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The_Liquid_Laser said:
I kind of wrote off the Dreamcast at the time, but then several years ago I got interested in what happened, and it kind of shocked me. The Dreamcast actually produced a fairly impressive library of games in roughly 2 years worth of time. I think if Sega could have stayed in the console business (i.e. their business side wasn't stupid), then the Dreamcast would have ended up the #2 console of Generation 6 (but still way behind the PS2). Basically their development side was doing some really impressive stuff (Shenmue, Phantasy Star Online, all of their arcade ports, etc...), and I think it was because the Saturn was such a flop. If you think of Nintendo's two biggest failures, the GameCube and Wii U, they were followed by Nintendo's two biggest successes, the Wii and the Switch. I think this sort of thing was happening with the Saturn and the Dreamcast, at least on the development side. The business side, on the other hand, had lost a ton of money on the Saturn and was majorly in the hole. The only thing keeping Sega going is that their arcade business through most of the 90's was making them good money. But by the end of the 90's the arcades had ended everywhere outside of Japan. And then launching a new console is also very expensive, so the Dreamcast cost them a lot on the front end. But they never made it to the back end. They exited the console market so they couldn't make their money back. Even the PS2 lost money it's first year, but that is fairly normal. The PS2 made all of that money back over time. The Dreamcast didn't have the time to stick it out and make its money back. If the Dreamcast was able to last a normal amount of years, I think it would have made them good money, and it would have had a library better than the XBox or GameCube. That's how I see it anyway. |
Definitely. The Saturn may have flopped, but Sega remained king of the arcades throughout the '90s. The House of the Dead 1 and 2. Super GT. The Lost World. Wave Runner. Virtua Fighter 3. Those were just a few of the arcade games Sega released during the Saturn years. Easy to see why they dominated. The Lost World in particular quickly became my favorite arcade game. I remember journeying to the two-story, Sega-owned GameWorks arcade and bar at the Grapevine Mills mall for a couple of my birthdays back during this window of time, which I'd describe as about three hours' worth of heaven for the resources I was given.
Everybody had their natural strengths that helped them through a lot of their rough spots in the home console wars. Sega had the arcades. Nintendo had their handheld systems. Sony had...you know, I think home consoles actually kind of were their natural strength; they've not really had as many rough spots in that market. With Sega, you felt that arcade influence in a lot of their console games too (even beyond arcade ports, I mean).
I see similarities between the Dreamcast's launch-year library and that of the Switch in particular too. Just like how Nintendo seemed to have figured out early on that the Wii U was a flop and quickly shifted their focus of development to their next system, it seemed like it'd been similar for the Sega and the Saturn. When you're banking everything on your next system being a massive hit, you do everything possible to make it one: you make sure the launch-year library is spectacular and memorable, you promote it aggressively and in memorable ways, and you keep the price to consumers reasonable. I think the Dreamcast could've drop-kicked Nintendo and Microsoft's console offerings that gen too most likely had they been able to keep going.
Sony was always going to win though. I mean the PlayStation 2 came with a built-in DVD player and was also two game systems and they were charging $300 for it at launch. You simply couldn't beat that deal, period. DVD players, which few people owned at the time, by themselves were typically around $300 back then and Sony's was also an advanced game system that could play both new PS2 games and your whole, existing PS1 library on top of it for the same price. No other deal like that had ever existed before. You couldn't beat it. It was always going to win. The PlayStation 2 was my first DVD player. Alright it wasn't the best one on the market, but it was definitely the best value by a wide margin. That was the earliest big effort I can recall to reach the otherwise non-gaming market and it proved spectacularly successful. I think they kinda lost sight of the key value proposition component of that the next time around.
