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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.

2 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --

  2. 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...