/vr/ - Retro Games

that's just cope it wouldn't have been enough

wouldn't have saved it. nothing could have. DC is an awesome console with some good games but they went full retard. posted an operating loss of $220m in 2000 and yet they're still trying to give away dreamcasts for SEGAnet subscriptions and throwing money at retarded shit like VMU slot peripherals that nobody used. should've cut down on production costs and sold the thing for $149.99 with no losses and focused on licensing cheap 3rd party games on contingency. might've been able to survive long enough to rebuuld brand loyalty and ship another console around 2005 but it was too late.

If Sega could have somehow moved heaven and earth to get Metal Gear Solid 2 to be a Dreamcast exclusive they might have had a chance.

>>9670395
Final Fantasy X would have also been a system mover.

>all it needed was for the company to not be hundreds of millions of dollars in debt before it's existence due to the Saturn and idiotic business decisions

what it needed was a better reputation from the previous generation going into that generation

also the fact that you could literally just burn any game you wanted to a cd and play it didn't help their cause

>watch game shows made at the time
>everyone is optimistic and says Sega will now focus on software and will truly become great
Haha...

>>9670393
No way, the market couldn't handle 4 consoles, hell even 3 proved too many which is why Nintendo went the casual route.
Sony had the cool factor, Xbox had the marketting money of Microsoft could lose as much as it wanted, Nintendo had the fan loyalty factor.
Sega couldn't compete with cool, with money or brand loyalty. It was SOL. Had it scraped by a Dreamcast 2 would've again been a failure compared to the 360/Wii and as much as the PS3 failed, it still had the inertia of the PS2.

>>9670372
All it needed was for SEGA to have not spent the six years prior being bumbling retards.

>nintendo could completely carry themselves with 1st party titles
>sony had every 3rd party developer in their pocket
>xbox might as well just have released as a standalone halo console because that's the only game anyone owned for it
>sega had nothing besides sonic and a few rehashed arcade IPs, console was too inferior to the ps2 for most studios to even bother with a pity port

>>9670372
Wrong. All it needed was not TRIPLING down on the notion that the market share gained with an early release would make up for comparatively inferior hardware derived for that lost time of development and industry evolution.

The theory that a year and a half of advantage would make all the difference this time was solid, except for the fact that it also meant a year and a half short from the state of the art when the competitors launched.

>>9670372
all it needed was for there not to be 2 major failed add-ons for the Genesis and for the Saturn to not be a piece of shit and it could have survived as a physical manufacturer. Sega was already in deep shit.

>>9670416
nah, it was feasible. the problem is they were hemmorhaging money. if they had been able to sell the console at a profit, offered better licensing fees to devs at the tradeoff of making them pay for production costs, and had cut back on all of the dumb shit they were pouring money into and axed half of their staff, they could have positioned themselves as the affordable, family-friendly option and either taken the market GC ended up taking, or co-existing alongside GC and Xbox. instead they were trying to be everything at once and they failed.

>>9670412
Zoomie doesn't know that this was cost prohibitive at the time.

>>9670463
>cost prohibitive
? cds were fucking cheap even during the psx era, the only prohibitive part was downloading an iso off ftp using aol dialup

>>9670463
Was it? Our anime club was burning anime CDs all the time, I think it was the year 2000. Still have the Evangelion CD with 16 episodes on it. That's right 16 on a CD.

>>9670463
It really wasn't.
t. Someone who bought a burner and used it for ps1 games since dude at the store modded it for you for $20.
Budget 4x burners were down around $200 by mid 99 and CDs were cheap. You wanted one anyway for storage.

>>9670469
he's a dumb zoomer who probably thinks cd burners cost thousands of dollars when they came preinstalled on every prebuilt best buy rig

>>9670463
No it wasn't. My household was not at all wealthy and we had a low end computer that came with a CD burner in 2001. I knew one other kid who also had a CD burner but all it would have required is one of us to burn off a theoretically unlimited amount of Dreamcast games if anyone we knew owned one or had the savvy to do that.

A stack of blank CDs was around $15-20 depending on where you got them and a used game for any current console was also around that price. You would have to be a retard not to realize you could pay $20 to have a library of new releases. I did exactly that with music CDs for several years and turned a huge profit, all I needed was to sell a few $5 bootlegs to completely cover the materials cost.

>>9670479
This except I rented the game for $3 and just made my friends pay for the CD they used (so $1 since some burns failed)

>>9670479
And by mid 2000s burning DVDs was cheap too. I burned a whole stack of PS2 games at the time, played them on my hacked PS2 wouldn't work on a normal one.

>>9670449
>all it needed was for there not to be 2 major failed add-ons for the Genesis and for the Saturn to not be a piece of shit
To be entirely fair here it was just one major failed add-on for the Genesis, the 32X. Sega CD was fine and had it's place, and the Saturn hardware isn't really that bad for the time period. Saturn could have probably done well enough to secure a solid 2nd place and keep the company in a better spot had everyone been on the same page.

But America didn't want to work with the Saturn and wanted their own thing. So they went all in with the 32X which blew up horribly in their faces, and then they were stuck playing a scrambling game of catch up with the Saturn, and later the Dreamcast.

The 32X is really the biggest contributing factor to Sega's downfall.

>>9670412
>Piracy kille-
No. Playstation 2 had even worse game sales rate.

>>9670372
It needed good games first

I honestly don't think Sonic is a strong enough draw. Mario is a draw, Solid Snake is a draw, Master Chief is probably a draw. But never in my life have I thought "I need this console so I can be Sonic!" and I say that as someone whose first game was Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). It's a fucking malformed porcupine who runs fast for some reason. Works well enough in a sidescrolling, but there's nothing to add to his arsenal:
>vehicles? he already runs fast lmao
>special abilities? again he already runs fast - even his Super Sonic form is just moving EVEN FASTER
>Dr Sonic? Sonic Golf? Sonic RPG? Sonic Teaches You Typing? Why would a porcupine do ANY of these things?
Sonic is not good enough draw. He can't shift your fancy new console.
Given how simple Sonic's entire concept is, it's not surprising it appeals to autists...

>>9670469
>That's right 16 on a CD.
Holy mother of compression are they in fucking midi? Are you sure you didn't mean a DVD?

>>9670571
There's over 9000 dreamcast games, there's lots of draw besides Sonic. Usually I find dreamcast owners are too pussy to talk about Sonic and they always wanna talk about these hidden gems instead.

>>9670605
No, CD, in RealVideo format. All the shittiest quality rips were in RealVideo. But even than it already had a fansub so there must've been an active online fansubbing community in late 90s somewhere

>>9670372
Sega would not have been able to eat or subsidize that cost in 1998 like Sony did in 2000. Also
>dead on arrival outdated controller
>weaker and less capable hardware than PS2 and got utterly clowned on by GC and Xbox
>3rd party and retailer good will massively lost
I like DC too but get real.

>>9670563
doubt but also ps2 sold like 20x as many units as the dreamcast so irrelevant

>>9670463
People are gonna ackshully you on this but in 1999 this was an expensive upgrade and everyone outside of major cities likely had shitty internet. These were major deterrents. It was only by the time the DC was dead that most people could really dabble in piracy for games this large.

>>9670479
>2001
DC was pronounced dead in Jan of that year. You, by your own admission, weren't part of the piracy craze that supposedly kill the DC. Only college demographic cityfags pirated optical media in any meaningful amount in the late 90s.

>>9670659
You burned games at your rich uncle's house, dummy.

>>9670469
>anime club in 2000
so you were
>16-25yo and savvy/wealthy enough to invest in early CD burners
>city/collegefag with decent internet available to you
am I getting warm here? So you weren't most people then, were you? That was not the average American experience for most of us back then.

>>9670681
Yes a totally guaranteed scenario for everyone. Rich, into nerd shit, and willing to let snotnosed guests use his stuff. Happy for you, but not the average case for most people in 1999 fuckface.

>>9670472
Budget prebuilts with CDRW drives were not cheap til 2001.

>>9670469
Bro 16 on a cd maybe at 10x24 resolution

Over 50% of the country didn't even have a fucking home PC to begin with in 2001. The ridiculous revisionism that runs rampant on this board by teenagers and 20 something's who were not even born or still wearing diapers when things happened is so fucking tiring. DC piracy exploded in the mid 2000s when you could walk into EB Games and buy a DC, VMU, and 2 controllers for literally $30

>>9670746
I think a lot of people who were privileged enough to have the means, location, and knowledge to pirate optical media easily in the 90s have convinced themselves that this was the case for most people. Otherwise, yes, zoomer revisionism.

Maybe it was different in Europe but it kinda sucked to do in America.

>>9670694
Why do people get so mad that somebody somewhere had a rich uncle? Know yourself.

>>9670776
I'm not talking about my feelings or your exception to the rule. I'm talking about how things were for most kids in the 90s. You had to be of means, savvy, and in the right place to pirate shit on CDs then.

>>9670786
And that anon left a mostly joke comment about a convenient luxury he experienced, not a statement of fact that everybody had a rich uncle ya autist

>>9670571
>I honestly don't think Sonic is a strong enough draw
For perspective let me just say that Dynasty Warriors 2 that launched with the PS2 sold double what Sonic Adventure sold on the Dreamcast. Let that sink in. Your supposed main draw sales worse than a launch musou title.

>>9670807
>game on console with 150,000,000 units shipped sold more than game on console with 10,000,000 units shipped

>>9670690
I was 12 and on dial-up. It was my big brother who got me into animus back then
>>9670726
Compressing video into big moving squares is a lost art

Nothing could save the Dreamcast. By then Sega had ruined its reputation post-Genesis, and the only aces it had left up its sleeve were faithful NAOMI arcade ports and fucking Shenmue. The controller was clunky too, not to mention the firmware exploit that made CD-R piracy dead simple.

Sony had built up an unfathomable amount of industry momentum and pop culture cachet with the PS1, and it actually delivered on the enormous hype leading up to the PS2, even if it didn't happen immediately on launch day. Making it a cheap DVD player during the still-early years of the format didn't hurt either.

>>9670816
It sold 5 million in the year it took for DW3 to come out. The 5 million sold copies is data from a Koei raport from 2002.

>>9670441
It isn't inferior compared to PS2, not really at least

>>9670879
The PS2 was a polygon- and particle-pushing monster compared to the GameCube, Xbox, and fixed-function T&L PC video cards of that generation. By comparison the Dreamcast was a milquetoast half-step between the 5th and 6th console generations.

>>9670372
You've triggered me OP. I make this comment here almost every day. But you forgot one important feature - the broadband adapter. This combination would have changed everything.

>>9670902
Expanding on that, one major reason why the PS2 was so notoriously hard to develop for was because Sony put possibly too much faith in the ability of developers to make the most out of the hardware's massively parallel and programmable architecture, when most of them expected high-level graphics APIs designed for less powerful fixed-function PC video cards.

Then Sony went full retard with the PS3.

>>9670463
I think people are really underestimating how quickly prices on things dropped, even within a span of a year and then blurring it all together.
Yes, people were burning cds in 99, but they really didn't plummet in cost until near the end of it and really fell through the floor in 2000.
Hell, napster didn't come out until june 1, 1999 which really kicked off demand.

>>9670419
>All it needed was for SEGA to have not spent the six years prior being bumbling retards.
This is the correct answer.

>>9670372
That's easier said than done, it would have increased costs of each unit and they'd have to pay the DVD consortium (partially Sony) for a license per unit.

>>9670493
You're a retard. Prices for a DVD burner in fall of 2001 were still over $600, and the cost of the burnable media would stay high until the device costs dropped a few years later.

>>9670441
The hardware wasn't even that bad, Naomi chugged along for like a decade ahead and all they added was a bit more RAM.

>>9670917
Not really. Most people in 99 did not yet have broadband. Hell, we lived in a richer neighborhood and it wasn't available until 2002.

>>9670968
He said mid-2000s. DVD burner prices and media dropped like a stone by around 2003. Remember that for home backup purposes, this was the primary method which helped drive prices down. It was massively more cost effective to backup to disc than HDD storage.

>>9670920
It was also poorly documented, as most of their consoles are.

>>9670974
>all they added was a bit more RAM.
It had twice the RAM, in all areas (general, video, audio) compared to the DC.

>>9670976
I read mid 2000s as mid 00, as in the middle of 00.

>>9670968
They said mid 2000s, fucking no one defines 2001 as mid 2000s you absolute tard. By 2003 a high end burner was $270 and that price was considered quite a disadvantage, which you can see with liteon budget dvd burners being $145 in 2003

>>9670994
Fair enough, but the processors were essentially the same. It wasn't doing anything out of this universe that the DC couldn't.

>>9670995
I can't even comprehend this anon.

>>9670372
By the time PS2 was really popular we had Apex DVD players in walmart for $50. Dreamcast failed because of the new president gave up.

>"we'll just use this weird GD-ROM format that only Sega seemed to use, instead."

>>9671041
It's just CDs.

>>9670987
That too, but it was ultimately western PC developers who couldn't be bothered to develop for weird Japanese consoles until Microsoft gave them an easier way in.

>>9671045
>It's just CDs.

The GD-ROM is based on CD-ROM technology, but there's something different in how GD-ROM discs are read that allow them to hold 1.25GB per disk. GD-ROM's usually can't be read on a CD/DVD drive beyond one track.

>>9671069
GR-R was just Segas more or less proprietary version of digital media, same as the dumb fucking GameCube mini discs. Absolutely nothing besides games ever used either

>>9671041
I'm memepilled enough that I now see basedfaces in pictures of fucking CDs.

>>9670469
they must've been compressed as fuck to fit 16 episodes in 700mb

>>9670694
At my highschool there was a kid that had a burner and he'd do whatever you needed for 5 bucks. Pretty sure every school had one of those back in the day.

>>9671069
The format is different but they're physically CDs.

How was the Dreamcast ever going to survive against a relentless series of brutal dickings from the likes of MGS2, Final Fantasy X, GTA III, Devil May Cry, Silent Hill 2, Ico, and so on, all within a single year?

>>9671054
>but it was ultimately western PC developers who couldn't be bothered to develop for weird Japanese consoles
In fact it was Naughty Dog who built documentation for their consoles, especially the PS3.

>>9671179
Naughty Dog already had years of experience as a second- and later first-party studio which obviously gave them first-hand access to Sony's hardware

>>9671201
Sure but they shared their knowledge base with other developers, and eventually pushed for the PS4-5 to be better documented since inception. Those claims of only Japanese devs pushing the hardware doesn't really reflect on the games themselves. Insomniac, Naughty Dog always had the more technically impressive releases, aside from, say, Konami.

>>9671201
What I'm trying to say is that Sony, being a total newcomer to the console market, made a number of bets on western studios like Naughty Dog and Psygnosis, not all of which paid off. But for those that did, they were given exclusive early access to Sony's shiny next-generation hardware, who they then recruited to document said hardware in languages other than Japanese.

ps2 will have toy story graphics killed the dreamcast

>>9670416
>PS3 failed
lel.

>>9671227
It failed, people were still buying ps2 when the ps4 came out

>>9671232
In third world countries? Of course they were.

>>9670571
sonic never drew a dime

>>9671179
>In fact it was Naughty Dog who built documentation for their consoles, especially the PS3.
False, the documentation and software side help was done by Psygnosis(later renamed to Studio Liverpool). ND only came into the scene with the PS3 after the release of Uncharted 2 .

>>9670416
Ps3 outsold the 360

>>9671278
You’re really underselling how critical the Crash IP was to the early PlayStation brand, at least in North America. Crash was Sony’s Mario / Sonic in the mid to late 90s.

>>9671292
What dopes technical assistance have to do with Crash? Besides the PSX development environment was written by Psygnosis. They designed all the tools ND used to make Crash.

>>9671269
>he collected 5,000 gold rings, never drew a dime

>>9671285
no it didnt. they just kept track of sales longer than 360 did. 360 was in the lead when they stopped tracking sales around 2014 -- that was also the same year they released a brand new 360 revision called the E model. Sony tracked PS3 sales until 2016 or 17. even with those 2-3 years of lead, they still only "won" by a few million units and that's if we pretend 360s weren't selling that entire time when they had just released a new model. MS just didn't care enough to keep reporting sales because they had already won and the Xbox 1 had been on market for over a year. this is all irrelevant anyway since the PS3 practically bankrupted Sony and was a massive failure in every way.

>>9670372
It would have helped majorly at that time. It also would have helped if they had stronger properties moving into the dreamcast. Sega was sonic, that was it. Nintendo in 1999 was Mario, zelda, star fox and also dominated with pokemon. Sony proved it could be done without the big IPs, but they did get final fantasy.

>>9670372
The Xbox was everything the Dreamcast wanted to be but failed at, it even got the same Sega games but in higher quality.

It had:
>DVD player
>big controller but actually good
>powerful
>had DOA, Shenmue, Panzer Dragoon, Sega GT, Jet Set Radio, PSO etc
>actual local multiplayer games
>actual online service

>>9671481
Microsoft is a spiritual successor to Sega

>>9670372
Bought mine from a friend and modded it so I could play sakura taisen 3. Best fucking money I ever spent. Also, 3 is the best game in the series.

>>9671225
I'm pretty sure those claims were about the xbox.