Third party developers’s fear of piracy didn’t help the console, but primarily it was released at the wrong time for the wrong price with the wrong features. If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn, it would not have failed. Piracy didn’t have much to do with it.
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn
The problem here is roughly 4 years, Sega was one of the big players in 1994, waiting until the Dreamcast was ready at the very end of 1998 and living off the Mega Drive (Genesis) + Arcades would be financial suicide
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
True, both PS1 and PS2 absolutely ruled sales in Brazil given how cheap and easy it was to get pirate games, which usually sold for BRL10 from 1999-2006, while original games would cost well over 10x that.
The 32X and Saturn releases were confusingly close to each other and could easily lead to some confusion with consumers. Releasing both a disk console and a disk addon for the existing console in the same year could confuse people on whether they needed the new console or just the disk addon, especially with marketing that didn’t exactly make it clear. Similar issue the WiiU had with people thinking it was an addon for the Wii and determining they didnt need it. If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
SEGA just didn’t pick the right console features for the right time. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time releasing in 1998, but by the time the PS2, GameCube, and especially Xbox launched just 2-3 years later, the Dreamcast hardware looked extremely outdated, because it was.
Honestly, it never got big enough for that to even matter. It just lost the content war to the PS2 Xbox and GameCube. Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure aren’t exactly enough great exclusives to justify buying the non-Halo machine or the console built by the company that “won” the previous generation.
The fact that it could play DVDs was the primary reason I bought one of the second-gen slim PS2s! (I was previously a Nintendo-only console gamer, and have since gone full PC gamer, so that was my one and only foray into Sony’s garden.)
Imo, zero DRM. You could copy any Dreamcast game and burn a copy and it just worked. No modding required. That easily kills sales.
Amazing console, I owned 3.
Piracy did not kill the Dreamcast.
Third party developers’s fear of piracy didn’t help the console, but primarily it was released at the wrong time for the wrong price with the wrong features. If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn, it would not have failed. Piracy didn’t have much to do with it.
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
The problem here is roughly 4 years, Sega was one of the big players in 1994, waiting until the Dreamcast was ready at the very end of 1998 and living off the Mega Drive (Genesis) + Arcades would be financial suicide
True, both PS1 and PS2 absolutely ruled sales in Brazil given how cheap and easy it was to get pirate games, which usually sold for BRL10 from 1999-2006, while original games would cost well over 10x that.
The 32X and Saturn releases were confusingly close to each other and could easily lead to some confusion with consumers. Releasing both a disk console and a disk addon for the existing console in the same year could confuse people on whether they needed the new console or just the disk addon, especially with marketing that didn’t exactly make it clear. Similar issue the WiiU had with people thinking it was an addon for the Wii and determining they didnt need it. If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
SEGA just didn’t pick the right console features for the right time. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time releasing in 1998, but by the time the PS2, GameCube, and especially Xbox launched just 2-3 years later, the Dreamcast hardware looked extremely outdated, because it was.
Honestly, it never got big enough for that to even matter. It just lost the content war to the PS2 Xbox and GameCube. Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure aren’t exactly enough great exclusives to justify buying the non-Halo machine or the console built by the company that “won” the previous generation.
Sony also maintained backwards compatibility and sold the PS2 as the world’s cheapest DVD player.
The fact that it could play DVDs was the primary reason I bought one of the second-gen slim PS2s! (I was previously a Nintendo-only console gamer, and have since gone full PC gamer, so that was my one and only foray into Sony’s garden.)
The easy copying really helps justify this.
Were they at all networkable?
Better believe I was playing Phantasy Star Online with folks!