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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.
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!!"
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.
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.
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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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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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."
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
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.
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