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Dreamcast Postmortem
zlite writes: "The Financial Times has a good insider tale of how Sega bungled the Dreamcast. Short version: tentative marketing, divided opinions, and costly delays. Then the main champion got cancer. The machine died with him." I do have to say that I've gotten a lot of use out of my DC, and I know a lot of people who use and like them -- so I think the article is a bit overly harsh. But it's still got some good background to the device.
... I have a n64, DC, and a PS (1 not 2)... and I get a lot of use out of the DC...
I don't think they bungled it.
BlackNova Traders
Before you mark me as flamebait, let me explain. I didn't like the Dreamcast. I never played Sega stuff. I was a Nintendo boy, because Sega just plain sucked (All Your Base, anyone?)
When I saw that the Dreamcast was being discontinued and offered for only $99, I went out and bought one because, hey, it's only $99. With the dropping price of games (due to said discontinuation) I thought I could grab a couple of good games before they went off the shelf.
Dreamcast is an incredible machine, way better than that PS2 crap. Games for the PS2 just plain suck, the controller is uncomfortable, and the prices are over-inflated by artificially-created hype. DC, on the other hand, has lots of good games, the controller is terrific, and you can play up to 4 players.
Just because the Dreamcast failed doesn't mean that it sucks. PS2 sucks. Dreamcast is going to have loyal fans (myself included) for a long time.
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That's just the way it is
You know the drill..."All your Dreamcast are belong to us!!"
And I'll keep on buying games for as long as they keep making them - and the quality stays as high as it is.
Test Drive LeMans absolutely rawks, Starlancer brings back all kinds of happywarmfuzzy Wing Commander vibes, and my wife loves blowing me up in Worms Armageddon.
Game labels, keep 'em coming!
(and who knows - maybe Loki will start compiling games for Dreamcast Linux someday)
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Is it me, or does anyone else notice how contemptuous the geek-consensus is towards marketing, how it is usually painted as a useless endeavour and marketing staff thought of as unnecessary, yet whenever a product fails and the reasons for that failure aren't clearly understood (or when a disliked product - e.g., Microsoft - succeeds), suddenly it's all about marketing?
And I know quite a few people that have bought one. In fact when it was announced that production of them had stopped, and the price was dropped, the Dreamcast outsold the PS2 in Japan for a week.
But you need to put this in context; this is a Financial Times article, and they don't really care about the quality of the games; they're interested in the sucess (or in this case otherwise) of the business. And one has to say that the Dreamcast did nothing for the business - in fact Sega stock rose quite sharply when it was announced that they were dropping the DC.
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Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
When Dreamcast was announced, my friends and I sat around, jaw open, trying to figure out exactly how Sega (Sega of all companies!) could even consider launching a system against the age-old giant Nintendo (who'se next generation console was still being worked on under codename: Dolphin) and the newcome Sony. After Saturn (which had some cool games and alright graphics), Sega had kind of dissappeard, and we liked it that way. Having been mostly Nintendo kids growing up, we managed to stay pretty much on their bandwagon. A couple of us had Playstations (myself not included), but never had we even considered buying a Sega... anything. So we managed to laugh it off, and say that Sega would fail yet again. When Dreamcast was released, nobody paid much attention to it. That is, until we played Crazy Taxi. We all have DCs now. It's safe to say that Dreamcast is a good system, built strongly enough, with some good games out there. The problem lied in that Sega didn't have the backing to support it. Having been out of the loop for so long, and not having the funds needed to run a large-scale marketing campaing, I don't see that they had much of a choice to fold. Kind of a shame, too, because I would have liked to have seen what came after DC.
WOOHOO! First Post...ahem. Sorry.
I also moonlight for a retail toy store in addition to being a corporate slave, and was there when the initial systems came. There were 5 (or 6) games available, extra controllers were expensive, and the other accessories were worse - although much cooler than any of its "competetors" at the time. Games were slow to come at first, and by the time 3rd party eq. came out for it, people in general were choosing to go back to the PlayStation. For the graphics' sake, I wish it had held on longer, but it was doomed from the beginning. I might buy one for the Soul Caliber aspect, but i'll just stick with my comp for entertainment for now.
BIGstan!
The Genesis handily beat the SNES in America for its tenure.
Saturn was a mistake, Dreamcast never had 3rd party support, so it goes.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Although North American businesses are far from immune to management quibbles, it seems like in a lot of cases that Japanese companies can get caught up in notions of duty and honour, and have difficulty making the quick decisions required in the computer/electronics markets today.
Growing up in the 80's, the Japanese could do no wrong and were wiping the floors with everyone with their improved production models and more efficient operations. Now it seems they have more trouble competing in the faster paced market. For example, I find it amazing that none of the top grpahics chipset makers are Japanese (it's even more amazing that two of them are Canadian).
Perhaps certain fast paced international markets are just not compatible with the Japanese style of management.
Ironic that the slashdot 'games' icon for this story is a N64 controller, is it not?
// the vastness of space and time, and I end up here?
I love my dreamcast, PSO has been a blast, NFL2k1 was alot of fun, Skies of Arcadia has been one of the best RPG's I've played in awhile, and Crazy Taix is one of the few games that me and my girlfriend both enjoyed. Still, its the same old story from sega, another botched half supported system. Sega CD, 32x, Saturn, now Dreamcast. That being said, this problem with marketing, and corporate infighting has forced its in house development teams to become extremely strong and creative, which is exactly what sega is going to need now. With the Sega Sports label, they could really do some damage to EA right in its core market, the sports games, hence the bad mouthing from both sides. AM2 can make great fighting and driving games, and Shenmue, for all its faults, definately is original. With sonic team you have a group that really understands the platform game well, and is getting a trial by fire initiation into the world of online gaming by PSO. And flat out, no other company around translates fun arcade games into fun console games. I just hope that the BS that destroyed their consoles doesnt destroy what could be a great third party publisher.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Jeesh, Hemos. There isn't one word in the article about the engineering quality of the product. It's all about management infighting and bungling. Like all business publications (and a depressing number of "technical" rags) Financial Times sees everything in terms of market opportunities won or lost. Having a quality product is only one (not always essential) factor in that equation.
There's no sign the writer knows more than the barest basics about electronic gaming or engineering. For this kind of article, she doesn't need to.
Her point is that the suits killed the product. From our nerdy point of view, Dreamcast being a quality product only strengthens her point.
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Or close, anyway, as long as the developer community still supports it. Here's some screens from a near-perfect adaptation of gameboy tetris I've been working on, which I hope to make multiplayer once Dan's programming libs support networking.
Yes, a $99 Dreamcast was a great way for my roommate and I to slack out for our last semester.
;)
Running "backup copies" without a mod chip certainly helps, too!
(Though.. I've got to say that the playstation controller is more ergonomic, IMO, than the Dreamcast's. That thing really hurts after a while.)
We really like Marvel vs Capcom 2, Virtual On, Tony Hawk 2, Jet Grind Radio, Cannon Spike, and Skies of Arcadia. There's definitely enough here for a $99 purchase, and if you get sick of it you can throw NetBSD on it.
Because it brought the price down? Has it occured to you that nobody is going to write games for a discontinued platform?
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All in all I don't get as much enjoyment from a console that I do from a PC game (mmm Fallout Tactics... drool), because they are never as in depth and they just don't offer the flexibility of a good computer game. But realistically (sp?) none of the big consoles suck, they wouldn't be here if they did.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
As far as comparing the PS2 and DC, just remember this: it's easy to love a dead man. I've played both and, sure, the DC is a great device inside a poorly conceived marketing and integration shell. But it's dead. If someone asked me if Maralyn Monroe was hotter than my wife, I would say "sure, but she's dead."
I think the dreamcast was a pretty good machine, however I think the timing of it's release was just bad. Idealy it should have been released to compete with the N64 and playstation however it's a generation behind. Not only that but with competitors like the playstation + the years weeks months of antisipation it was bound to fail. I like many other people chose not to buy a DreamCast but instead to save my cash for a PS2. Just like the Jaguar, an excellent machine, but given cost, and compition it fell in a bad lot. It was a good run for it's money with a few good titles, however not godo enough.
Yet during his tenure, Sega paid little attention to marketing. "The idea was, 'if the product is good, it will sell itself'," recalls one former manager.
As far as I remember Commodore had the same policy about marketing. And we all know what happend to them. Now, at the time when marketing is the most important thing, something like this was inevitable.
The graphics are great, the controller is decent (some people have complained, but I despise most other controllers, so this one isn't bad).
What I want is a PC-Hardware compatibility catridge.. something I can plug my VGA monitor, my keyboard, and mouse into. Why? (Dreamcast has VGA out with an awkward pinnout). All of this is available seperately, but I'd love the whole set in one little box.
And I'd like to find the 10baseT adapter somewhere...
My last item on my wishlist is an MP3 player that is good enough I could drop my Dreamcast in the trunk to play MP3s in my car. (The hardware is damn near perfect for such a concept; really, at $100 it is cheap, the controllers are high-speed serial (2mbit) and support an LCD panel (in VMU) already. So, a little redesign and rebuild and one should have a faceplate with easy, full controls... now if I could only hack hardware.
Unfortunately, they never created a solid business model. Hard work and frugality will get you a long way, but with their concept of lifetime employment people often ended up in the wrong jobs, were unproductive, and spent more time posturing than working.
They also have no idea how to deal with the international community. They tend to deal with businessmen from other countries as though they were Japanese, and so they fail miserably. Look at how they handled DC. It was doing fairly well here in America. Why not merely discontinue production in Japan? Or if they don't want to deal with it themselves, why not spin off a DC America company?
Anyway, the disaster that is Japan is one of the strongest arguments in favor of free markets and a well designed democracy there is.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Consoles have never been made out of entirely custom chips. That's way too expensive, even for Sony.
NES, Genesis and SNES all had off-the-shelf CPU designs. They all also featured custom graphics chips. The reason SNES was "better" was because it was nearly three years younger than Genesis. Saturn used off-the-shelf CPUs (SH-2s) and three custom graphics chips. N64 used a MIPS R4000 CPU (old SGI design) and custom graphics (also by SGI), PSX used an R3000 (even older SGI design) and custom graphics. PS2 uses a R5000 (reletively dated SGI design) as the CPU. Gamecube is using a PowerPC.
Dreamcast fits this too. There was a PC version of the 3D tech used in DC, but make no mistake, the DC version of the PowerVR2 was the first. Considering the cost of the machine, Dreamcast still outclases PS2. There isn't a PS2 game out there that looks better than DC's best. They may come, but Dreamcast's hardware was never part of the equation. The hardware, and the tools to use it, are the best out there in terms of price and performance.
Why do you think the machine has become a hacker's favorite toy?
I jinxed the console. I predicted it's death the day I bought one at midnight on 9/9/99.
You see, any console I buy fails. Any console I don't purchase succeeds.
My history:
Not a bad buisness model, except they dropped it after 8months and 6 games. there by alienating 60-80% of their user base and they never recovered from this. I know as a child about half of my friends had a sega and the other half had nintendo's. after the 32x 100% of us had a n64 and/or playstation but no one bought a saturn of a dreamcast because we all knew that sega would just rape our asses for money.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
An instant-classic RPG, just a lot of fun. Sky Pirates! Flying battleships! Ship-to-ship combat! A game world that actually feels as big as it's supposed to be!
If it had fewer annoying random encounters, and a better variety of monsters (why do I always feel like I'm fighting a salad?), it would be perfect.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Get your facts straight before making glib judgements.
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I had the same problem with the stock Sega pad, especially the D-pad, but I got a Mad Katz third-party controller, and all that went away.
I actually prefer the Mad Katz Dreamcast controller to the Playstation/PS2 analog controllers! The analog joystick is more responsive, for one thing. This is saying a lot, because the PSX/PS2 controller was previously the best I had ever seen!
Only slight problem was that the Mad Katz VMU port took a little while to break in before it worked reliably.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Consoles can differ in many ways: power, developer relations, and ease of programming, among others. All of which can contribute to on average higher or lower quality games.
PS2 is initially worse off on the ease-of-programming bit, but who knows what the future holds?
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Both of the Turok games were pretty fun, too. (not the 3rd, which was BS deathmatch)