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The Dreamcast's Final Death
Croakyvoice writes "The Dreamcast games Last, Hope Karous and Trigger Heart Exelica will the last officially licensed Sega games for the Dreamcast because from February Sega Japan plans to stop production of GDRoms. The death of the GDRom format will mean no more Dreamcast or Naomi Arcade games. The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue. From the article: 'This doesn't need to happen, as developers are fond of the NAOMI for its relative low cost, ease of production and accessibility, and straightforward ports to the Dreamcast home console. Warashi returned to the scroll shooting genre with Trigger Heart Exelica on NAOMI, and Milestone would likely gladly continue to produce further games following Karous on the system as well. Sega themselves have recently presented Dynamite Deka EX running on NAOMI. If GD-ROM production continues, there is a much greater chance that we'll see a home console port of this game on DC within a year.'"
The PS2 has it all over the Dreamcast. hardware wise, but that (or any purported Sony hype) was not the reason the DC failed. The true reason was the Sega/arcade fanboys. You see, the DC releases were heavy with games that appealed to the Sega/arcade fanboy base and not very well to anyone else. I didn't see any DC launch games that appealed to me and so did a lot of other people. If they had released games for markets other than the "I love fighting games, 2D rules, I love SNK and Capcom, Shoryuken!" market, they'd have done better. Focusing too much effort on their hardcore fanbase was the killer.
Of course, having a crappy bulky controller with batterysucking VMU's,and low capacity disks didn't help either. As did the tanking of the Saturn, leaving Sega's fans more hardcore than before in the Genesis days.
"The Dreamcast Community has sent emails to Sega Japan to ask for a rethink on this issue"
"Dreamcast Community" (read: George, Leslie, and Frank).
Whoo, signature!
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