Attention Dreamcast lovers! I have found evidence of sabotage!

1. You take me to seriously.

2. Sorry, No

Are Jaguar software still coming out? No. DC Software is. How about Atari? No. DC software is still coming out. Can't tackle that argument can you? Might mean your wrong Gerry.


There are quite a few examples already given to you that proves its not a losing system. Something that has had so much popular culture relevance and mild stones in the technological industry cannot be considered a failure. Period. Also as Chris has said to you, 100,000 sales a day? Failure? Are you using "Technically" Correct Logic?



Also I don't know if your aware of this BUT corporation adhere to the belief of exponential growth meaning they are forbidden from going into any red zones in the case of sales and stock price. Meaning that if they did the CEO's bonuses would be in jeopardy. So if you DONT THINK that the CEO's did it for their own personal gains and then fired "a lot of people" then I can't help you understand, Im not good a teaching people common sense.

Regarding the PS2 specs: Who knows, maybe you're right, 108. - At the very least, the supported resolutions turned out to be a lie. Almost all PS2 games do run at lower resolutions than Dreamcast games. Most PS2 games run at 640x240p or 320x480i. That's nowhere near 1080p, and Dreamcast always runs in 640x480p60 via VGA (even low res 2D games like Super Street Fighter II X do get upscaled to meet the requirement for this standard). - It even allows up to 800x600 in theory, and I assume that this mode is what games like Ikaruga use to display the Tate mode vertically on a 4:3 screen. (All I know for sure is that this mode exists and works, everything else is pure speculation on my part.)

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Originally Posted by 108 Stars

But in the 16-Bit-era the japanese were the bad guys. They ordered the western divisions to discontinue the support for all other systems beside Saturn; SoA and AoE wanted the Mega Drive, 32X and GG to live on in the low budget segment. The MD was to take the place of the Master System. As Thorsten Opperman of Sega Germay said: "The Mega Drive is our bread- and butter-product".
Basically SoJ had ordered to cut the compyny´s lifeline and betting all on Saturn. When this did not work out they were in trouble.

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I agree with your concerns regarding the Mega Drive not recieving the support it should have gotten during the Saturn days. But I think their plans were different:

The 32x was meant to take the Mega Drive into the 32-bit era. They probably thought that Saturn would need time to gain some user base anyway. But there was Sony with its PlayStation. That obviously hit them by surprise. They suddenly were in a position to react, not to lead.


I remember to have read in an old issue of the German MAN!AC magazine that "in 1995 the 16-bit market fell apart much faster than previously anticipated". This obviously did not really affect Nintendo who went ahead to release Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi's Island, and loads of RPGs for SNES during these days. So, the shrinking 16-bit market must have mostly hit software sales for Sega's line-up (MD, SCD, 32x). - I think it's safe to assume that the 32x did not only harm the Saturn's start, but mostly that of the Mega Drive/Genesis.

The massive failure of the 32x, the mildly successful release of the Saturn, and the declining sales of the Mega Drive / Genesis soft- and hardware... You can be sure that Sega was loosing money. A lot of money. That's when SEGA decided to officially discontinue support for the Master System, Game Gear (which was big in Japan btw), Sega CD, 32x and Mega Drive / Genesis to focus on the Saturn. The managment of both SOJ and SOA got replaced. Stolar got CEO at SOA and Irimajiri at SOJ. That's been in 1996, when Nintendo released the N64 in Japan.

- In the review it probably would have been a good idea to [skip the 32x and] make the Saturn fully compatible with the Mega Drive / Genesis, Sega CD and Master System.

@Edge

That is indeed a strange view. You are the first person I know to call the DC a success. You just take highly subjective aspects like popular culture influence and being a technical milestone to declare it a success; but this does not work.

First of all I did not use the word failure; I said Sega was the loser in the generation, and that it was the loser in the second time in a row. Being the loser requires comparison to the competitors. And in comparison to the PS2´s or Xbox´ success Sega was the loser. The commercial success equals the accaptance of the public. And the DC just did not reach the sales numbers of the other 128-Bit-consoles, which makes Sega the loser of the generation.

This is a totally different matter from games quality or the dedicated fanbase. You can´t mix these things up.

In the end, the DC will always be mentioned as the loser of that generation in the annals of gaming; no amount of fan-support or cult-status can ever change that.

I personally like the Dreamcast, but I won´t put on my pink glasses as the saying goes and disregard what the result was; in the end DC lost, becazse of the reasons both I and christuserloeser posted.

@christuserloeser

Indeed, that would have been a good idea (backwards compatibility
I even remember people at first belioeving the Saturn was compatible to the MD because of the cartridge slot. It might have really helped.
But it is fascinating to see how quick the downfall of a company can be, and what a long reaching chain-reaction some bad decisions can have, leading from the days of the MD until the demise of the Dreamcast.

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Originally Posted by 108 Stars

@Edge

That is indeed a strange view. You are the first person I know to call the DC a success. You just take highly subjective aspects like popular culture influence and being a technical milestone to declare it a success; but this does not work.

First of all I did not use the word failure; I said Sega was the loser in the generation, and that it was the loser in the second time in a row. Being the loser requires comparison to the competitors. And in comparison to the PS2´s or Xbox´ success Sega was the loser. The commercial success equals the accaptance of the public. And the DC just did not reach the sales numbers of the other 128-Bit-consoles, which makes Sega the loser of the generation.

This is a totally different matter from games quality or the dedicated fanbase. You can´t mix these things up.

In the end, the DC will always be mentioned as the loser of that generation in the annals of gaming; no amount of fan-support or cult-status can ever change that.

I personally like the Dreamcast, but I won´t put on my pink glasses as the saying goes and disregard what the result was; in the end DC lost, becazse of the reasons both I and christuserloeser posted.

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I fixed this post cause I was on my way out while I was typing it.

108Stars you must be devoid of all common sense my friend. Please broaden your horizons.

1. I never declared it a success but its certainly not a failure.

2. Sega was not the loser. It didn't lose anything. Its still there making games. Losing to me is bankruptcy

3. Sega Saturn was a big hit in Japan. It was almost like japans PS1.

4. They ran out of money attempting to take on two digital monopolies and I think they faired as well as possible even with severe mismanagement and the lose of a chief executive.

5. So using your "Logic" its not a loser then cause the public accepted it 100,000 times a day from what Chris has been telling us.

6. Of course it didn't reach the sales numbers, it was out for 3 years. What does that have to do with anything? The only way you can arbitrarily pick a winner and loser if all console companies kept selling for a set number of years and then tally them up.

7. Is there an imaginary finish line I am not seeing here? Why did it lose? Cause you said it did? Did it "Technically" lose?


8. Why if we mixed up the quality of games and the public affection for the product then it may not be loser right?

9. Wrong. Sorry. You cant take an empirical look at the evidence and just say in an absolute fashion. "Failure" it was not a success. Far from it but very far from being a "failure"

Geez, Edge, your responses are really getting silly....

If you citate the interview christuserloeser posted, citate it not out of context:

We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. It was a big stakes game. Sega had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day. So we licked our wounds, ate some humble pie and went to Sony and Nintendo to ask for dev kits.

You see? Dreamcast just could not keep up, it was just not enough. We are not talking about Ferraris, we are talking about Sega going bankrupt.

You are just trying to use the bits and pieces of information that are to your liking, ignore the rest of the story and post some silly statements. Can we ask you to go about discussing the matter a bit more critically, please?

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Originally Posted by 108 Stars

If you citate the interview christuserloeser posted, citate it not out of context:

We were selling 50,000 units a day, then 60,000, then 100,000, but it was just not going to be enough to get the critical mass to take on the launch of PS2. It was a big stakes game. Sega had the option of pouring in more money and going bankrupt and they decided they wanted to live to fight another day. So we licked our wounds, ate some humble pie and went to Sony and Nintendo to ask for dev kits.

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That's what he said, but I am reading it quite differently. The question I am asking myself is: Why would going multi-platform save the company, while keeping up their core business (arcade and home console games and hardware) would have meant immediate bankrupcy ? 100,000 units a day was not enough ? Not enough for what ? - If they had to lay off thousands of employees all over the world ANYWAY (and more than one thousand in Japan alone!), why does it have to be tied to the company's transformation into a below average software company ? I mean, there's no doubt that SEGA's workforce probably would have had to suffer from a massive restructure (once again based on bad management decisions), but there's no reason on earth why they couldn't have stayed in biz. The Dreamcast's user base was installed, now all they needed to do was to deliver games - and that's where they were pretty damn good at AFAIK.

The decision to quit the hardware market totally ruined them. When the Dreamcast's discontinuation was announced, their stock reached an all-time low. In fact, without CSK's Isao Okawa (SOJ's President during the Dreamcast days), who died shortly after Dreamcast was discontinued, and who gave the company his $695 million worth of Sega and CSK stock, Sega probably would have been history.

The first question is if the Dreamcast had reached the sales needed to pay off the devolpment of the system. There is always, with every console, the time when the system is sold for less than it costs to produce it; did they ever install the hardware base and the software sales that come with it to make it worth it, or was DC still a machines that needed investment without paying off?

I think their idea was to have installed the userbase that would ensure them to get into the profit range up until the pont mentioned in the interview; Sega did surely expect sales of the DC to go down with the PlayStation 2´2 release. So the plan was to get the Dreamcst into homes before that.
Maybe the software ratio was just not enough to justify further production of the DC considering the huge cuccess and media reaction to the PS2.

I am sure they must have done some serious calculations before deciding to pull the plug; after all, this was a HUGE step for a company such as Sega.

Maybe bankrupcy was not that near after all, but maybe real profit was not near either and the decision was to stop investment into something that will most likely not pay off after the sales goals had not been reached.

You know, I am personally one of the people who held a grudge against Sega after the (at least in Europe) disappointing MCD support, the 32X and the discontinuation of the MD while SNES owners still got stuff like DKC; mostly because Sega said something and did the opposite.

So, I did not buy Saturn or Dreamcast; and actually, it felt great for me when I heard Sega would leave the hardware buisiness.
What I had never expected was that they would become such low-quality-game developers. I seriously thought the great Sega-quaity would now be available on all systems.
Now I´m sitting here, owning a used Deamcast because that was the last generation of truly great games made by Sega.:(

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Originally Posted by 108 Stars

The first question is if the Dreamcast had reached the sales needed to pay off the devolpment of the system. There is always, with every console, the time when the system is sold for less than it costs to produce it; did they ever install the hardware base and the software sales that come with it to make it worth it, or was DC still a machines that needed investment without paying off?

I think their idea was to have installed the userbase that would ensure them to get into the profit range up until the pont mentioned in the interview; Sega did surely expect sales of the DC to go down with the PlayStation 2´2 release. So the plan was to get the Dreamcst into homes before that.
Maybe the software ratio was just not enough to justify further production of the DC considering the huge cuccess and media reaction to the PS2.

I am sure they must have done some serious calculations before deciding to pull the plug; after all, this was a HUGE step for a company such as Sega.

Maybe bankrupcy was not that near after all, but maybe real profit was not near either and the decision was to stop investment into something that will most likely not pay off after the sales goals had not been reached.

You know, I am personally one of the people who held a grudge against Sega after the (at least in Europe) disappointing MCD support, the 32X and the discontinuation of the MD while SNES owners still got stuff like DKC; mostly because Sega said something and did the opposite.

So, I did not buy Saturn or Dreamcast; and actually, it felt great for me when I heard Sega would leave the hardware buisiness.
What I had never expected was that they would become such low-quality-game developers. I seriously thought the great Sega-quaity would now be available on all systems.
Now I´m sitting here, owning a used Deamcast because that was the last generation of truly great games made by Sega.:(

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Guess I win.

I accept your apology.

At least on Dreamcast games being great we can agree it seems.

My glorious victory!

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Originally Posted by gamevet

The PS3 is actually the most reliable this generation. The Wii has graphic chip issues and we all know about the 360. Look up a few youtube videos of the PS3 being put through the extremes; it really is a beast.

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The Xbox 360 is highly unreliable, and it seems the source of the problem was found: http://www.megagames.com/news/html/c...lurerate.shtml
But I've also heard of complete loss of video output as well as jammed trays and faulty Hitachi DVD drives.

I heard of graphic chip issues with the Wii, but I never had mine display garbage on the screen(and yes, I have WiiConnect24 enabled).

The PlayStation 3 is an F-ing MONSTER! I can barely pick it up! Feels built a tank, thankfully, which is not the impression I get from the original model PlayStation and PlayStation 2.

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Originally Posted by Ace

The Xbox 360 is highly unreliable, and it seems the source of the problem was found: http://www.megagames.com/news/html/c...lurerate.shtml
But I've also heard of complete loss of video output as well as jammed trays and faulty Hitachi DVD drives.

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Great! It's too bad I bought my Elite back in November of 2007. I didn't even get the revised chipset that came out that month. :(

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Originally Posted by gamevet

Great! It's too bad I bought my Elite back in November of 2007. I didn't even get the revised chipset that came out that month. :(

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When I hear stuff like that I am pretty happy to get out of the console buying business.

No-one can really argue that the Dreamcast wasn't a great console but however you look at it no-one bought it. It sold 10.6 million in it's entire lifespan. That makes it the 20th best selling console. Even the Game gear did better, or in other words it flopped. It doesn't matter who you quote or what graph you look at in a skewed way, this will never change. It's in the pillars of history. It's fact. Just take solace in the fact it's cool to back the underdog.

I'm getting sick of backing the underdog. It just always seems to happen though. Don't know why.

I don't think its a flop though. "Official" sales lasted until 2006. There is hundreds of games. 2 new games for the system are coming out in the next few months. I don't believe its a flop / failure. From what I have seen and researched I can't make statement like that when looking at the evidence.

Sales of hardware still going on today, Games still being made, Different and exotic ways people are playing with the DC's technology. Bleamcast, Treamcast, Handheld Dreamcasts. It goes on forever. People just can't get enough.

I mean you can't just glance by this information without being impressed. I don't look at it quantitatively I look at it qualitatively and it looks good.

Oh yeah you can't deny everythin you said there is true there but all that really proves is that what fans it does have are hardcore badasses rather than it was a success. Doesn't matter though as long as there are geeks messing around with the innards of a dreamcast in there bedroom or trying to get a rank on all the levels on the Sonic adventures. Dreamcast will never truly die.