Ea killed it, refusing support. 3rd party's were not very big on the idea of supporting 4 consoles, just like now with PC PS Xbox they don't care about nintendo. They wont in the future.

Not getting big ips from Ea really hurt, with full backing of all publishers they could have done well enough early on.

No, it failed because the parent company ran out of funds due to horrible management. SOJ were some of the most incompetent people you will ever see in a major company. By the time the Dreamcast launched, it was already too late. That thing would have had to sell 150 million units to help them. It was a lost cause.

As I understand, it was a few factors. Sales were good in the west, but poor in Japan. The hype surrounding the PS2's release didn't really help matters. But in the end, the biggest factor was money. SEGA just didn't have the cash to compete against Sony and Microsoft's incoming console after the Saturn's failure drained their finances.

The Dreamcast actually sold pretty well for the short time it was on the market (at least here in NA), but SEGA's blunders during the end of the 4th / beginning of the 5th gen are what doomed the Dreamcast from the beginning. The Dreamcast is what the Saturn should have been, but instead the Saturn was a complicated mess of hardware that was rushed to market to quickly counter Sony's launch of the PlayStation.

In retrospect, SEGA should've ditched the 32X altogether, and they should've delayed the Saturn about a year or so to beef up the hardware to make its 3D capabilities more on par with the PS1 / N64, and to give both themselves and 3rd parties more time to develop quality software for launch instead of just a couple of arcade ports and a handful of mediocre titles.

This would've allowed SEGA to at least be more successful during the 5th gen and not have to pull the plug early on the Saturn while rushing the development cycle on their next gen console, which would've put the Dreamcast more on par with the PS2 / GC / Xbox in terms of hardware capabilities and release date.

They made more Dreamcasts than could be sold. They had a huge stock of them and they weren't selling...true. But of course, I always lovingly blame the PS2. More powerful, it had DVD, Broadband Online gaming out the box, and it had the games. What wasn't to love?

Sega was hemmorhaging money before it hit the scene and was later selling their decked out console at a loss with the PS2, Gamecube and Xbox about to make everyone forget about it. It's a fun system that I still love, but there's no mystery as to why it was unable to rescue sega...

Truthfully, I don't think anything could have kept them in the console race after the Saturn debacle and the entry of Sony into the mix. Throw another company like microsoft that had almost unlimited resources and a willingness to lose a ton of money establishing themselves into the mix, and sega really had no hope... Nintendo was occupying the only room in the market they might have made use of and was in a far, far better financial situation.

To put it more simply, sega had the business savvy of Plankton from SpongeBob, and that won't get it done when mega corporations with the resources of Sony and Microsoft get involved.

At first, Sega blew their money for:
- 32x
- Saturn
- Advertisement
- Dreamcast
- Shenmue 1 & 2

Secondly, EA didn't support Sega.

And finally Sony and the piracy killed it.

To be fair it sold 10 million in 1.5 years but I think sega had spend too much money devolving dreamcast and Shenmue, So when sales where slower then expected they couldn't recuperate lost monies. Plus with an immediate release off ps2 and Gamecube it looked like a lost cause

No, Sega Dreamcast was selling solid, but Sega made series of bad business decisions and they were literally out of money and then didn't had money at all to continue to support Dreamcast.

So Sega Dreamcast don't have bad sales and short life because was bad console or not appealing, it's because Sega bankrupt.

Indeed the sales of the Dreamcast were fine, but they were not enough to convince Sega investors, loans, and other such things to have enough cash flow to continually support it. It would have made profit, but the profit was not quick enough for a company like Sega.

Wii U not selling is fine because Nintendo has 3DS to back them up, and tons of cash from Wii/DS profits.