Why is dreamcast the worst console ever?

[gamevet]

The DC was so successful in the US that it got outsold by the N64 in every single month of the year 2000, outsold by the PS1 almost all of the time, and immediately fell way behind the PS2 in sales as soon as that system released. It also sold well in 2001 as Sega dropped the price through the floor; I doubt you'd have seen the uptick in US DC sales in 2001 that you saw had the price not dropped so much. I mean, yeah, the DC did okay during its short life, and certainly did wonders for Sega's name with Western hardcore gamers, but it was NOT a success, it was a failure that lost Sega a lot of money.

It was still the most successful launch of any console before it. It would have been much worse, if not for the success Sega Sports had in North America.

[A Black Falcon]

It was still the most successful launch of any console before it.

True. The problem is sales dropped off after launch and didn't really recover.

It would have been much worse, if not for the success Sega Sports had in North America.

That helped, yes. No question.

[KitsuneNight]

True. The problem is sales dropped off after launch and didn't really recover.

sounds kinda familair doesnt it ?

anyway on topic of a very old thread the dreamcast is by no means worst but it is a failure yes
it could have done better it should have done better
but it didnt

the hows and why have no doubt been dicussed to death already

[QuickSciFi]

You know what's better than necro-posting? Necro-quoting.

P.S.> The Dreamcast rules all.

[retrospiel]

Uhh... you do know that Sega lost a huge amount of money on the Dreamcast, probably just as much as they did on Saturn or maybe even more, and did not start making a profit again until the year AFTER they discontinued the DC and moved on to supporting other platforms too, right? Yes?

They lost more money discontinuing Dreamcast then they did supporting Dreamcast.

[j_factor]

Uhh... you do know that Sega lost a huge amount of money on the Dreamcast, probably just as much as they did on Saturn or maybe even more, and did not start making a profit again until the year AFTER they discontinued the DC and moved on to supporting other platforms too, right? Yes?

They didn't make a profit a year after. They didn't make a profit again until the Sammy merger. Back then I was posting on Sega boards and there were a lot of discussions about Sega's finances. A few years ago I posted financial information here, showing that Sega lost more money in 2002 than they had in 2000.

Considering that Ubisoft did not release the PS2 or PC versions of Evil Twin in the US, I would have a very hard time believing that they were planning on releasing it for Dreamcast here, given that they game didn't release in Europe until several months after the last US DC release in February 2002, and that they didn't even release it here on the other platforms the game was on, which were both quite major! No, I think Ubisoft just decided to be stupid and not give us that pretty good 3d platformer. I like Evil Twin, it should have released here on PC at least!

I'm not sure exactly what happened with the US PS2 version. Originally it was Dreamcast only in the US, then when the US DC release was cancelled, they eventually decided to bring over the PS2 version instead. It had a release date, though quite a bit later. When talking about the game in late 2002, someone linked me to a preorder page for it at Gamestop. I declined because I wanted the European Dreamcast version instead. I remember they even shortened the title from Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles to simply Evil Twin and gave it a different cover.

The Dreamcast version was supposed to come out in the US in the last quarter of 2001 alongside Ubi's Conflict Zone and Dragon Riders. It was cancelled because they missed the deadline that Sega of America imposed. The European release date has nothing to do with it. Note that both of those games were released in Europe months after the US releases. Also, Evil Twin was released as part of the final batch of EU Dreamcast titles that were all released on the same day, distributed by BigBen Interactive. None of those games had to come out that late, the others had been released in the US already.

Also of course, Sega announced the DC's impending death in January '01, in response to the system's disappointing sales that first holiday season against the PS2. It's not suspicious, it was a response to not-good-enough sales at its first critical test against the competition. A Sega with money could have kept going, but Sega was nearly broke, so they couldn't do it.

That is not true. Sega lost more money by doing what they did. Sega didn't have a good exit strategy. The announcement in January '01 came abruptly, with Sega not prepared to support other platforms yet. The Gamecube and Xbox wouldn't even be out for another 10 months, and Sega didn't start releasing PS2 games until they were supporting all three. So they announced the Dreamcast was dead, and then for the next 10 months they're only releasing Dreamcast games (apart from Chu Chu Rocket GBA, which they could've done anyway). This killed their software sales. Games like Sonic Adventure 2 and Crazy Taxi 2 sold worse than their predecessors despite the system having a larger installed base, and games like Floigan Bros. got basically no attention at all. Price cuts would happen for games almost immediately after they came out, because people expected games for a dying system to be discounted. And then when they did start releasing games like Super Monkey Ball, well, a lot more people had Dreamcasts than Gamecubes at that point.

[gamevet]

True. The problem is sales dropped off after launch and didn't really recover.

They didn't immediately drop. The Dreamcast sold @1.6- 2 million units in North America (during its 1st year), before sales abruptly dropped with the release of the PS2. It was not because the (North American) Dreamcast didn't have good software, because the console had plenty of that.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/...hardware-sales

[A Black Falcon]

They didn't immediately drop. The Dreamcast sold @1.6- 2 million units in North America (during its 1st year), before sales abruptly dropped with the release of the PS2. It was not because the (North American) Dreamcast didn't have good software, because the console had plenty of that.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/07/...hardware-sales

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...C-sales-US-NPD
Have you forgotten the facts already? DC sold fine in '99, but dropped badly in Jan. '00 and did not recover. Sales looked "good" at the end of the first year because of the launch months.

They didn't make a profit a year after. They didn't make a profit again until the Sammy merger. Back then I was posting on Sega boards and there were a lot of discussions about Sega's finances. A few years ago I posted financial information here, showing that Sega lost more money in 2002 than they had in 2000.

I don't know what you're talking about, but it's a quite well-established fact, based on Sega's releases, that Sega lost money for five years, from FY1998 to FY2002. So no, this is wrong. (Remember that a fiscal year starts in the middle of the previous year and ends in the spring of the listed year, so Sega lost money from spring 1997 to spring 2002.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._1993-2004.svg

I'm not sure exactly what happened with the US PS2 version. Originally it was Dreamcast only in the US, then when the US DC release was cancelled, they eventually decided to bring over the PS2 version instead. It had a release date, though quite a bit later. When talking about the game in late 2002, someone linked me to a preorder page for it at Gamestop. I declined because I wanted the European Dreamcast version instead. I remember they even shortened the title from Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles to simply Evil Twin and gave it a different cover.

The Dreamcast version was supposed to come out in the US in the last quarter of 2001 alongside Ubi's Conflict Zone and Dragon Riders. It was cancelled because they missed the deadline that Sega of America imposed. The European release date has nothing to do with it. Note that both of those games were released in Europe months after the US releases. Also, Evil Twin was released as part of the final batch of EU Dreamcast titles that were all released on the same day, distributed by BigBen Interactive. None of those games had to come out that late, the others had been released in the US already.

It's interesting that they were actually considering bringing over the DC version, I didn't know that. But given that the PS2 and even PC versions were not released here, I still think that it's likely that in the end they'd have canned it for DC too... which is really too bad considering that it is a good game.

That is not true. Sega lost more money by doing what they did. Sega didn't have a good exit strategy. The announcement in January '01 came abruptly, with Sega not prepared to support other platforms yet. The Gamecube and Xbox wouldn't even be out for another 10 months, and Sega didn't start releasing PS2 games until they were supporting all three. So they announced the Dreamcast was dead, and then for the next 10 months they're only releasing Dreamcast games (apart from Chu Chu Rocket GBA, which they could've done anyway). This killed their software sales. Games like Sonic Adventure 2 and Crazy Taxi 2 sold worse than their predecessors despite the system having a larger installed base, and games like Floigan Bros. got basically no attention at all. Price cuts would happen for games almost immediately after they came out, because people expected games for a dying system to be discounted. And then when they did start releasing games like Super Monkey Ball, well, a lot more people had Dreamcasts than Gamecubes at that point.

Again see the chart above, and notice how losses were less in the '01-'02 fiscal year than the year before. A lot of that is probably that hardware losses pretty much stopped by the end of '01, and software sales picked up late in the year when their GC, Xbox, and PS2 games started releasing, but the results are as shown.

Sure though, yeah, they probably did hurt '01 Dreamcast game sales by announcing the discontinuation, and they definitely got some games cancelled that would otherwise have released, but when you look at how amazingly the PS2 was selling and Sega's dire financial situation, they had to do something or they'd go under. What do you want, Sega announces the DC's death that fall and kills it months later? Giving more warning is not a bad idea... and the end was inevitable given Sega's finances. Also see that chart again I link at the top of this post, and notice how DC sales increase in most months in '01 over '00, surely mostly because of how Sega dropped the price to like $50 by the end of the year in order to sell off their stock. That has to have helped overall software sales too. (If that very low December '01 sales number for the DC is accurate maybe the DC did sell better in '00 just because of that, but January to November sales are clearly higher in '01.)

But overall, I think that even without a discontinuation notice until later, I think it's likely that those '01 DC releases would still have been overshadowed because the release of the PS2 was completely dominating the industry... and also, the holiday season dominates videogame sales. What you sell during that time is often more important than what you sell in the rest of the year combined.

[gamevet]

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...C-sales-US-NPD
Have you forgotten the facts already? DC sold fine in '99, but dropped badly in Jan. '00 and did not recover. Sales looked "good" at the end of the first year because of the launch months.

The chart doesn't show anything close to dropping badly in January of 00 (@50k for that month is pretty good), as a matter of fact it actually goes up in February of 00 (88k according to that article I'd posted) and sells just as well during the 00 holiday season, as it did during the 99 season. Looking at 2001, the Playstation, N64 and Dreamcast are all trading places on best seller of the month throughout the year, though that chart doesn't show the PS2 kicking all sorts of ass.

Go look at Xbox 360 and PS3 sales numbers for their 1st year. You'll find that there wasn't a massive difference to what the DC (North America) was posting in 2000. It was certainly posting better numbers than the Playstation did in its 1st year.

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Xbox_360


According to that article I posted, the Dreamcast was pretty much selling like it should. Even the Playstation saw a massive dip in May of 2000. The DC most certainly didn't drop off of a cliff several months after being released in North America. It was doing okay in North America, it's just that Japan and Europe weren't holding up their end of the deal. It was selling better than the Wii U has so far, that's for sure.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=108859206

[j_factor]

I don't know what you're talking about, but it's a quite well-established fact, based on Sega's releases, that Sega lost money for five years, from FY1998 to FY2002. So no, this is wrong. (Remember that a fiscal year starts in the middle of the previous year and ends in the spring of the listed year, so Sega lost money from spring 1997 to spring 2002.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._1993-2004.svg

I wish I could find my old post. But, the total net profit/loss for the company is kind of an out-of-context number. You don't just the overall health of a business just on that. You also have to look at things like sales, and where the money is going. Sega wasn't necessarily losing money on the Dreamcast itself on a continual basis. They made a lot of one-time investments during the Dreamcast era (e.g. the launch of Seganet) that wouldn't have been recurring costs in 2002. They canceled the system before they could really get a return on these investments. Sega also sold off a good amount of assets in the last couple years before the Sammy merger. That nominally adds to their revenue but doesn't represent any improvement on their core business.

It's interesting that they were actually considering bringing over the DC version, I didn't know that. But given that the PS2 and even PC versions were not released here, I still think that it's likely that in the end they'd have canned it for DC too... which is really too bad considering that it is a good game.

I wish I could find a bit more information, I had an old link saved but it doesn't work anymore. I did find this, dated October 27, 2001.

I looked in the Eb Games website today and noticed that Evil Twin for the Dreamcast is not in their upcoming titles anymore. I just want to know if the game has been cancelled. I really hope not, since I was totally looking froward to that being my last game purchased for the Dreamcast.

So yeah, I know I'm not misremembering, at least.

Go look at Xbox 360 and PS3 sales numbers for their 1st year. You'll find that there wasn't a massive difference to what the DC (North America) was posting in 2000.

The Xbox 360 was in third place (behind Wii and PS2) from the Wii launch in November 2006 until the following August. Nobody seemed concerned.

[A Black Falcon]

The chart doesn't show anything close to dropping badly in January of 00 (@50k for that month is pretty good), as a matter of fact it actually goes up in February of 00 (88k according to that article I'd posted) and sells just as well during the 00 holiday season, as it did during the 99 season. Looking at 2001, the Playstation, N64 and Dreamcast are all trading places on best seller of the month throughout the year, though that chart doesn't show the PS2 kicking all sorts of ass.

Go look at Xbox 360 and PS3 sales numbers for their 1st year. You'll find that there wasn't a massive difference to what the DC (North America) was posting in 2000. It was certainly posting better numbers than the Playstation did in its 1st year.

http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Xbox_360


According to that article I posted, the Dreamcast was pretty much selling like it should. Even the Playstation saw a massive dip in May of 2000. The DC most certainly didn't drop off of a cliff several months after being released in North America. It was doing okay in North America, it's just that Japan and Europe weren't holding up their end of the deal. It was selling better than the Wii U has so far, that's for sure.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=108859206

You can try to sugarcoat it all you want, but the fact remains that the DC's sales in 2000 in the US weren't good enough. Sure, a new system releasing early, it's understandable that the last-gen consoles would beat it for a while... but Sega needed better. They needed serious success, and didn't get it at all, as those sales numbers show. The monthly sales were not good (not awful, but not good), and then the holiday season went pretty badly as the PS2 wiped the floor with the competition. And yes, I wish the PS2 was on that chart; are specific numbers for it out there? Yearly I think we have... monthly is probably around somewhere, but I'm not sure if I've seen it, recently at least.

Also, as I say below, Sega's awful financial situation makes things very different between the Dreamcast and cases like the PS3 or 360. Sony and Microsoft could afford to wait for the profits to come back. Sony lost so much money on the PS3 through much of its life that they lost just as much money as all of their profits on the PS1 and PS2 through their whole lives up to that point! But Sony could afford to wait for a turnaround, and it eventually came. Of course now Sony's not in great shape, but even so they're still far better off than Sega was. And MS, of course, can and did throw away billions like it's nothing.

Also, I don't think that PS3 or 360 sales were ever actually as mediocre as Dreamcast sales. Wii U, yes. I've seen the charts showing how the DC and Gamecube are, launch-aligned, still ahead of the Wii U, I believe. But PS3 or 360? I doubt it, 360 especially! Do you have proof for that?

I wish I could find my old post. But, the total net profit/loss for the company is kind of an out-of-context number. You don't just the overall health of a business just on that. You also have to look at things like sales, and where the money is going. Sega wasn't necessarily losing money on the Dreamcast itself on a continual basis. They made a lot of one-time investments during the Dreamcast era (e.g. the launch of Seganet) that wouldn't have been recurring costs in 2002. They canceled the system before they could really get a return on these investments. Sega also sold off a good amount of assets in the last couple years before the Sammy merger. That nominally adds to their revenue but doesn't represent any improvement on their core business.

As I say below, I mostly agree here, most importantly on the point about abandoning the DC before it could get to the potential-profit phase being an issue. Of course any company which can choose would do that, stick with their system long enough to try to make some money off of it as costs come down and the userbase goes up later in its life, but Sega was too broke to do that with the DC, of course. And that's one of the major reasons why releasing the DC at all was kind of crazy... great for gamers, but financially crazy! They could not afford that system unless it'd been a massive hit like the PS2 which it was never going to be. But that's Sega, always taking chances.

Still though, overall profit or loss numbers are something people do pay a lot of attention to in the gaming business, so I absolutely do think that those numbers -- that Sega lost money for five years, and then made a small profit in the '02-'03 fiscal year -- matters. I think it's relevant that Sega's first profit in five years came in the first full year after they abandoned hardware -- clearly it was, at first, financially good for them to not be in the money-losing hardware business anymore. Of course Sega was never the same again after selling to Sammy, but for a little while after ending hardware they were still great...

I wish I could find a bit more information, I had an old link saved but it doesn't work anymore. I did find this, dated October 27, 2001.

So yeah, I know I'm not misremembering, at least.

Interesting. It's really annoying that they canned the PS2 version and seem to have never given the PC version a first thought; I don't remember ever hearing about Evil Twin getting a US PC release, and I definitely followed PC gaming at the time!

As for Sega saying that DC games had to be done by October, so the third-party releases from November and December were all finished sooner? And NHL 2K2, released the next February, was too? I'd think that that game only released in February because it wasn't done the previous year!

The Xbox 360 was in third place (behind Wii and PS2) from the Wii launch in November 2006 until the following August. Nobody seemed concerned.

Well, Microsoft wasn't almost bankrupt. Sega's financial situation is the reason why they had to give up when they did, after all. Otherwise they of course would have stuck it out and tried to make some money off of the DC, as you normally try to do in the later years of a console's life after spending money to launch it earlier on... but they couldn't do that, so all they got was the losses with none of the later gains. Sega just couldn't afford to continue.

[KnightWarrior]

I hated Sony that year

I wanted to bash alot of PS2's and PS1's

They wanted to kill Sega

[zetastrike]

I hated Sony that year

I wanted to bash alot of PS2's and PS1's

They wanted to kill Sega

I'm getting tired of people saying Sony had Sega in their crosshairs from day one. All Sony did was release the PSX and market it properly. It's not like they decided to pick Sega up out of the crowd and beat on them specifically. Nintendo suffered a pretty massive blow to the ego too. Sega just made bad decision after bad decision during the mid 90s and broke the consumers' faith in them. That was their undoing.

[sheath]

You need to read Revolutionaries at Sony. Also:
http://www.itproportal.com/2010/09/1...15th-birthday/

"We sold more than 130 million PS1s, went on to sell more than 146 million PS2s, put Sega out of the hardware business, established us as a household brand, [and] created a huge profit center for Sony Corporation," announced Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment at the event.

Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2010/09/1...#ixzz33WG4BPBI

Then there is the little matter of Psygnosis, Eidos, Naughty Dog, Square, Working Designs, Bleem!, and who knows how many other developers that were "influenced" by Sony to become exclusive, or exclude Sega. I know, I know, all of these companies knew the internal workings of Sega, and their financials, and "saw the writing on the wall" and abandoned Sega's last to consoles while they were still selling reasonably well and had comparable userbases. Or, here's another one, the PS1 was just so darned easy to program they abandoned the Saturn (nevermind PS2 in this comparison).

There are lots of narrative "histories" out there that all praise Sony for being brilliant creative geniuses and completely ignore the many companies Sony has shut down through damn near illegal monopolistic means. Sega is really just the most obvious victim of Sony "establishing Playstation as a household brand." Does anybody remember Lik Sang?

[zetastrike]

Then there is the little matter of Psygnosis, Eidos, Naughty Dog, Square, Working Designs, Bleem!, and who knows how many other developers that were "influenced" by Sony to become exclusive, or exclude Sega. I know, I know, all of these companies knew the internal workings of Sega, and their financials, and "saw the writing on the wall" and abandoned Sega's last to consoles while they were still selling reasonably well and had comparable userbases. Or, here's another one, the PS1 was just so darned easy to program they abandoned the Saturn (nevermind PS2 in this comparison).

There are lots of narrative "histories" out there that all praise Sony for being brilliant creative geniuses and completely ignore the many companies Sony has shut down through damn near illegal monopolistic means. Sega is really just the most obvious victim of Sony "establishing Playstation as a household brand." Does anybody remember Lik Sang?

And Sega could do nothing about it? None of their stupid decisions, like screwing over and lying to their own customers, had anything to do with their demise? It was all just mean old sony who wanted the themepark all to themselves? Wasn't it Bernie who burned the bridge with Working Designs?

Ken: That Sega, they've gotta go.