From the many failed gaming systems, the Dreamcast is easily the most celebrated today, it, to this day, has a dedicated fanbase with members so hardcore one of them probably hates me know for calling it a failed system, sorry!
While it was only available for a few years and left as quickly as it came it left a lasting impression. Released in 9.9.99, it had one of the strongest and most succesful launches in history , Sonic Adventures 1 & 2 are usually considered to be the only good 3D Sonic games, Soul Calibur was the first game to show that home consoles had surpassed the arcades and its considered to be one of the greatest fighting games of all time; the Dreamcast was also the first system to succesfully implement online play with games like Phantast Star Online, Chu! Chu! Rocket and Daytona USA.
While originally very succesful, sadly, the system came down in sales rather quickly, the poor reputation Sega build during the Saturn days as well as the looming launches of the PlayStation 2, the Nintendo Game Cube and Microsoft's Xbox gave it a short life, and after dissapointing sales Sega officially discontinued the system on March 31st 2001 ending their bussiness on the hardware department.
Dreamcast story is sad, but for another time, this time its all about sales, right here we have a mega collection of hardware and software sales of the Dreamcast in the US and Japan, first off the US.
The data right here is from 2004, as from NPD, so pretty trustworthy, anywho the complete software sales of the Dreamcast in the US.
Now onto Japan, as said before the Dreamcast was discontinued in 2001, that's 3 years before Media Create started sales tracking, so only Famitsu numbers are availabe, according to them, the Dreamcast sold 647.984 units in Japan from its late 1998 launch until the week ending on February 11, 2002. That's the last week of tracking of the Dreamcast I could find, no breakdown SKU table, sorry.
The Dreamcast got a buttload of games released in Japan, way more than in the US actually, this information comes from a book called World Of Dreamcast - Software & Peripheral Equipment Perfect Catalog which was published on September 2001, only in Japan, the LTD, publisher and title of the game comes from this book, the release date is from gamefaq's game database and FW data is from VGC.
:T
