So many things wrong with this thread I do not even know where to start.

@OP: did you want an outcry bigger than a giant middle finger to Sega and letting it kick itself out of HW market?

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.

nonsense i never payed for no sega.net and i played my dreamcast online

Ka-pi96 said: How many people even had a Sega console that gen?

About 10 million with only a few years of significant support.

Hence, it sold about at par with Wii U and Vita.

Those games look better than most Xbox games because most Xbox games were designed for PS2. Seriously, use some common sense.

You said PS2 was carefully designed but the specs weren't great. Numerous PC ports were console exclusive to Xbox simply because the PS2 specs were garbarge in comparison. Not nearly enough thought went into designing the PS2. Gamecube on the otherhand had some nice specs.

One last thing, Shadows of the Collossus was a mess on PS2. The frame rate made me naucious and visuals were bland. I didn't bother playing through it until the PS3 version was released.

I guess Ruler got overuled.

Sorry, couldnt resist the pun. :P

It was for awhile.

Sega eventually DID charge for online play. $10 a month.

Not related to SegaNet though, that was around while online play was free.

Because in Japan Dreamcast came with a whole year of Internet access. Also SEGA was actually giving away free Dreamcasts with the subscription at one point

So what's the point? There was no outrage because there options available to play without paying SEGA, they also didn't charge you if you wanted to play online... That's the difference.