary game, burn it, and play it. You can tell that a console is going to fail to another before the last game is shipped. The PS2 was clearly going to crush the Dreamcast before it had literally passed it in numbers. I don't think the Dreamcast's fate would have materially changed if it was pirate-proof.
I remember clearly that most people were holding off for a PS2, despite the fact that the initial release of games on the PS2 for that first year had graphics that were actually sub-par compared to the DC because it was so difficult to program for and had a weak line up of games that first year compared to what the DC had the first week it was out (a Sonic game and Soul Calibur).
I ended up owning both, but I got more mileage out of my DC that year or two I owned it then I did from the PS2 for a while (I don't think the PS2 really hit its stride until the 2nd year it was out).
Wasn't it LimeWire/Kazaa? My early P2P history is a little fuzzy.
The big issue is that so many people were still on modems back then that downloading a DC game wasn't easy. Plus public WiFi wasn't really a thing yet. It was the kids on college campuses who were connected to brand new and shiny Ethernet networks that really went nuts.
These applications weren't really where piracy derived, these applications along with a cable modem made it possible for point and click piracy. Similar to Napster. The scene which as others pointed at actually started in newsgroups and shifted to IRC and FTP was where piracy was extremely prevalent.
In the UK at least it was more than likely due to Sony's far superior marketing of the original PlayStation. The arrival of the PS2 and the Xbox sealed the deal.
That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
Sega started porting many of their new arcade games to the Xbox. Consequently former Dreamcast users who wanted to play the new arcade games at home bought the Xbox.
A Sega exec tried to push Microsoft to make the Xbox backwards compatible with the Dreamcast even [1], which Microsoft refused mostly because they didn't want to support online infrastructure for titles that used it. The original Xbox seemed to have been considered to be the favored successor to the Dreamcast by Sega at least at one point.
Then again, Sega's main initial portwork was focused on the GameCube. The Dreamcast games Sonic Adventure 2, Ikaruga, Crazy Taxi, Phantasy Star Online and Skies of Arcadia were ported to the GameCube and not to the Xbox. They also brought originally-for-Dreamcast titles Super Monkey Ball, Beach Spikers and Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg to the GameCube exclusively.
But it really was. Sega and Microsoft worked closely together or why do you think they implented the Windows CE option? Also all Sega arcades afterwards shipped with Xbox hardware.
Windows CE was ported to a lot of processor architectures at that time. Its architecture is quite different from the Windows NT line. To quote Wikipedia on this
"Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is based on Windows NT, Windows Embedded Compact uses a different hybrid kernel."
I am also pretty sure that Windows CE's architecture is quite different from the OS running on the XBox, but cannot give a quotable source on this. At least for the Xbox 360 and XBox One, I am pretty sure that I have read that their kernel is actually not so dissimilar from the kernel used in the NT line. The difference between the Windows NT line and the XBox 360/One OS rather lies in the software running above the kernel.
You can quote me, as I've gotten down and dirty with the Xbox ( https://github.com/monocasa/xbvm ), and have written board support packages for CE for work.
The OG Xbox kernel is an extremely heavily stripped down and modified Win2k kernel. No support for user mode, multiple address spaces, or more than one running process. No win32 in the kernel. USB, sound, and the vast majority of the graphics driver are statically linked into the process executable.
There was a rudimentary os when you boot without gd-rom. It allowed you to set settings, manage memory cards etc I suspect it was loaded just in case where there were no os on the gdrom inserted otherwise the system will boot on the gdrom os. Edit : video link https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5L9p_Bq_hFk
> I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
That's a rather persistent myth. The project that became the Xbox originated from an entirely different division within MS. The team in the Windows CE group that worked on the Dreamcast SDK actually had their own separate proposal for a non-x86 based console but MS chose to move forward with the Xbox proposal instead. IIRC, very, very few of the people on the Dreamcast SDK team moved over to Xbox when they were disbanded.
> The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast.
Indeed, if that'd be really the case then Sony's PSX should have failed 10 times over because it was the original "piracy console" due to the use of CD-Rom vs cartridges.
Sure, the burners and blanks used to be expensive in the beginning, but it didn't take long for prices to fall.
Also didn't help that the PSX was region locked, so many people chipped their consoles to be able to play releases from other regions, which then also allowed the console to play pirated/burned PSX games.
During my childhood, growing up in the 90s in Germany, I don't remember anybody owning a PSX that was not chipped, some would literally make a business out of selling burned PSX games on the schoolyard, bringing binders full of games and printed lists with all of their "offerings".
> The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast.
I had a large group of friends who got the Dreamcast right when it came out. I still remember many of the commercials touting the AI of the console and the end of their commercials showing the light on the op of the console glowing with the voice over "it's thinking".
Everybody in our group wanted it because the Dreamcast touted the ability of the machine to think and gone were the days on NFL games were you could run one play over and over and the game would just let you. Here was a console who advertised this wasn't going to happen, that it was actively learning.
Huge disappointment when we all realized we had been had by a marketing campaign that touted a functionality the games and console could never have. After the first month and realizing all the AI claims were totally bogus, my whole group of friends didn't buy another game.
Once the PS2 came out, that was it for Dreamcast.
The interesting thing is I've seen a ton of articles about the history of the Dreamcast lately and none of them mention this very large marketing campaign of essentially lying about the capabilities of the console.
Sony did the same BS with the PS2, whose MIPS core was called the "Emotion Engine" because it was touted as being powerful enough to allow the console to feel, or at least simulate, emotions.
The turn of the millennium was a weird time for gaming.
>The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles
The dreamcast was forward thinking in many ways (Built in Modem, MMO console games, 3D graphics that could rival arcades) but the lack of a real system selling game was very noticeable.
> if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games
This is very true, every time I go to south america I still see street vendors selling PS2 bootleg games!
I helped my sister find DC downloadable games. And unfortunately, 95% of all the games available were 1-on-1 fighting games. The few others were simulators (Crazy Taxi, flying games).
The only RPG I can think of was Phantasy Star Online. It was down for at least a decade when we downloaded games.
I look at PlayStation, and it was RPGs galore. And while there was shovelware, there were all sorts of games from every genre.
If you're interested in picking up some DC RPGs today for nostalgia I would recommend Skies of Arcadia and Grandia 2, the latter did some to PS2 though.
Yup. Piracy would have increased console sales and it didn't. Really as simple as that. The software was definitely there at the time. But, Sega you know, is Sega and ultimately all the good faith they had built in Western countries with the master system and Genesis had worn out with their mediocre add-ons and console (Saturn. I might add had great games.).
The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good).
The article mentions Ikaruga a lot. It worth noting that Ikaruga for the Dreamcast was released a year after the Dreamcast was cancelled. They probably weren’t hugely concerned about piracy at this point.
From memory it was an easy port for them, because the arcade board that Ikaruga ran on is also the same as the Dreamcast.