| mrstickball said: The Dreamcast's worldwide sales were utter trash by the time Sega canned it. I believe it's last US Christmas, to which there was a massive pricedrop, only sold >300k systems. It would of still ended up in 4th place, with around 16.5~17.8m units w/w. It would of, however, weakened the PS2 and Xbox userbase by probably 2m units each. |
I think the assumption you have to make in a hypothetical debate like this is that certain conditions that lead the Dreamcast to fail were not present. The unfortunate thing is that these assumptions would cause a ripple effect through out the industry and would change the strategies of the companies that followed. Had Sega's out of the box online strategy been popular it is likely that in 2001 (2 years after the Dreamcast launched) Nintendo would have been far more interested in online gameplay with the Gamecube; if the Dreamcast had stronger third party support this would have come at the expense of support for another platform; and if the Dreamcast was performing well through 1999 Microsoft may have decided there was too much competition to even bother entering the market.
