Did piracy kill the Dreamcast? Sega was already hurting financially since the 32x and the Saturn was only popular in Japan, but knowing that they sold every console at a loss meant that they HAD to make the money back with the games. So, can we 100% put the blame on piracy? If they sold more consoles but people pirated the games instead of buying them, they would be fucked even more.

I'm not here to argue against piracy, i don't care, i'm really just interested in what happened with the Dreamcast, since it was an amazing machine that pretty much was alive for only 2 years.
It makes me sad that we never got to see it's true potential, it would never be able to do shit like Metal Gear Solid 2 but i the console could have probably received some decent ports. Even GTA 3 was being worked on for the Dreamcast, so i can only wonder if we would see VC or San Andreas on the Dreamcast.

TLDR
Pic rel -acked the dreamcast

The Dreamcast was doing quite well for itself, but Sega was set to implode regardless due to internal strife moreso than financials. Ease of piracy and the PS2 launch were mostly incidental to the Dreamcast's death.

No. Saturn and the millions of Genesis accessories left a bad taste in people's mouth and they abandoned the Sega brand. They should have just keep Genesis simple and not make Saturn expensive and hard to program. Genesis fans moved to PlayStation and were excited for the PS2, not Dreamcast.

>>716197653 (OP)
A combination of circumstances (ps1 announcing their 3d focused 100 dollars cheaper console at the saturns debut) and poor decision making (sega lacked the confidence to publish most saturn games outside of japan) which lead to the saturn under performing. Which wouldve been survivable but the dreamcast also underperformed. And having the two back to back was too much.

Or so i have been told, and i am inclined to believe.

>>716197653 (OP)
no. a big contributor was kalinske. the final nail in the coffin was the ps2 outclassing it

>>716198730
International publishing/distribution was a huge factor in killing the Dreamcast, PAL territories got practically nothing even compared to the dregs that the US got. It was basically the same as the Saturn in that regard.

The lore of video game fans
>Nintendo
>PC
>Sega
>PlayStation
>Xbox
>Sega dies
>Nintendo (Sega)
>PC (Sega)
>PlayStation (Sega)
>Xbox (Sega)
>Xbox dies
>Nintendo (Sega Xbox)
>PC (Sega Xbox)
>PlayStation (Sega Xbox)
>PlayStation dying
new lore entry
>Nintendo (Sega Xbox PlayStation)
>PC (Sega Xbox PlayStation)

Sega made the mistake of what Xbox and PlayStation are currently making of pissing off their fans and chasing them away while porting their games first to PC and then everywhere. At least, around that time, Sega wasn't woke and still produced great games. AAA also didn't exist then, so gaming was still overall better.

>>716199714
*same

Nah gamingvwas made extremely casual and normal by 99 with Playstation. There were a lot of factors but piracy ain't it. It was piss easy to pirate but the console sales just weren't there. Other shit like Sega's handling of 32x and Saturn and EA not making games for it. Dreamcast was great but the normies didn't take to it.

>>716197653 (OP)
No. Dreamcast was dead less than a year after release. I literally bought a Dreamcast in February of 2001 for $99 at funcoland. This was just a few months after the ps2 released. Piracy seemed to really catch on after it had already failed. The Nintendo ds had way more piracy and it was a success

>>716197653 (OP)
>Did piracy kill the Dreamcast?
Worked for PS1

>>716197653 (OP)
The Saturn and the 32X killed the Dreamcast before it was even born.

Did people even know how to pirate things at this time?

DC has no games.

Dreamcast had hipster CD format so how could that fuel piracy?

>>716201020
>Dreamcast had hipster CD format
it didnt matter. you could just use regular burnable cds and it will run just fine.

>>716197653 (OP)
I remember begging my Dad for a sega dreamcast to play Sonic Adventure. Then he beat me with a belt.

>>716197653 (OP)
No, piracy finished it off after it was already a dead man walking.

>>716201020
Several models of the Dreamcast (possibly all of them, I can't remember) work natively if you just burn the games to a CD-R, you don't even need a mod chip or anything.
Having said that, most people didn't find out about it until well after the console had already died so anyone claiming piracy led to its death is retarded.

>>716200003
PS1 at least was able to convince normies to buy it. Dreamcast only had the nerds, and the nerds all pirated. The PS1 had stronger copy protection as well, you couldn't just straight up play burned idscs on them like with the Dreamcast.

>>716201226
The only issue with piracy in that regard is that while not all games used all the disc space, a lot used more than can fit on a CD-R.

Crackers had to delete non essential files, eencode or remove video, and in some cases add compression to data. This was especially evident in skies of arcadia where you can see the screen lag while it decompresses the data.

>>716197653 (OP)
No built in DVD Player

>>716198554
Sega fucked up by not trusting Tom Kalinske.
>man singlehandedly makes Sega a force during the Genesis era when Nintendo ran its business like the fucking yakuza
>Kalinske knows Saturn's proposed architecture is bullshit, was in talks with his friends at Silicon Graphics to make Saturn's GPU; Sega of Japan rejected his advice
>Silicon Graphics partners with Nintendo for N64
>Kalinske still manages to secure heavy 3rd party support, prepares a huge array of launch titles
>SoJ freaks the fuck out over PlayStation announce, decides to release ahead of their proposed launch date
>Paid marketing push not ready
>Few games are ready, 3rd parties are pissed because they planned their own marketing budgets to coincide with the launch
>System is $200 more than PS1 with nogaems
>3rd parties jump ship not only for Saturn, but can't trust Sega anymore so fewer titles on Dreamcast
>SoJ blames Kalinske because he's a gaijin
>he peaces out and becomes CEO of Leapfrog, growing it into the largest educational toy company in the US
>Dreamcast never fucking recovers
>Sega forced out of consoles forever

You could say not trusting him was the genesis of their console failures.

>>716198336
What's sad is that Sega finally had the best console of the generation, and that was the generation they died. Every single cross platform game played better on Dreamcast than GC or PS2.

>>716197653 (OP)
Piracy does not hurt sales. They were already failing for other reasons and that just makes the presence of pirates more apparent.

>>716197653 (OP)
No. Contributed maybe. Though piracy if it had lots of great games (and piracy was abundant) would have gotten people to get one.

People were already satisfied with N64 and nogameplay station.

Judeostation 2 also came out and pedostation had a good name for no reason, some games on the the bomb japan station were good, Sony later killed them. Saturn was twice as powerful and used quads, no performance killing transparency. Games looked better on it eg Tomb Raider.
Saturn should have been arcade Model 2 board though.
>Expensive
Initially. Mass producing the best should be the only option. Would have lasted and set higher standards, double as a PC and give good graphics. 3D OS.

Dreamcast wasn't good enough. Voodoo 2, 3x more powerful than what DC had, and SEGA were contracted to use, should have been used. Probably be more powerful than a PS2. Needed to use a lower resolution too.

AND EXCLUSIVELY USE LIGHTGUNS.
Make games around them. Metroid Prime 3 controls or rails exploring, get a presentation, become a hero as prompted. Use the virtua cop gun and shoot cops. Shoot people who like cops. Shoot people that justify cops with being cunts.

Make a world possible. Not the parasites upon it thriving. Real life.

Fight oppression, downers, whatever, wrong. What tries to make wrong right, like meat eating prison guards, university educated experiment endorsing wrong. Not to be tolerated. Keep quality, purity, free of invalid association. World built in the moment all the time by the best. Backup not taking over and replacing. Observer imitations not replacing real. Want to live have to be yourself.

>>716201746
kalinske fucked over sega by continuing ot push the genesis. his piss-poor judgment left sega with several millions of unsold sega genesis units after buybacks, and company finances in the red
the saturn was quite successful in japan. it floundered in the west because its heavy hitters never made it overseas

Gamer who lived during the period here. The bigger issue was SoA shitting the bed on not importing at much of the Japan Saturn library as possible. This led to PS1 gaining a big foothold. So when the Dreamcast came out, the hype cycle was already moving to the PS2. The in-fighting between SoA & SoJ caused a lot of problems like the 32X/Nomad era when the Saturn was on it's way, the early launch for Saturn without having any games ready, the early cut off of Saturn Western releases. As well as the huge debt that SoJ had that was only forgiven because someone fucking died.
Piracy was just a symptom to the root issue of Sega in-fighting between countries. PSP had a huge piracy issue and it was still a massive success regardless of how much the legal attach rate of games was.

Dreamcast (& Saturn) still has an incredible library that shouldn't be ignored because of how many systems were sold. The amount of people in the west that have played most of the Saturn library unfortunately could probably only be in the 4 figures.

>>716202061
It would've had heavy hitters in the west if Sega didn't jump the gun and launch early. No surprise that a system with 775 Japanese-only titles out of a library of 1028 games would be more successful in Japan.

>>716202423
There's so many Japanese Saturn games that only a few hundred Western fans know about, and probably played by even less.

>>716202423
SoJ were convinced Virtua Fighter was a system seller, and had learned first hand how brutal being late to market was with the Mega Drive.

The issue with the Saturn was that SoA had been doing absolutely fucking nothing for the past 5 years and winning because their number one competitor failed to launch in the west, which made them very apprehensive about the switch, they wanted to hang onto a dying marketshare as long as possible.

Model 2 lightgun game (to be typical):

Res lowered with speed. Hold gun down off screen and pull trigger. The longer you run the more pixelated the screen is or black/white. Sound better. Hear screams. Go to them, like a next level.
Arrive and blow away the parasites.
Standard not set as shit today.
Nobody picked up and put in a torture chamber.

No thanks necessary. Taken around, sure it's ok then gun down, trigger pulled, reload, held move, move again.

Shooting near enough to scare away. Disarm cops shooting their guns.

Shoot tyres as cop cars carrying people drive away. Surrendering traitors open cages with their keys. Or shoot the locking mechanism yourself.

Anyone in trouble rescued. No punishment suppressing, people get wrong, recognise, try again. Make up for and take to better.

Inspid university educated filth don't limit with appraisal. Calling in cops to cull competition so they can rape what the best made. Claim it and pretend it.
Their goons in clean uniforms and brainwashed bix nood blown away and they identified and everything unloaded on them. Reload.
Or disregard. Only stop cops etc as they attack. Maybe the coward parasites try something else. Look at what they lessen to lead.

>>716197653 (OP)
Just imagine if the Dreamcast lived about as the PS2 did. I can only imagine what kind of games we were to get in mid to late 2000's on Dreamcast. More Sonic?

Didn't the main designer of Sega game development vanish shortly after Dreamcast came out and he is still missing to this day? Pretty sure Nintendo send their ninja's to take him out.

>>716202593
>SoJ were convinced Virtua Fighter was a system seller,

More like the only game that wouldn't look or run like shit. Fighting games are basically cheating when it comes to being spectacles for a system. Tekken 3 is one of the best looking games on the PS1 despite running on old fucking tech.

>>716201960
>>716202617
Oh sweet, a schizo. Did you ever consider that I'm living in your walls. Know those noises you hear in the middle of the night? That's me, eating your food.

>>716202593
VF was a system seller... In Japan.
And funny enough the year going into Saturn they had the Number 1 marketshare in the World and fucked it all up.

>>716200003
Also PS2.

>>716197653 (OP)
By the time the Dreamcast came out, it was already too late to save the company.

>>716202692
sounds more like a defective ai script

>>716202593
And they did the inverse in Japan in 1997 when they publicly said that Saturn "is no longer their future." So they actually killed their bottom line while still working on the Dreamcast, people were reluctant to buy a system that the company themselves said they're ramping down support for. That's what ended up having PlayStation overtake them by the end.

>>716197653 (OP)
Only the 1st gen DC read CD-Rs bro. They were pretty rare

>>716202974
I've still got my 9/9/99 Dreamcast. Still works, too! Ironically though, never pirated anything on it. Bought all my games because I wanted to support Sega. (I bought the Saturn on release too, $499 at Montgomery Ward, but ended up selling it to buy a PlayStation.)

>>716202423
>775 Japanese-only titles out of a library of 1028

i go on emulation sites and see cool japan only games all the time.

>>716197653 (OP)
Dreamcast died due to a bunch of old japanese men fucking things up. The xbox is what the dreamcast was supposed to be hardware wise

>>716202650
>Just imagine if the Dreamcast lived about as the PS2 did.

They stopped making systems, but developers were still making games for it. I saw a handful of games made for it after the 360 came out.

>>716197653 (OP)
Sega was already too far gone by the time the Dreamcast came out. Even if they did everything right when it came to the Dreamcast (DVD player, stronger hardware, robust anti-piracy, etc.) there was simply no way they were beating the PS2 barring Sony making some major fuck-up along the way. And Sega's finances and corporate politics were so bad by the late 90s that they desperately needed that win. At most the Dreamcast would have lasted until around 2005 at which point Sega would announce they would not be making a successor.

>>716197653 (OP)
Nah. The Dreamcast was doing alright sales wise, what really killed it is that SoA and SoJ couldn't stop fucking arguing with each other like a bitter, married couple and lead to increasingly stupid and boneheaded decisions on Japan's part.

>>716202650
You know all those early 6th Gen Sega games? JSRF, Panzer Dragoon Orta, TJ&E 3? All those were Dreamcast planned games.

>>716203224
True, the fundamental issue was Sony entering the market with the PS1 and taking their whole marketshare.

If NEC hadn't completely fumbled the TG-16, the Saturn probably wouldn't have even come out, and the DC definitely wouldn't. A complex system of errors and misread markets caused Sega's downfall, the actual outlier isn't the Saturn or the DC, it's the Genesis doing well.

>>716203469
PC Engine dominated 4th Gen in Japan too, which is pretty funny. Complete opposites for the PC Engine & Saturn in the East & West.

>>716203083
And now Xbox is dead because a different bunch of old men fucked it up.

>>716204156
Phil couldn't save a sinking ship from Don Matrick. All he could do is make a new ship of theseius out of the Xbox Ship

>>716204437
Nintendo managed to save themselves from the Wii U debacle with the Switch. There was no reason why the Xbox couldn't course correct.

>>716204501
That really just comes down to Xbox making games and making them exclusive.

>>716204437
He didn't build a ship of Theseus, he took the rotten planks and built a bunch of barely sea-worthy dinghies out of them shouting, "This is an Xbox! And this is an Xbox! And this is an Xbox!"

>>716198050
FPBP.

No, Piracy didn't kill the Dreamcast. SEGA killed the Dreamcast by fucking up three times before it.

>32X
>Sega/Mega CD
>Saturn

They thought expansions for a console would give said console (Genesis/"Mega Drive") arcade-like parity when it was long-in-tooth and took too long to make the Saturn. Once they did make the Saturn, they fucked up making it hard to develop for (chasing Arcade developers, IIRC?) and when the Playstation broke from Nintendo to do their own things, started to focus heavily on 3D to where Sega (at the time didn't have the capability) pivoted in a panic and made the Saturn worse.

By that point, consumer confidence in Sega was GONE. The Dreamcast had an uphill battle to bring that back, but as soon as the Playstation 2 launched and a few games past launch period, it was over for the Dreamcast.

MS would be in a similar-ish situation but without the hard-to-develop for and regional in-fighting, ironically.

>>716204750
I hate the narrative that the Sega CD was a failure, it was a success. It's only lumped into the issues with Sega because it was the first of the many add-ons to the Genesis.

>>716201459
Also games like D2 used every bit of data on the disc and you had to use 99 minute CDs which haven't been a thing in decades. It was literally easier to just buy the thing

>>716197653 (OP)
No. Being shit and no games killed it and timing. Like everyone else I got a Playstation and immediately took it to Ching Chongs Radio Repairs and had it chipped and then browsed their CD folder for whatever game I wanted for 5 dollars. The N64 was it's own thing and not in competition with the Saturn or Dreamcast. Sega was already dead before the PS2 came out, and most of us were happy to wait on a PS2 or Xbox. To be frank, the whole 32x/Mega CD shit pretty much killed it for me too anyway.

>>716204853
>I hate the narrative that the Sega CD was a failure, it was a success
It was an abject failure in what it set out to do, which was make the Mega Drive competitive with the PCE. In the west, sure, it was more of a novelty and sold a reasonable amount. Still a failure, though.

>>716204437
>Phil couldn't save a sinking ship from Don Matrick
He could've by actually publishing games on X-box and publically beheading Mattrick in Times Square while proclaiming all Mattrick's (and Adam "Why On Earth Would I Want to Live There?" Orth's/Online DRM shot heard around the world) fuckups are no more.

Instead he just tried to coast on the Boner and everyone chuckled at the Boner and moved on.

>>716205085
Also this anon summed up my experience
>45 different fucking add ons
>Saturn has no games and I don't see anyone with it
>Everyone I know has playstation
>Playstation piracy is rampant, you never have to buy a full price game
>By the time Dreamcast is due to be released, I have aldeady forgotten Sega exists and the only debate among anyone is whether to get an Xbox or PS2 and even that debate seems focused on whether you have a DVD player or not.

>>716204437
Phil fucked it up because he ported everything to PC and then PS.
He also threw away the BC program which was the killer system feature.

>>716205215
Also another thing about the playstation
>Genuinely not that much hype for it
>We are always talking about the 3D0, the Neo-Geo or the Jaguar
>NEVER see them anywhere outside of magazines or limited displays at shops
>Come end of 96 and 97, half the kids at school have a playstation
It was like they just came out of nowhere and omniprescent. Every video store rented them, every shop had them. Used one's, often chipped were already easily bought. It was like they won simply by availability. They were not there one day, and then the next they were as everywhere as a SNES. They literally became such a standard that boomers would use "playstation" as shorthand to refer to "consoles". Meanwhile I only ever knew one kid who had a Saturn and it's maindraw was the light gun, which wasn't that distinct because PS had Time Crisis. Even if it wasn't as good.

>>716204501
Microsoft never built up the same level of brand loyalty that Nintendo did. Even by the end of the 360's lifespan a lot of people were selling their consoles (or throwing them out when they RRoD'd) and buying PS3s. They also fucked up at the critical moment where digital distribution became mainstream and everyone who bought digital games for their PS4 became locked into Sony's ecosystem, as now switching consoles meant throwing your entire digital library out with it.
Nintendo was able to make a comeback with the Switch largely due to the fact that its low price and portability meant that even people who owned a PlayStation or Xbox would pick one up to compliment their existing console. It's a lot easier to justify spending $300 on a machine that not only plays Mario but you can take with you on-the-go than it is $500 on a machine that can play Halo but otherwise does the same thing your PS4/5 does.

>>716205613
The BC thing was literally at their content limit due to publishers and developers not playing ball. I don't fault him on that. They should though have made their BC team work on the Activision classics that they released recently instead of outsourcing it to Antstream or whatever the fuck. Streaming games won't work still in 2025, I don't care what success you got in your play test in Silicon Valley.

[Spoiler]and they should get the MSX library too[/spoiler]

>>716206049
bull fucking shit, all they had to do was put all the dlc back up for the old games and the online. They're just too fucking stupid to know how to retrofit things and waste money on the most apeshit flop campaigns

>>716206049
There is literally no excuse to not make all the non-licensed activision games not BC after the merger
Especially Singularity, RTCW and Wolfenstein 09. Wolf 09 STILL isn’t relisted despite the fact that all the companies involved with it are all owned by microsoft

>>716206151
>>716206180
Didn't they say that they were working on getting some of the delisted stuff like Deadpool back?

>>716201425
Weren't most DC games too big to burn? What kind of self-respecting nerd is going to play those awful CDI rips

The Dreamcast was selling well initially and things looked decent for SEGA after the failure of the Saturn in the west.
But the moment the PS2 marketing campaign started they could already see the declining interests and started thinking about potential options to bring the DC back into the debate.

>more large scale titles
>a new version of the Dreamcast which supports DVDs like the PS2
>potential addons for things like DVD support
>just more marketing to remind people they exist

And the executives decided that all of those options wouldn't work. And they were probably right. The PS2 didn't need to do much - all it had to do was being a better PS1 and it was exactly that. DVD support was also huge and after looking at the failures of the SegaCD/32x it was clear that another addon spam would not work. If this would have been the only failure SEGA probably would have sticked around - but two console flops in the west in a row would be too much for them to keep the game going.

>>716205746
The Playstation wasn't hyped too much on its own but Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were the games to play in 1996, and unlike the Saturn, the Playstation was cheap and easily available.

>>716206361
I don't know and care but deadpool has nothing to do with the og games's internet play

>>716206831
And those were the two games that led me to buying the PS1. I was at a friends house and he was showing us the PS, just after Christmas, put on Tomb Raider and we were in awe. Then I ended up renting the console and TR, but also RE on the same weekend and immediately wanted to buy it.

Decompil/recompil/port craze like for the N64 when?