Why did the dreamcast fail?

[johnsobas]

Final-Fan said:

johnsobas said:

PeoplesChamp said:
It was released to close to Sega Saturn. Sega became known for not supporting there devices( sega cd, 32x, and some other drive).

it was released 4 years after the saturn which was very dead by the time the dreamcast came out. Saturn never had any life in NA or Europe, it wasn't even released in some european countries. It did pretty well in Japan, that was it, and even in Japan it was dead. .

Sega actually did pretty well at supporting Saturn even though it was basically dead, games like Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shining Force 3, and Burning Rangers come to mind.

Actually it's my understanding that in Japan the Saturn was hanging on fairly well; when the Dreamcast was coming out Sega reportedly dropped the Saturn like a rock and thereby enraged Sega fans worldwide, with the Japanese ones having the most legitimate gripe.

Sega obviously learned from its mistake, supporting the Dreamcast well after it were forced to withdraw from the general market; but ironically the Sega fans had just lost all trust after the Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn all got the axe.

@HappySquirrel: try $400, in the USA at least.

@ the OP:  All of the above, plus ungodly PS2 hype, plus the false impression that the Dreamcast was not as powerful as the PS2 (see "PS2 hype").  The death of the Dreamcast is a tragedy unparalleled in the gaming industry and it is my shame that I did not buy one when I had the chance.  (Until 2005.) 

No, the saturn died so fast it was actually remarkable.  In Japan Saturn and Playstation both had sold about 4 million units, but the change was so sudden, and so fast that from that point saturn sold 1.7 million, while playstation about 16 million more units.  That's the definition of dropping like a rock. 

 looking into this further i see what you said seems to have some truth to it. 

 this is from wikipedia

As Sega started aggressively moving forward with that project, a rift developed between Sega and many of their third-party developers and publishers. As the Saturn was popular in the Japanese marketplace, many Japanese developers saw little reason for Sega to rush another platform to market. As Sega began public discussion about their future platform to media barely two years after having launched the Saturn, many gamers decided that the Saturn was already dead. Sales quickly diminished, as the console's life expectancy dropped substantially after Bernie Stolar's public comments that "The Saturn is not our (SEGA's) future". This, combined with Sega's reputation, having pulled out on support rather quickly for both the Sega CD and 32X platforms, led to a large chain reaction that quickly caused the platform's future to collapse. Many Saturn projects were canceled, in anticipation of the new console, because of the substantial drop in sales after Sega announced that they were working on a new platform and through developers' and publishers' frustration with Sega. In a magazine article involving Will Muscaeli, he summed up the life cycle of the Sega Saturn as being "disappointing". Some major publishers such as Electronic Arts were so dismayed at Sega's early abandonment of the Saturn that they vowed not to support any Sega consoles in the future.^{[citation needed]}

With Sega now publicly saying they were working on a new console, sales for the Saturn substantially tapered off in the second half of 1997. This caused many games that were planned for a western Saturn release to be canceled

 

 it wasn't that they released the dreamcast too early, it was that they announced it too early, and said they were focusing on it.  They said the saturn is not sega's future, that is just terrible PR.  According to this article this was the reason why the console died so quickly, although I don't think it would have done too much better anyway.

Wow, Sega was messed up in those days.  I bought a Saturn, and I didn't even know about half of that stuff that was going on, this is news to me.