Why Did the Dreamcast Fail?

[brunoafh]

IIRC for as bad as people claim the Dreamcast was doing here, it was doing far, far worse back in Japan.

Not really. It did worse in Japan than some previous consoles, but not terrible.

[Sano]

I know 0 about the Dreamcast, but I am a fan of the Saturn. Just want to say that there is some kind of allure from the Dreamcast that makes you want to collect its hardware and games. I haven't yet, but I just might.

[Mad_Hatter]

I know 0 about the Dreamcast, but I am a fan of the Saturn. Just want to say that there is some kind of allure from the Dreamcast that makes you want to collect its hardware and games. I haven't yet, but I just might.

lol, i don't have a Saturn, I have a Dreamcast. But I think there is something allure about the Saturn, and I am in the process of buying one.

[Sano]

I know 0 about the Dreamcast, but I am a fan of the Saturn. Just want to say that there is some kind of allure from the Dreamcast that makes you want to collect its hardware and games. I haven't yet, but I just might.

lol, i don't have a Saturn, I have a Dreamcast. But I think there is something allure about the Saturn, and I am in the process of buying one.

I agree, the Saturn has the same allure. I think the Saturn has a bigger one to me. I've owned a few over the years; but I always end up trading them.

[ZeroAX]

IIRC for as bad as people claim the Dreamcast was doing here, it was doing far, far worse back in Japan.

Not really. It did worse in Japan than some previous consoles, but not terrible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

Turns out you are right. It's funny cause I too had heard that it sold bad in Japan. Maybe bad compared to the Saturn which was popular there? I don't know. Still worse than Sega expected/hoped, but I guess that could be said about the Dreamcast everywhere.

[Original_Name]

I don't feel like I ever once heard anyone complain about the overall quality of Sega's games during the Dreamcast era until it had its little retro revival a couple years back, and increasingly more people just shit on it now. I suppose I'm guilty of it too -- despite the Nintendo 64's lack of popularity in most places I swear it must have outsold the PlayStation in Nashville, since they were and still are absolutely everywhere. All my neighbors had a Nintendo 64 at the time so I got plenty of opportunities to've supposedly become sentimental toward it, but I went back and tried to enjoy the system and I absolutely did not and could not comprehend the appeal. It likely has to do with the fact that it's so gushed about in my immediate area (and the fact that I just don't really enjoy Rare's output), just as the Dreamcast became so gushed about in several corners of the Internet starting a couple years ago.

No offense Dave, but even though you're a prolific poster I never really pinned down your tastes, but Ryan, didn't you even go through a big Dreamcast phase? I'm having a hard time remembering, but it seems like at various times you went through phases in which the Saturn, PlayStation, and Dreamcast were your favorite systems, right? Am I crazy to think that outside of individual complaints about individual titles, this recent trend I've noticed of dismissing the Dreamcast entirely is more a symptom of its allure being washed away by the decade anniversary revival than anything else? Sure, many of the flagship titles had finicky elements that were pointed out at the time and forever afterward, but until recently it seemed like the consensus was that the games more than made up for them in other ways. It seems like increasingly more people will point out the one element of a game that was always known as its weak point, but now completely write off the entire game wholesale on the basis of it. Of course the games aren't perfect, it's the Dreamcast.

Like I say, I was guilty of it too with the Nintendo 64 -- it's just odd for me seeing it happen to a console that previously had a good reputation amongst the same people who're now dismissive of it. I mean, is this gonna happen to the PC Engine, Neo-Geo, Saturn, and Gamecube as well?

[dsheinem]

I was just joshin'. I love the DC and it has a fantastic library full of games that I enjoy.

[Jmustang1968]

I think it was a combination of the cost the article mentioned, plus the abandonment of the saturn, as well as the release of the PS2 with its dvd player and backwards compatibility. I didn't trust sega anymore after the Saturn treatment. I alalso was excited to get to play ps1 games on the ps2 and the ps2 was my first dvd player.

[ZeroAX]

People probably say the dreamcast had shitty games because everyone replayed Sonic Adventure 1 and saw how much its greatest launch title sucked

[Original_Name]

Haha, fair enough. Still though, has anybody else noticed this with the Dreamcast lately? It seemed like nobody talked about it for nearly a decade outside of retro forums, then it sat on this nostalgia bubble that got to be borderline mainstream (to the point that Sega started rolling out a brief Dreamcast revival), and now people dump on it more than they have since, like... 2003. Seriously, the amount of times I've read "Yeah, the games were cool and all, but they lacked polish and were kind of weird" as though that's supposed to be surprising or something is getting out of hand.

Not that I'm so attached to a video game console that I can't accept others not holding it in high esteem, but I do sort of wonder if this'll become a trend in the Internet age. On the one hand, awareness and admiration of retro Nintendo is probably at an all-time high for the same reasons, but for less ubiquitous consoles it could continue to do the exact opposite. Y'know, with the advent of retro-chic games journalism and abundant availability of roms I could imagine the Neo-Geo making a huge comeback, for instance -- "Remember how you couldn't afford this back then?" "SNK was amazing, you should have supported them" "The games still hold up to this day", only to have people dismiss it with painfully obvious things like "Oh, there's too many fighting games" a year and a half later.

I'm probably looking into this too much, but I think that the Dreamcast is kind of unique in that it rides this line between being almost totally unrecognized in the real-world, well-recognized in games journalism, and interpreted as overrated by a lot of the Internet community, and has actually gone on to become more popular after its release than during. I guess it'll be a good thing to see under-recognized consoles get their due, but it's been weird to see people dump on an underrated console because they think it's overrated.