Why did the dreamcast fail?

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Jonbob0008 said:

bdbdbd said:

Tispower said:

Jonbob0008 said:
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I said this was ANOTHER factor. On its own, it wouldn't have made much of a difference, but due to the fact that Sega had blundered so bad in its previous console launches, it made a lot of difference. Many gamers at the time were unsure at best at the prospects of the Dreamcast, and so they were not inclined to buy the new system. Sure it sold well at first(It didn't sell THAT great. It had less than 9 million consoles sold within its first two years), but for every one person that bought the Dreamcast, there were at least 5 or more that said "I'll wait for the PS2/Dolphin. At least that's a sure bet. It's not like I'm suffering with my current console."

 If the library of games for either the PSX or N64 had been weaker, the Dreamcast's sales would have been even stronger, perhaps even strong enough for Sega to turn a profit on their system. They may have then survived the initial onslaught that was PS2 and lived on long enough to have its own piece (however small) of the marketshare.

By your interpretation of my logic (which was incorret) we'd still be playing on the NES. I never said people wouldn't upgrade, I just said that with the strong library that PSX and N64 had, there wasn't enough incentive for most gamers to want to risk paying good money for a system that might not make it.

EDIT: You know what, I rescind my statement about the Dreamcast ever selling well. If you look at the sales info this site offers, you'll find that the Saturn had sold almost as well as the Dreamcast did in about the same amount of time, and everyone keeps saying how big a flop the Saturn was. Remember too that the Saturn had competition in both the PSX and N64, while Dreamcast's main competition wouldn't arrive for over a year after it launched. It is now my belief that the intial success of the Dreamcast was, is, and  always has been greatly exaggerated.

I didn't mean your logic being faulty, it's just that sometimes the last generations effect seems to be overestimated. I assume that you compared Saturn and DC in "compare consoles", which, at least for Saturn and DC, contains only the japanese data. Saturn sold 2/3 of its overall in Japan and in Japan DC sold less than 50% of Saturns japanese sales. But, in the Americas and Europe, DC sold double the amount of Saturn, ending eventually (WW) selling 1M more than Saturn. Why Saturn is considered as so big flop? It sold less than 1/3 of Megadrives LTD. And the reason why Dreamcast isn't seen flop like Saturn depends on from whos view are you looking at it. To japanese it was bigger flop, but to everyone else, DC even succeeded in comparision to Saturn. At the start, Saturn had only PSX to compete with. In fact, Saturns launch was rushed 6 months early from what it was originally planned, just to get it out before the PSX. Being the first in the market haven't really been ever a key to success (not counting Megadrive), since only the early (next generations) adopters have been basically the only ones buying the first system. People usually wait for the 2nd one to see what the generation has to offer. One way you could say that next gen starts when there's 2 consoles in the market. On a sidenote, i hate quoting on this site.