/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8791751]

Where does the meme that piracy killed the Dreamcast come from? The PS2 took until 2005 to beat the Dreamcast's attach rate circa 2000.

[Anonymous No.8791759]

>>8791751
They weren’t pirating or playing Dreamcast games.

[Anonymous No.8791828]

From zoomers who weren't there at the time.

[Anonymous No.8791838]

>>8791751
Lol, Jesus you people need to let it go
The sheer number of PS2s sold affects this number greatly

[Anonymous No.8791843]

>>8791838
I don't think OP's point is to console war, but to point out that Dreamcast software sales were very healthy.

[Anonymous No.8791846]

They sold the Dreamcast too cheap. It was a hail mary and sega didn't have many options

[Anonymous No.8791847]

>>8791843
No they weren’t, it’s just the console was so low selling
Pretty sure even the Saturn had more sold than the DC

[Anonymous No.8791896]

>>8791843
The software sales weren't healthy (because the hardware sales weren't healthy). It's just that there's no correlation between piracy and low software sales. High speed broadband internet and CD burners were not yet ubiquitous in like 2001, so even if you knew how easy it was to pirate Dreamcast games, it's not like you could just do it. If you couldn't do it yourself, then you would have to find someone selling bootlegs and buy them from him.

[Anonymous No.8791927]

Attach rate wasn’t as important as “Japan” - Dreamcast didn’t do well in Japan and since it was a Japanese company it was they were instructed to sodouku

DVD player sold ps2 bc even if your mom and dad or average college aged guy didn’t play games they could use the ps2 as an affordable DVD player for the time

[Anonymous No.8791931]

>>8791751
Sega admitted pirates were a problem for them by releasing the Sakura Wars Dreamcast, a Dreamcast without the karaoke exploit.

[Anonymous No.8791941]

>>8791931
Companies will always try to ward off pirates even if they aren't an active detriment to success or profits.

[Anonymous No.8791960]

>>8791751
Sega ran out of money from selling the Dreamcast at a loss in the US, every console sold lost them $100. If someone bought 10 games they would recoup that loss.

[Anonymous No.8791971]

Style over substance nugamers who went with Sony and Nintendo and their crap nugames killed Dreamcast. Nothing else.
I fucking hate this revisionist history. DC was fucking killing everyone else until PS2 limped in and said "LOL WE HAVE MGS" and all the dumb little nugamers lost their collective shit and abandoned the DC, the last good console ever made.

[Anonymous No.8792007]

>>8791971
Nice head canon there anon, it wasn’t even beating the PS1, they release it too early and if they released it later it would have been too late
It’s a good console but it couldn’t compete with 3 competitors

[Anonymous No.8792036]

>>8792007
>head canon
It's called "truth", and if you had been there and not been biased toward style over substance fucking shit games, you would have seen it, clear as day.
>wasn't even beating the PS1
Gee, wonder why that is... maybe.. because PS1 had style over substance LOL MGS LOL MORE SHIT PSEUDOGAMES GEARED TOWARD MODERN SHIT GAMERS too?
Wow, what a concept. Silence yourselves, kids. Let people who grew up with games and have no fucking dumbfuck biases speak, and no, I'm not biased towards Sega for any reason other than THEY WERE THE ONLY ONES WHO DIDN'T FUCKING GO ALL IN ON THE GODDAMN STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE GARBAGE. They tried to cater to people with that trash taste with the Sonic Adventure garbage, but otherwise, the console was full of actual fucking games. What a concept.

[Anonymous No.8792040]

>>8792036
Anon, you're defending the console whose killer app was Shenmue.

[Anonymous No.8792050]

>>8792036
What actual games, literal movies like Shenmue?

[Anonymous No.8792052]

>>8791751
I always questioned this.

Were people really burning dreamcast games into disks in 2000 when most people still had dial up?

[Anonymous No.8792064]

>>8792052
see >>8791896
tl;dr the answer is "no"

[Anonymous No.8792065]

>>8792036
I know exactly who you are, and to call yourself not biased is hilarious
You were revving up those pencils as the Dreamcast released
Ready for sonic to decapitate both Mario and Crash, it’s really pathetic
You also probably blame the Saturn for destroying SEGA like a dumbass

[Anonymous No.8792069]

>>8792052
Kind of, but it was more that people were buying burned games at flea markets for a fraction of the price

[Anonymous No.8792087]

I remember playing Sonic Adventure on a store's display Dreamcast as a kid, didn't touch the console again for like 15 years. I like it now and enjoy owning mine (with GDEMU) but I get why it wasn't a strong enough competitor to PS2 at the time.
I really enjoyed Skies of Arcadia, some of the music has stuck with me months after playing it.

[Anonymous No.8792109]

>>8791960
They should've used that strategy during with the Saturn at launch.

[Anonymous No.8792134]

>>8792109
it was what they eventually moved to with the saturn as the sales were strong for the console early on. The problem later became a lack of support from Sega themselves in regions outside of Japan. You should make a new thread if you want to talk about Saturn, as it's off topic here.

[Anonymous No.8792223]

>>8792052
Around 1998, PSX pirating was so popular that even video game stores offered the service of soldiering the modchip in your PSX. The Dreamcast got exploited in the year 2000, a time in which pirating was even more normalized, so you could expect even more activity.
By the way, in the times of 56k modems, people would leave their computers on all night, download in parts or go to the IRC (there you could resume file transfers). Also, the option of just copying a rented game was also there.

[Anonymous No.8792249]

>>8791751
>oldfag reporting
Piracy killed the Dreamcast is some sort of revisionist history. Yes it was easy to burn games. If you had a burner and ripping software. Which I dont remember too many people having at the time. Maybe scenefags on the net, but normies not so. I had gotten one in 97 or 98 and it was around $300.

[Anonymous No.8792397]

>>8791751
>piracy killed the Dreamcast
Why this cope?
PS2 is the only murderer

[Anonymous No.8792478]

>>8791751
It didn't kill direct sales at the time. CD Burners were still expensive and not many people had them. What it did do was severely damage third party confidence. Developers were worried that sales in the future might be impacted. While Sega could and did fix the exploit, there were still ~10 million Dreamcast owners who had Dreamcasts with the exploit. So let's say Dreamcast kept going and sold Gamecube or Xbox Numbers. That would be 1/3 - 1/2 of the install base that would able to just easily pirate games. As internet speeds increased and CD Burners became more common place, it would have become a serious problem in the future.

So basically the "Piracy killed the Dreamcast" argument isn't really about direct sales at the time. It's that it scared the shit out of developers and caused them to jump ship.

[Anonymous No.8792896]

>>8792478
Cope

[Anonymous No.8792941]

>>8791941
Correct. It's more an ideological and control issue than anything else. There is $3 million study commissioned by the EU that demonstrated that piracy does not affect sales, and surprisingly enough they just buried it.
>>8792249
If anything pirating HELPED sales. The PS1 had a huge pirate market in the EU, and lots of people were buying it because it was easy to get pirated games for it.

[Anonymous No.8793153]

>>8792249
>oldfag reporting
>doesn't know how to greentext
>seems legit
If you'd had a burner at the time, or even been around at the time, you'd know you didn't need a burner to burn discs. You just needed to know someone who did. That someone could be anyone. Your daddy. A friend. Some random dude who sold pirated discs. Any of the thousands of businesses that provided the service.

[Anonymous No.8793182]

>>8792941
>If anything pirating HELPED sales
I know this is anecdotal, but I can say from my own experience, I pretty much bought a PS3 solely to hack it and pirate everything, but when my hard drive space started to fill, I would buy the disc versions of digital games and delete my digital copies. Then when I built a PC after my PS3 YLOD'd, I started rebuying the multiplats I had on Steam. I've bought Bayonetta 1 three times (Steam version, Wii U version, Switch version) after pirating the PS3 version.

[Anonymous No.8793202]

>>8792052
I had to have an online friend send me some burnt Dreamcast games because no one around me had both the internet connection or cdr drive to do it in 2000.

[Anonymous No.8793212]

>>8793202
There was a rather large online black market of pirated games back in the early 2000s. I also remember black list of known scammers.

[Anonymous No.8793310]

>>8792036
>a dreamcast fan of all people bitching about style over substance
o i am laffin
look in the mirror

[Anonymous No.8793364]

>>8791751
Piracy helps console sales, it's why the PS1 was such as huge success in europe.

[Anonymous No.8793571]

>>8792052
I was doing it. Like the other guy said, you leave your 56k modem up overnight, ~250 megs downloaded when you get up in the morning. Many games were less than that when compressed.

[Anonymous No.8793581]

>>8792249
>If you had a burner
It wasn't expensive, less than $100 at the time, even less if you got a second-hand one. And useful as fuck, only people I knew who didn't have one were normies who played solitaire and used their computer for work.

[Anonymous No.8793598]

>>8791751
it didn't kill sales but it was another thing that discouraged third parties from supporting it over the long run, and if enough devs and consumers collectively decide to pass on a system then it dies.

[Anonymous No.8793603]

>>8793310
You kids just spew random bullshit to support your fucking skewed, brainwashed bullshit. Please stay silent because you have ruined gaming and the only way to fix it is to kick every single one of you out, have the industry crash and burn, and bring back good gaming again like in the 8/16bit days. Not every game back then was good, but there were more good games released in any single year than ALL GAMES since.

[Anonymous No.8793610]

>1998
>1999
>2000
>Year 3
>Year 4
>Year 5
What the hell kind of chart is this? Use the same fucking metric on both sides, not this apples to oranges shit.

[Anonymous No.8793703]

>>8793603
cope and seethe larper scum
it fucked up the arcade mindset of the genesis and killed sega from ever making another good game

[Anonymous No.8795365]

>>8792249
This!

Honestly as a dude in his thirties I remember the Dreamcast launch well, and despite the 'muh piracy' meme, the majority of people I knew avoided picking one up at launch because late stage N64//PSX games were more than interesting enough to warrant holding off on a console purchase (especially considering people knew that the PS2 was right around the corner).

It also didn't help that in the US the dreamcast didn't really have a Killer App that was a system seller, Soul Caliber and PSO were neat, but as a kid most people I knew (working//middle-class families) wouldn't have been able to really wrap their heads around online console gaming, or some of the more impressive features that the Dreamcast lead with.

I also tend to think the lack of a second thumb stick had a lot more to do with its downfall then people give it credit for. When the dual-shock dropped I feel like a lot of people sort of accepted that the twin stick form factor was going to be the standard moving forward, and although DC controllers have a special place in my heart no amount of VMU gimmicks were going to close that gap.

[Anonymous No.8795694]

>>8791751
You could burn games without any mod chip, unlike PS1 or PS2 (not that it mattered since most chipped them anyway). Not everyone could download and burn games but most knew someone who did.

I don't think that's what really killed it. Sega was just shit at marketing and negotiating exclusives with third-party unlike Sony and didn't have the loving (cultist) fanbase like Nintendo.

[Anonymous No.8795765]

>>8791847
The OP pic data literally shows otherwise. Do you have brain damage?

[Anonymous No.8795859]

"""Piracy""" helped PC sales. If it weren't for free music & shit, I wouldn't have one. No sense in paying for internet just to talk to you retards.

[Anonymous No.8795890]

>>8795859
>No sense in paying for internet just to talk to you retards.

[Anonymous No.8795905]

Someone that actually worked in a small game store while it was out.

Dreamcast games rarely sold. Even when we had them for sale really cheap. We stopped getting in multiples of the newest titles as they weren't selling.
Often when we sold a used DC they also got a memory card and sometimes a extra controller.
We might see them a few weeks later for another memory card.
Few people wanted a new one and often when somebody tried to sell one to us it came with a few CD-Rs.

Getting the burned games was easy as markets often had at least one person selling them.

No they didn't kill it, but they sure helped.

[Anonymous No.8795974]

>>8791896
>High speed broadband internet and CD burners were not yet ubiquitous in like 2001
You didn't need broadband though. Downloading a 750mb CD took a while but was very possible on 56k. And computers started coming with CD burners around that time so even if you didn't have one, a friend probably did. Once the boot disc became widely known, people started buying Dreamcasts with no intention of buying a single game.

[Anonymous No.8795986]

the ps2 was bought for playing dvds. plenty of people never bought a game and brought down the average

[Anonymous No.8796000]

The system failed because Sega blundered their way through the mid-90s. Don't know why the narrative has shifted to piracy in recent years.

[Anonymous No.8796005]

>>8795986
>ps2 launched at $299
wtf for some reason I thought it launched at 499 or so.
wicked.

[Anonymous No.8796006]

>>8795986
I have never met anyone who bought a PS2 solely to play dvds. You could already get a regular dvd player for less than a PS2 by the time it launched.

[Anonymous No.8796014]

>>8796000
c >>8795905
This is not remotely an unusual story. Unit sales for Dreamcasts were a lot higher than game sales, and Sega took a loss on the unit if you didn't buy any games.

[Anonymous No.8796038]

>>8795986
Since cheap vcr where sold out and DVD combo where around 1000?

[Anonymous No.8797523]

>>8795986
I doubt people were buying PS2 to play DVD. DVD players were half to a third of the price of a new PS2 when it was released.

[Anonymous No.8797613]

>>8797523
I don't think many people bought a PS2 exclusively as a DVD player, but the people who were buying a console AND a DVD player did.
Honestly it was the case for me and it sucked since I couldn't just take the console to my room when someone else wanted to watch a DVD on the living room.

[Anonymous No.8798515]

>>8791896
Video game piracy back then compressed the ever living shit out of disc images. Its also why you can run across a shit load of PS1, Dreamcast, and Gamecube disc images that are tiny because whoever ripped it removed the track padding. (when the disc is stamped occasionally developers will try to position certain chunks of data at higher speed locations of the disc using padding to reduce load times or just optimize how things are loaded from the disc and reduce read head travel time).
Crazy Taxi could be pruned down to about 100 to 150mb with the padding removed. You'd also get the archives split into 3-4 mb chunks so you could have multiple goes at it if your internet was slow or flaky and download managers could do this automatically and keep things on a schedule if you only had a short time online.

[Anonymous No.8798538]

>>8791751
The Dreamcast died because it was overpriced and didn't have any games that people actually played...

You could literally count on one hand the amount of great games and they were all ported later on.

[Anonymous No.8798624]

>>8797523
>I doubt people were buying PS2 to play DVD
Just because it played DVDs? No. Because it also played DVDs in addition to being a game console? You fucking bet they did.

[Anonymous No.8798627]

>>8797523
it was a christmas present that pleased a Dad and thier son.

[Anonymous No.8798631]

>>8798627
their* god im not retarded i swear.
while im still here, >>8795986 this certainly was not common and makes no sense

[Anonymous No.8798636]

>>8791751
Average person who bought the Dreamcast bought it to play games. Average person who bought the PS2 got it to use as a media device that could also play games.

[Anonymous No.8798637]

>>8798538
The Dreamcast died because Sega discontinued it, you retard. It would've taken a healthy 2nd place behind the PS2 and handily beaten the Gamecube if it weren't for Sega fucking up its own financials to the point they had to drop it.

[Anonymous No.8798639]

>>8798538
>You could literally count on one hand the amount of great games
Why would people go on the internet and lie like this?

[Anonymous No.8798662]

>>8798624
this was the main selling point for my pops to get the console.

[Anonymous No.8799170]

>>8792223
>Also, the option of just copying a rented game was also there.
For the average person? No way in hell. Don't forget that official games came on GD-ROMs, not CD's. The only way to rip games back then was if you had a specially made serial cable that connected your Dreamcast to a PC. Almost no one owned those.

[Anonymous No.8799194]

>>8792052
Educational institutions in particular had great internet at that point.

[Anonymous No.8799224]

>>8791751
this is easily explained. dreamcast numbers are whales who buy consoles at launch
ps2 is a much more encompassing sample of people from different social classes. also, ps2 was also bought as a dvd player