Dreamcast didn't have to be.
From what I've looked at, Dreamcast's biggest failure is not that it underperformed the competitors or didn't have great titles. Dreamcast's biggest failure is that Sega decided to pull the plug, perhaps a bit prematurely.
Dreamcast launched in North America on September 9, 1999 (9.9.99...remember??) and Sega stopped production in March of 2001. That's less than 2 years!! Hardly a console run, if you ask me. Of course, Sega had just come off the heels of a terrible run with their lackluster Saturn system and didn't want to waste their money on another system that looked to be doomed. However, the looming launch of PS2, which is only moderately more graphically advanced than Dreamcast, cast its powerful shadow on Sega and the company decided to pull the plug .
In its 1 1/2 years, Dreamcast was a powerhouse. The level of games that were released for the system were of an incredible caliber. Jet Grind Radio, 2k Sports, Soul Caliber, and tons of other games made their way to the system, and people were buying, but Sega decided that they weren't buying enough. Due to what they considered poor sales, they pulled the plug early.
| Dreamcast | 10,600,000 | 7% |
| PS2 | 91,390,000 | 64% |
| Xbox | 21,900,000 | 15% |
| GameCube | 18,800,000 | 13% |
Look at that! In 1 1/2 years, Dreamcast sold more than half of what the GameCube did and what the Xbox did. The difference is that both the Xbox and GameCube were released in November of 2001, giving them over 5 years to sell systems.
In this light, Dreamcast wasn't failing at all. On the contrary, it was raping! Sure, the system is technically less-powerful than all three of its competitors, but its game library was huge and great! In its year and a half, it hosted over 200 games!! Let's see Xbox 360 pull that one off. If Sega had played its cards right, and maybe waited it out a bit, there's no doubt in my mind that Dreamcas would have come in 2nd or 3rd in the console race for that generation. With sales at that rate, all they had to do was build a library of acclaimed games and bring people in.
It's a shame really. Sure, I've always been a Nintendo fanboy at heart, but there's no denying some of the innovative features of the Dreamcast. For 1999, that's pretty incredible. Would I buy a Sega console if they decided to get back in the business? Who knows? All I know is that the Dreamcast is an amazing system, and one that should have gotten a better chance.
I found three Dreamcast controllers on some random shelf at Wal-Mart the other day. They were marked down to $6.99 and looked like they had been sitting there for the better part of a decade, but they were there and they were new!!
Wal-Mart on Sawdust Rd. in Spring, Tx hasn't given up on you Sega, and neither have I!!
Thank you for the Dreamcast.
--Cale
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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