Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Dreamcast Postmortem

Posted by Hemos on from the delving-inside-sega dept.

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.

4 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. I love my DC too by phaze3000 · · Score: 4

    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.

    --

    --
    Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
  2. The Japanese. by Matt2000 · · Score: 5


    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.

    --

  3. Yup by Galvatron · · Score: 4
    You pretty much hit the nail on the head. The Japanese have had GDP growth of about 9% annually in the period from 1850 to 1985. Compare that to average US growth in the same period of 2.5-3%. The Japanese were willing to spend their whole lives working, and saved all the money they made (two sure ways to economic success).

    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
  4. Dreamcast's failure is all my fault. Sorry... by weave · · Score: 5

    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:

    • Nintendo NES: Didn't buy one. Was interested in something that blew the socks off of NES. It was the...
    • 3DO: $700 when it first came out, but I waited until it dropped to only $400. Soon after I purchased it, it was clear it was doomed due to the success of...
    • Playstation: I never got one. It's been a ragging success. I figured I'd wait for the next generation of gaming system which was:
    • Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64 was just so incredible at the time. I had to get one. Games dribbled out, and most of them sucked. They all looked like Super Mario 64 but with a different script. The only decent game I ever bought was Zelda 64. An incredible title. But I felt like N64 was a loser system. So I set out to find a new love. It was...
    • Sega Dreamcast: I got my hands on a Japanesse model in early 99 and was blown away. Couldn't wait until 9/9/99 to get my own. I had heard about this PS2 thing coming out, but figured that history would doom it. Atari was once a dominant game system but never repeated it. Nintendo was #1 with NES but never recovered that title. So this "PS2" thing just had to fail. I figured, screw the PS2, I'll get me a Dreamcast. Sigh...
    • Playstation 2: So now the PS2 is selling as fast as they can make them. Even though many say the Dreamcast is still a better system, it's now dead. Well, I'm not buying a PS2. Instead I think I'll wait and buy a...
    • X Box: If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, I'll consider a large cash bribe not to buy your box. But I think I will anyway. Microsoft deserves to be a victim of my curse...