Sega charged $22 per month to play online for the Dreamcast. Where was the outcry back then?

[Jon-Erich]

Ruler said:

kappie1977 said:

When the Dreamcast came out it was really the best Console ever IMO great times I had with this console and it's games! Too bad the mass had not chosen for this and chose for the PS2  And for the cost as already mentioned it was Sega.net as a provider. So for that time the deal wasn't really bad. I can remember that in my country you also couldn't have Dream Arena (as internet provider) and next to that in that time I only played online on PC. But still if we could get that internet package here end of the 90's and beginning '00 it would be a good deal, as the normal rate here was around EUR. 35,- per month with a limit. Nowdays there are hardly any internet only providers here, it's mostly all-in-one packages.

I dont think the dreamcast was such a good console. It had no dvd player, no backwarts competability, your old video cables and controllers didnt work.

The PS2 offered it all, it was a better value for your money not mention it was stronger anyways. 

Yet you don't mention the games....It's so easy to look at all of this in hindsight. 

First of all, the DVD market was small in 1999. A lot of well known movies had not even been converted to DVD yet. Also, as I already explained, it's not like Sega didn't want to do it. In 1997-1998, DVD technology was expensive. They couldn't afford it. At the same time, there was outcry over the fact that Dreamcast couldn't play DVD's. Had it survived, it wouldn't have been alone. GameCube could not play DVD's and Xbox required you to buy a remote to use the DVD playback function. As for video cables, again, this was expected and most people didn't complain. By 1999, most gamers in the west were done with the Saturn anyway. The controllers were not backward compatible for an obvious reason. Dreamcast was using new technology. The VMU and jumpack would not have been compatible with the Saturn controllers.

These things that you're complaining about would have made no sense to include with Dreamcast from a practical and business standpoint. For financial reasons, they couldn't include some of these things. For Sony, it made sense to do everything they did. They helped invent the DVD format so supporting it was obvious. The dualshock 2 was almost identical to the dualshock 1 so controller compatibility was a given. Charging the PS2 $100 more than what Sega was selling Dreamcast for meant that Sony could have all these things without taking a big loss. Sega on the other hand couldn't afford to alienate an already skeptical market by charging that much for Dreamcast and yet they couldn't afford what they were charging for it.

Secondly, the PS2 may have ben a better value from a multimedia standpoint, but for at least 2 years Dreamcast was a better value when it came to games. It took the PS2 a year to get the number of quality games that Dreamcast had available on day 1. It took PS2 at least 2 years to have the number of quality games the Dreamcast had in one year. PS2's online never matched the Dreamcast's online. As far as hardware is concerned, PS2 may have been more powerful, but that's completely irrelevent. Both GameCube and Xbox had far more powerful hardware than the PS2. Despite it's power, the hardware for PS2 was by most standards a piece of. There's a reason why so many years later, indie developers still develop Dreamcast games while not nearly as many of them are making PS2 games. Dreamcast was incredibly easy to work with and developers loved it.