A combination of bad PR from Sega Saturn, fanboyism of Nintendo over Sega, Sony absolutely killing it with Playstation One and hyping Playstation Two to pieces leading to few game studios making games for Dreamcast, which lead to fewer sales, etc.

I owned one, and absolutely loved it. But the amount of games you could buy compared to the alternatives was a massive drawback, and Sega didn't have enough household names like Nintendo to pull through.

I'd add PS2's DVD playback capability as another contributing factor to the Dreamcast's demise. Was kind of a big deal at the time.

I think PS3 was the cheapest bluray player you could buy when it was released. It probably boost sales a bit like PS2's DVD playback feature.

There were cheaper players by LG and Philips at the time, but more importantly the PS3 was the fastest to boot up and play a Blu-ray disc. Boot to playback times on 2006-era standalone Blu-ray players were abysmal, anywhere between 2 to 3 minutes.

2 to 3 minutes? Really? I never seen a Blueray disc in use but no wonder they didn't catch on.

What really hurt adoption in the early days was the Blu-ray versus HD DVD format war, not the players' startup performance. Consumers just sat it out and stuck with DVD, which still looked pretty good with upscaling players and anamorphic movies having become the norm.

Blu-ray has been a successful format, not at all like what happened to LaserDisc. Given the increase in the speed, reliability, and availability of broadband over the last decade (hence streaming) plus the aforementioned acceptability of DVD, Blu-ray's window of opportunity and overall potential were considerably narrower and more limited than DVD's.

weren't DC games easier to copy too ?

Yes, but not right away. It took a while for the knowledge and processes to become established. Piracy wasn't what sank the Dreamcast. By the time piracy became commonplace, roughly mid-late 2000, the DC was already pretty obviously going to lose in the market to both the PS1 and upcoming PS2.

Casual piracy was significantly easier on the DC, but not because GDRoms were easy to copy. What was easy to do was to convince the system to boot from a standard CD, and it turns out some games didn't take up a whole GDRom or could have their textures easily replaced with lower res or better compressed versions allowing them to fit on a self-booting CD.

Kind of? The 1ST_READ.BIN had to be re-scrambled to run off of CD-ROM, but this was trivial after the Utopia leak.

However, if this were the reason for the demise of the console, we could expect large volume sales of the (loss-leader? or close to it?) console, and limited game sales.

Instead, unfortunately for Sega and ultimately, everyone, we saw limited sales of both the Dreamcast console and its games - a sign that the console itself was simply defeated by the PS2, rather than piracy.

Another argument here is that the PS2 suffered from a similarly trivial "swap magic" exploit just after release, where as long as the disc drive never registered a disc ejection, running code could simply be switched out for another piece of running code.

By the time Dreamcast piracy was common place, the console was already cancelled.

It may be a minor quibble, but I found the DC controller to be rather hard on the hands. The edges were just sharp enough to be uncomfortable after a good round of Marvel vs. Capcom.

I quite liked the DC controller. Never felt the comfort issues you’ve reported on (but everyone’s hands are different).

That said, I do agree with your point about the fighting games. They’re definitely played better with arcade sticks (same is true for beat em ups on most systems though).

I don't think it's minor. It's a very uncomfortable controller. It certainly dampened my interest in the console a bit.

The Capcom fighting games on Dreamcast were arcade quality at the time. Absolutely stunning. My favorite was Marvel vs Capcom. I wasn't very good at it, but I was mesmerized by the graphics and great overall UX.

IIRC the Dreamcast and the Naomi arcade system are very similar. The arcade systems have about twice the ram, and can run from rom cartridges as well as optical media (read once on boot into a dedicated disc cache), and there's some variants with interesting I/O, but there wasn't a difference in compute or GPU capabilities.

Notably Soul Reaver 2 was aiming for a Dreamcast release but then moved to be a PS2 exclusive, and there was a fully playable port of Half-Life that never saw an official release.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)

I've played the Half Life port, it is playable but had some fairly major issues. The framerate, controls, and load times were all pretty bad. The save files would become larger and larger (and took longer) as you progressed through each level to the point that in some sections a single save would occupy well over half of the VMU's capacity.

> The save files would become larger and larger (and took longer) as you progressed through each level to the point that in some sections a single save would occupy well over half of the VMU's capacity.

So, uh, like Skyrim in PS3?

I did play it as well, and noticed each of your points, although the PC I owned at the time of HL1 release barely fared better performance wise.

The hype/release of the PS2 is understated. It was massive. Since then nothing has, and nothing probably will, rival it again.

EA not supporting it did a lot of damage, though ironically almost every sega sports franchise was better than their games

EA refusing to publish games was a killer, too. Albeit 2K sports was a great line at the time, but EA owned all the important licenses.

Couldn't developers have easily ported their Windows games to Windows CE?

I don't believe Windows CE had DirectX until later, so there probably wasn't any compatibility path.

Edit: apparently wrong again! not my day today.

It's been a while but IIRC it was a cut down version of DirectX 5 ported from desktop Windows.

Windows CE as an OS has lot of peculiarities. For essentially single-tasking game console most of them are probably irrelevant, but on the other hand these peculiarities would probably make straight port of typical DirectX game from desktop windows an interesting endeavor.

> The Sega Dreamcast is known for running an optimised version of Windows CE (with DirectX) as an operating system.

From the page linked.

PC port from DC games happened for some titles but I’d imagine the other way around would have been difficult.

I think they lost because they were too easily hacked.

Most people I knew had one, but nobody payed for games because you could just use a boot cd and play pirated games endlessly.

One of my friends had hundreds upon hundreds of games. More than any of us could ever play.

That is not true. It has been debunked so many times. Sega and there poor decisions during the end of the Genesis era(add-on that cost consumers hundred and then dropping support soon after) and Saturn days(surprise early launch angering developer, consumers and retailers enough for them to never carry the Saturn) lead to the death of the Dreamcast.

Statistical data showed that people were not buying the Dreamcast even though the games were easily pirated. Therefore piracy had no bearing on the console.

The Dreamcast needed sales and Sony's hype machine and SEGA's past reputation lead to consumers avoiding the Dreamcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d2xuRwYUt4

And being relatively hard to program for, which made many studios ignore it.

That was the Saturn you’re thinking about. The Saturn had two sprite based processors and did 3D by skewing those tiles. This also presented other problems like with transparency (morphing squares into triangles causes problems with alpha blending). It was how Sega arcade boards also worked at that time and so Sega engineers were well versed in writing 3D engines like that but the rest of the development community had settled on the now standard approach of triangles. Couple that with the lack of an SDK and a dual processor system in era before developers were used to writing for such hardware and you had a very problematic console.

The Dreamcast, however, ran a PowerVR2 chip which was much more familiar for anyone with prior dev experience.

Perversely the PlayStation 2 was more complex due to custom hardware like the “emotion engine”. But Sony already had enough momentum from developers and consumers for any such difficulties to become game changing.

As many have pointed out it was very easy to develop for. The developers of Dead or Alive 2(Tecmo), one of best looking 3D fighters on the Dreamcast state stated that developing on the Dreamcast was like writing a sentence with a pen whereas on the PlayStation 2 it was like writing a sentence with a brush.

People are still developing games for it using open source libraries. There was recently a 3D racing game released.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelheart/arcade-racin...

Was it? That’s not something I’d heard before (unlike, say, the PS2/3, Saturn, or N64, where complaints like that are common). What made the DC hard to wrangle?

Here is an overview,

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/dn275r/sega_sa...

Remember that Windows CE was just an alternative to the actual SDK, and it was something like DX 5.

This is about the Sega Saturn, not the Dreamcast.

Yeah I mixed it up, sorry about that.

The main issue was that the market really couldn't sustain three consoles at the time [1]. Nintendo wasn't going to go anywhere, and PS2 had a huge impact even prior to its release (including a DVD player was a big decision), sucking the oxygen out of the market in the year between Dreamcast's launch and PS2's. That left Sega, who was struggling financially.

Nobody has mentioned piracy, but it's worth noting that Dreamcast's proprietary GD-ROM format was cracked pretty quickly, allowing games to be pirated with a regular CD-R. This article [2] and HN discussion [3] goes into detail about the technical implementation of the format and how piracy came about. That didn't help Sega's financial position.

For a bit of personal history, in mid-2000 I worked with Sony America on a PS2 title for the upcoming PS2 release while I was a game designer at Pandemic Studios. I would have much preferred to work on a Dreamcast game because the console and its games were just brilliant and forward-thinking. I never got a chance to work with Dreamcast's tooling, but I heard it was quite good. By comparison the PS2 was extremely difficult to work with at the time, the tooling was terrible... we had to hire several consultants and struggled getting it performant.

EA also didn't bring their games over. The stated reason from Bing Gordon was their developers didn't want to work on it, but given my own experience I don't believe it.

[1] Around the time the Dreamcast left the market, the firstgen Xbox launched, and went on to lose $5-7 billion trying to crack the market. Microsoft had the deep pockets that Sega lacked, and their willingness to spend also caused losses at Sony as they locked horns in subsequent generations.

[2] https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18654199

The failure of the Sega Saturn scared away the big 3rd party developers like EA and Square, combined with the huge success of the PlayStation 2 forced the company to cut their loses and leave the market entirely.

The Dreamcast beat the PS2 to market by a full year, and the PS1 handily outsold the Dreamcast in the interim. It was bad news for Dreamcast from the start.

EA had their own reasons besides it being a simpler financial decision. Bernie Stolar said EA wanted to be the sole provider of sports games on the DC, SEGA didn't agree. It is also coming to light that EA had stock in 3Dfx and SEGA did not choose them to power the DC so EA was salty.

Square never developed for a SEGA console so that was no blow to SEGA Square not being a developer.

I grew up in that time, I can at least say why we never had one which was mostly just because we had an n64 at the time.

The Dreamcast, at least from the commercials I remember, didn't really seem all that appealing by comparison and the games available for it never really stood out to me or anything, at least at thr time. I have played some Dreamcast games since and did enjoy them, it would have been cool if it hadn't died and things had gone differently for sega. I always did love the genesis I spent about as much time on that as I did the nes and snes as a kid.

I remember I didn't even hear about sonic adventure until I got the sequel on the gamecube years later. Both of which are actually pretty great games.

But we had a lot of choices on the n64 and most of the time my siblings and me or my cousins and all of us played together so we had a lot more choice of stuff we could all play together. There was tons of great 4-player games on the n64. Some i think are still the best 4 player games out there.

GoldenEye, perfect dark, the multiplayer on Conker's bad fur day, the mario party games(except the first one...that bastard killed all our control sticks...stupid weak n64 controllers and those devious stick spinning mini games designed to sell more controllers.), super smash brothers, mario kart, diddy kong racing, Iggy's wrecking ball, I dunno, I could just keep listing games all day.

The n64 still probably, gives hands down the most choice in and arguably some of the best local 4 player gaming experience out there.

It was the same reason why none of us had a playstation growing up and why we ended up with a GameCube for a ps2. Not as much opportunity for multiplayer.

Yeah the N64 was great, but in total worldwide console sales totals, PS2 = 155 million, N64 = 33 million, Dreamcast = 9 million. Partly the enormous total was because the PS2 stuck around for so long (and, cyclically, kept getting games for ages because of the installed base) but my point is, for most gamers, it's more like they didn't have a Dreamcast because they had a PS2.

That console generation had a clear winner, despite Nintendo doing its own wonderful thing as usual. Sega were out of the running, due to bad previous consoles, price, Sony's frankly dishonest publicity about what the PS2 would be able to do, some great hits coming to PS2 first, the DVD drive, and just the general network effect that means the winner of a format war sells many more units.

They're not perfectly aligned but the relevant competitor for the PS2 and Dreamcast would probably be the GameCube, not the N64. Though it's about the same story, just with slightly lower sales for Nintendo.

Or, for that matter, the same basic story as the prior generation as a whole: PS1 sold about 100 million, N64 33 million, Saturn 9 million. The Saturn got undercut by the Dreamcast but both were clear also-rans while Sony just ran away with the market.

Thinking about Sega kind of straddling the generations also just drives home how many moves in a row for them just didn't work: the 32X, the Sega CD, the Saturn, the Dreamcast.

It really did seem like all of their (too many) consoles were a promise of the next gen but never quite living in the next gen.

I know, there was a bunch of comments talking about that already, I just figured i'd throw in my own experience from the time rather than add to the echo chamber.

> I remember I didn't even hear about sonic adventure until I got the sequel on the gamecube years later. Both of which are actually pretty great games.

Having played Sonic Adventure 2 about a year ago on the DC, I have to emphatically disagree. SA2 is hot garbage. Maybe the GC version was better, I don't know, but I really couldn't see what people liked about SA2.

I did really enjoy SA1, but since that is colored by nostalgia I can't say for certain it isn't exactly as bad (though I seriously doubt it).

The Dreamcast did pretty well, actually. Just not well enough to offset Sega's massive dept. It turns out that manufacturing can be expensive. Sega was clearly aware of this because they were already shopping the company around for a merger or acquisition some time before the Dreamcast was released.

Sega Dreamcast had terrible marketing, at least in the UK...

Here's one of the big ads I often saw on TV... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT1Tbc_PD2k what is a Dreamcast?

Another UK ad... they had the word "Dreamcast" on the Arsenal top... https://nirvanacph.com/welcome/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/dr... what is a Dreamcast?

I read somewhere, and forget where, but most probably from Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/super-power-spoony-bards-and-...), that Sega never had large margins with their home systems, unlike Nintendo. When the Dreamcast had an underwhelming initial release, due to their cooled reputation, they simply didn't have the money to keep investing in the system to try and turn it around.

Probably because the wire was at the bottom of the controller

I still miss the controller design, to be honest. The trigger buttons were just right and the layout worked for all sizes of hands.

Lack of EA support in the US really hurt them, in my humble opinion.