/vr/ - Retro Games

Why did the dreamcast fail?

>A path of distrust between developers, fans, and Sega, paved by the 32X, Sega CD, the poor documentation and support of Saturn game development by Sega, and no Sonic on the Saturn which gave Nintendo and Sony free reign
>Failed to capitalize on the advances in gaming, IE storydriven games were taking the world by storm, graphically impressive rendering methods that looked better than the arcades, and companies treating their consoles to exclusive games instead of porting over quartermunchers
>A lot of Dreamcast games were already old when the Dreamcast came out, they had been around in the arcades for a while, it simply wasn't considered new
>Poor marketing and not enough money to fund their marketing, Sony's marketing strategies were bigger and better, and had proven themselves to be a reliable company that developers wanted to work for
>Dreamcast was poorly protected from the start and could easily play burned copies, so from the start people were buying the Dreamcast just to burn their games for it, people were even selling prettied up copies of burned games to friends and relatives
>Sony wasn't just building their console around the hot and new DVD format, they were one of the groups that developed the DVD, while Sega had to buy it up from companies like Sony. This lead to Sega looking for cheaper alternativs, which then lead to the more unreliable Dreamcast that broke a lot more often than the PS2.
>Sega was offering free internet access on the dreamcast at a huge loss, something they couldn't afford and that later consoles would start asking money for due to the insane cost. Plus people were gaming on PC and Sega simply couldn't live up to the quality of online PC gaming.