Why did Saturn have copy protection but DC didn't?

I'm not really citing the Apple thing as an example of anything but the bare facts -- that DVD-ROM became standard on the newest line of Apple desktops at such-and-such a date, after having been an upgrade option for a year or two.

I knew that, by mentioning it, someone would insist on pointing out that Apple is a pricy brand. :) I think we all know that, and I don't mean to hold them up as an example of common practice, though it's also true that where I went to school, most people had Macs of one sort or another.

(Not me -- only in 1998 did I finally borrow an old Quadra for one semester before giving it back later that year, and only thanks to a stroke of good luck did I have a chunk of change with which to buy the refurbished beige G3 that became my main machine from 1999-2005. It only had a CD-ROM drive, BTW.)

What I wish I knew is what the upgrade price was, because that would be revealing of underlying commodity pricing (but only up to a point, since Apple marks everything up).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Tripredacus

It may be correct, we can never go back and do that search. But that is talking about PC DVD-ROM drives (supposedly) and that is not what the kind of drives that were inside the game consoles. The "generic" term used is reflective of no-name OEM drives, such as drives that have no branding, manufactured by Matsushita or other companies. And these prices are likely bulk prices not retail. No one was buying DVD drives for their PC in 1998 for $100.

I recall the PS2 in 2001, being something north of $200, was still cheaper than the cheapest DVD player beind sold at the time. The same happened with the PS2, at $380 it was cheaper than any stand-alone BD players when I bought it. Interesting how that turned out.

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The folks over at the Vogons forums would probably have more insight there on the PC end and digging up archived price lists and such. (a quick search a while back found plenty on prices of complete systems, but not so much on components ... a wayback archive search on Fry's website might show useful info, at least on front-page sale items, but I'm not digging through that right now) In any case, I would hardly say 'never' to definitively answering such questions.

And again, the price of DVD players was far higher than PC IDE DVD drives (let alone bare bulk DVD drive components) and the PS2 was undoubtedly the cheapest consumer-ready DVD video player around in 2000/2001. (homebrew multimedia systems done on the cheap wouldn't be directly competing with those, plus they'd only be cheaper as upgrades to existing systems ... ie a new motherboard+CPU+video card combo at most: side-note, but a neat thing about the VIA MVP-3 chipset was support for old EDO DRAM and one of the most popular motherboards using it sported EDO SIMM sockets, so you could recycle your old RAM for the initial build and could also run the RAM at 66 MHz while the main bus still ran at 100 MHz: for I/O and board-level cache ... really nice features along with AMD's K6-2/300 in '98 and '99)

Most PC users getting DVD-ROM drives were doing it for software use and any plans for DVD-video playback were secondary or future considerations. The more expensive drives would've been DVD-R capable ones appearing and extremely appealing for backup purposes, but that wasn't viable for most consumers for a few years yet and CD-R drives were still premium items as well. (a CD-R drive without DVD support would probably cost a good deal more than a DVD-ROM drive)

The same issue cropped up for BD-ROM drives vs Blu Ray video players in the 2005-2010 period ... by 2008/2009 you could get a BD-ROM R/W capable drive for $70, but a home theater blu ray player was still going to be well over double that price. (I'm not sure exactly when BD-ROM drives dropped below $100 or reader vs writers ... though few people would've wanted one without at least DVD-R capability)
Granted, the appeal of Blu Ray or BD-ROM was far more limited than DVD for either the video format or for data use. They were neat for doing backups for a little while, but spare HDDs became more appealing quickly (faster and cheaper) while BD-ROM based software distribution really didn't materialize. (also probably one of the reasons digital distribution took off as rapidly as it did and why the Xbox 360 lasted so long on DVD+downloads alone ... the lack of massive BD-ROM sized games didn't demand such an upgrade and you failed to see games being released on 3 or more DVDs as you had with CD-ROM in the previous generation with multi-CD releases alongside single-DVD releases) You finally see massive games common now, but those all rely on fast internet connections or painfully long multi-day download times. (a 20-50 GB game over a 5 Mbit DSL connection is pretty painful ... let alone in a shared household)


Though to play devil's advocate on my own point, the quote was from February 1999, not 1998, and Sega had to have been planning around Japanese market prices and making predictions on how prices would trend, and it's very possible DVD drive prices were more than double that just a year before, if not more than that. The counter-argument there is that Sega released the Dreamcast slightly too early anyway, especially given the Saturn's greater success in Japan, and taking a more nuanced approach with the late-gen Saturn (in ALL markets) and releasing the DC slightly later would've been smarter.

Well, that and it made no sense to slash apart bot the Saturn AND Sega PC R&D and infrastructure during the Bernie Stolar era SoA and if they wanted to go full-on damage control and conservative mode, they could've played down the Saturn's problems and quietly shifted it to life-support while refocusing on PC publishing in the US and Europe. Case in point would be Sonic Xtreem given the PC version was basically ready for market (and would've been ready much sooner had they gone PC-first earlier in development when the Saturn Team(s) were screwing up so much) and gradually back-ported things to the Saturn if/when it made sense.

Honestly, that approach also probably would've helped with the DC hardware decisions, focusing more on ease of cross PC-DC development. (SoA/STI teams might have pushed for the 3DFX solution, or might have pushed more to get another party involved, possibly looking from more of a DirectX or OpenGL standard PoV while obviously avoiding Nvidia ... or looking at the practical issue of choosing a big, stable manufacturer able to output sufficient volumes at a competitive price: ATi was hard to beat for that at the time where PowerVR or S3 would've been greater risks at the time: and as it turned out, both had trouble getting good yields with their chips in 1998)

The expense of translating and porting niche Japanese games to a niche console was unappealing, but translating them for the PC market would've made far more sense, while doubling as ready-made translation for the small but still extant Saturn Market in North America and UK/Europe. (plus, RPGs, adventure games, strategy games and such were already PC staples and while JRPGs weren't the standard fare, they were still significant in that market ... plus Square+Sony were pushing their games on PC) Just ditch Nvidia support and go for software rendering and DirectX compliant stuff. (SoA's releases for PC already tended to have DirectX support ... I want to say a few even had special ATI RAGE compliant versions, but might be remembering wrong: BUG! ran well on our Rage Pro at the time in any case, though that might've been the only 3D Sega PC game we got back then, most others were Genesis ports like Garfield and the S&K collections, plus Sonic CD) They really should've ported a lot of the 32x games to PC as well, especially in compilation form it would've been neat.

Hell, given SoA was skeptical of staying in the console market at all, hedging their bets by having a solid presence in the Wintel marketplace would be pretty significant. Best case, you've got a solid cross-platform market to work with on your console and PC side, worst case you end up dropping consoles entirely and grow out to 3rd party publishing from the PC side of things. (going PC was probably a far smarter idea than going vaguely 2nd Party on the Xbox in 2001 ... though they hedged their bets with GameCube support early as well, which wasn't a bad idea) Also, it seems like the Dreamcast attracted tons of folks from the PC-gaming mindset anyway, and got some PC gamers into console gaming for the only time. (maybe it's personal anecdotes, but lots of PC-centric games from that time tend to mention the Dreamcast as stand-out appealing when other consoles had little interest to them)


Oh, and PC CD-ROM games back then basically had no copy protection anyway, or if they did it was mostly due to co-release on floppy disk with code or quiz type DRM. (by the late 90s you could generally make a CD-ROM image on your hard drive and mount that rather than needing a physical disc inserted, though CD-changers were a popular alternative for a time due to the limited HDD space: I think we switched over to mostly using virtual CDs around 2001; virtual CD programs cost a bit too, but were really useful ... eventually freeware/open source stuff appeared as well, and is what dominates the field these days) Mounting virtual CDs in DOS games was an interesting ordeal, though, and was again years later with DOSBOX.


Also, the Apple comparison is interesting, but not very useful on component pricing. Apple's not well-known for being a budget-consumer oriented company and more comprable to mid-range pre-built PCs of the period if anything. ($1000-1600 wasn't far off from the cheapest DVD-capable pre-builds I browsed over on one Google Books search result on old price lists ... again not useful for the individual component prices, though)

Pre-built machines would easily cost more than double what a shrewdly assembled home-built (or local shop-built) machine would go for, let alone a homebrew or shop-assisted upgrade of an existing system. (case, PSU, hard drive, monitor, OS, etc all add up to a substantial savings ... if you already had a Soundblaster-16 compatible, you'd be fine sticking with that too in the late 90s: everything still had ISA slots back then and onboard audio was neither universal nor trouble free)



Though in any case, DVD-ROM support was hardly the make or break issue on the Dreamcast. (though I maintain omitting the Modem pack-in as a cost-saving measure would've been wise regardless of drive choice ... it's something most users didn't care about and/or couldn't use anyway or couldn't use at a speed that made it worthwhile, but would've been a nice gimmick to profit from in peripheral sales)


Edit:
this article might also be somewhat useful for comparison, though still not good for off-the-shelf component prices:
https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1...vd-rom-in-1999

The preview also stops short of quoting DVD drive prices, though it does list cost of upgrade installation of CD-RW drives, interestingly enough.

Oh and here's a couple of Google Books magazine archives:

https://books.google.com/books?id=1w...page&q&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=Xr...page&q&f=false

System prices, not component prices, though. (again, old Fry's or CompUSA archived pages would be more useful) Those magazine pages are basically what popped up a while back when I poked at the subject.


Hmm, there's a gap in the wayback archive's Fry's pages between 1997 and 2000 ... https://web.archive.org/web/20000815...w.frys.com:80/ kinda funny to see Fry's with their own ISP back then, though. (and whatever webcralwer archivist using it)