Anon on the dreamcast

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CPriceRun86@reddit

Controllers. Dreamcast failed because of the big gay controllers.

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PrrrromotionGiven1@reddit

ruin your brand with slop for like 8 years releasing shitty handhelds and add-ons that get dropped really fast

finally make a good and innovative product at a competitive price

nobody trusts you, sales are mediocre

Plus the PS2 hype train was unstoppable, you can't compare it with modern console releases, people ACTUALLY cared, it wasn't just new thing

This was the most competitive period in gaming, you couldn't afford mistakes at the rate Sega made them in like 1992-98

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Parapraxium@reddit

This. Nintendo was very well trusted and even they got their asses beat by the PS2 hype train. I was one of the few that grew up with GameCube and it was pretty good tbh

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Sega's reputation was in the toilet after 32X and Saturn. And Sony was just going from strength to strength. Everyone knew the PS2 was gonna arrive soon, and when it did Sega hadn't done enough with their head start.

I loved my Dreamcast and it was a fun era of gaming. But it lacked some real killer games that were gonna turn heads from Sony casuals

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TombolaOfCincinnatus@reddit

The Dreamcast is a bit unique in that so many people have this kind of nostalgia for it, even though they never experienced it at the time. It's a mythos built up by ideas of what could have been, and not so much what it actually was.

Sure, it had some innovative features that would later become important, but sometimes being first isn't as important as you might think. Online play was innovative in the late 90s, but the infrastructure just wasn't there yet. The VMU was neat but really just a gimmick.

What's left after that is a console that was weaker than competitors' offerings that would be released shortly, with a brand weakened by years of bungled products, weak third party support and no real killer app.

Another weakness of Sega was their reliance on offering home versions of popular arcade games, which became less of a selling point in the 90s, as arcades and arcade style games fell out of fashion.

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Ordo_Liberal@reddit

The infrastructure for online play wasn't ready even by 2013. It killed Maxis lmao

Up to this day the 3 console giants gatekeep online play behind paywalls because of the infrastructure

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kefkai@reddit

I mean the Dreamcast was extremely easy to pirate, you required only a CD burner to pirate Dreamcast games. You know unlike other consoles that actually required a mod chip to be able to use pirated games.

Most companies back then were taking a loss on the consoles, if you're taking a loss on the software too then you're just losing money hand over fist...

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Ordo_Liberal@reddit

I know for a fact that it was easy to pirate PS2 games.

Source: Am Brazilian and would buy pirated games from the trunk of parked cars all the time

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tistimenotmyrealname@reddit

10 year old me, no idea about anything, just put the sonic gd (you couldnt even fool a little retard by calling it not a cd) intp the PC and then you got some fucking cool sonic wallpapers for free as a gift! So they even encouraged people finding that out. Dreamcast Was awesome.

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bumford11@reddit

The writing was on the wall for Sega as early as the bungled Genesis add-ons and the even more bungled Saturn. The Saturn was such a debacle that they never managed to release a bespoke Sonic game on it, instead having a port of 3D Blast and the weird foot racing game, Sonic R. Their attempt at a Saturn Sonic game went through a torturous development before being canned; it would have been embarrassing compared to Mario 64 anyway, or even to Crash Bandicoot or Spyro.

They released some really creative, interesting games on the Dreamcast but they didn't have the mass appeal. EA refused to work with them so they lost what was at the time one of the most prolific publishers of the top selling games.

The original PlayStation was reaching the end of its life so was dirt cheap with an enormous back catalog, with the PS2 just around the corner.

On a personal note, I didn't like the controller. It only had one analog stick and the wire came out of the bottom which meant it was always in the way. Nice triggers, though.

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Kenway@reddit

The ps2 also played all the ps1 games. I don't remember if dreamcast could play Saturn games or not but that library isn't nearly as impressive either way.

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Judah_Earl@reddit

Does absolutely nothing wrong

Except have the worst controller ever created.

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DarkScorpion48@reddit

Sega are the masters of corporate fuck up. The Japanese branch absolutely loathed the American one and would set projects on fire just to spite them.

They kept making bad business decisions after bad business decisions and essentially handing everything to their competitors in a silver platter. Check Matt McMuscles videos for some deep insight in how much Sega bungled things up.

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Tthecreator712@reddit

Honestly, with how much Sega management fucked up continuously Im kinda surprised theyre still standing

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TeslaCrna@reddit

gif

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Kryslor@reddit

Dreamcast was fine and Sega could have survived it if they had entered that cycle with some healthy financials. It was a walking corpse by the time the console even released.

The Saturn was an unmitigated disaster despite what contrarians now like to say.

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FMC_Speed@reddit

The problem was money not hardware, SEGA is a comparatively small company compared to giants like Sony or MS, and they can’t tank losses for years like most hardware makers do, the Saturn was very expensive and it cost them a fortune, so the Dreamcast was born out of pride (they even admitted so in an interview, they didn’t just want to fold to and quit so they went for one last try in hope to sell to their sales target)

I respect them for going all out like that, I still use my Dreamcast sometimes

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PathlessDemon@reddit

And the VMU (Visual Memory Unit) which slotted into the controller allowed for on-loading of mini-games, and special options/monitoring for other games, was an amazing experimental approach for the time.

I fucking loved this system. We as people failed it.

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killahtomato@reddit

Believe it or not Sony had one of them as well (the VMU) that went in the memory card slot of the original playstation. You could even play a really REALLY mini Street Fighter on it.

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Ryrynz@reddit

Not really. The PS1 memory card couldn’t do anything like the Dreamcast VMU, no screen, no controls, no CPU.

You might be thinking of the PocketStation, which was a separate Japan-only add-on. That could run tiny mini-games (some Final Fantasy VIII stuff etc), but it wasn’t built into the controller or standard memory card setup like the VMU.

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BillyOnFire123@reddit

Evil gabe newell