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fillet on 05 May 2013
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MikeRox said:
fillet said:
This talk of the Dreamcast failing because of easy piracy is pure bullshit. Most people didn't even know about it at the time. I actually was actually into gaming at that point and get the feeling most people who refer to that don't have a clue and are just reciting stuff they have read.

Dreamcast failed because of 3rd party support basically, EA did not release any games on it because of the 32x/Saturn and other publishers were pretty timid.

You basically had a console for arcade perfect ports with a few notable top notch games that weren't ports. A lot of arcade style games that had no depth.

To be honest there's so much misinformation about the Dreamcast's decline unless you were there and at least 15-16+ at the time to understand and notice, you're just reeling off junk you have read on a random site...and that person is doing the same.

Not that many people actually knew how easy it was, not like with the PSP for example.

The internet wasn't as big as it is now in 2000-2001.


Until this year, I had a complete Dreamcast set. I'm just in the process of selling it all now. Dreamcast was only on the market 15-16 months in the West before it was pulled. SEGA just plain ran out of cash. So it's actual sales weren't dreadful, it outsold the Saturn with 5-6 years on the market.

Sega Dreamcast was the first console I ever bought for myself (3 days after my 16th Birthday in 1999). A lack of EA Sports really did hurt it in Europe, but the 2K sports games were really stirring things up in the US. But a lot of what you are putting is just as much nonsense as that article. It had all major 3rd parties onboard apart from EA. It also had some incredible exclusive software which was not just arcade games. Resident Evil Code Veronica (the PS2 ver was not announced until much later), Skies of Arcadia, Sonic adventure, Jet Set Radio,Toy Commander to name but a few games which were incredible at the time. Though the arcade games were the big appeal for me. However, remember the system was only on the market for 15 months in the West before the plug was pulled. So all the games on the system came out in a very short period of time.

I wish I still had the link for software sales on Dreamcast, but honestly, around the launch of Dead or Alive 2 was when Utopia released, and software sales dropped off a cliff almost instantly. I couldn't believe it when people at college were running around with lists of games for £5.00 each on CD-Rs. The piracy was that wide spread on the system. Even school kids were distributing them!

I'm talking from an analysis point of view. I couldn't give a stuff if the Dreamcast was the best things since sliced bread (which I think it was, I had all the games worth having, played Shenmue 1/2 before anyone here later "discovered" it) Put more hours in crazy taxi 1/2 than most people have had hot dinners. Played House of the Dead 2 more than Virtua Cop 2 even...I'm a Sega person :)

Doesn't change the fact that piracy had nothing to do with it.

Yes the 2K games were better than the EA ones and the reviews were unanimous in their declaration of amazingness...but still, that doesn't change that most people didn't see it like that who didn't own a Dreamcast.

Oh and yes Resident Evil Code Veronica was heavenly at the time as was SOA, you should give the Gamecube version a go it's great!

I used to sell copied Dreamcast games myself after downloading them on those file sharing sites on a 56k modem then burning them in DiskJuggler ;) Good old Crazy Taxi was only a few MB before using the MP3 decrompresser from Echelon etc etc etc, been there done that was into the Dreamcast like a crazy fool...

 

 It was already dead. In fact didn't Sega release a revision without MIL CD support at least 6 months before it was dropped. Like you say, Sega ran out of cash, remmeber them even saying that they were dropping it but there were still "over 100 games due to be released for it"...of those 100, about 10 actually came out, if that.

 

Can't really disprove the piracy theory but would be very interested if you can find some sales link with when the Utopia disk came out and when self boots started to appear...I would actually like to be proven wrong on this as it's always interesting to learn something new, so if you do manage to track it down please post it and quote this so I can see it mate, thanks.