Dreamcast-Talk.com

Think that's an important point Ian about Sega being on a knife edge with its margins and the impact of piracy. It was a relatively small company in comparison to Sony. OK I know it was part of the CSK conglomerate but it was making big losses.

Some very interesting sales figures as well thanks for posting them. I had 8 games for the Dreamcast, all retail, bought and paid for- and at the time that seemed a lot. In comparison I had 3 N64 games and five games for the Megadrive. I consider all these titles AAA games. I grew up in the 80's and 90's and had a C64, Megadrive, N64 and then Dreamcast before moving on to PC. I still have every game that I ever bought or was bought for me apart from my PC games. We only got games on birthdays and Christmas. You might get one, two, three a year. You swapped and tried out games with friends at school - you read the mags and unless you really were looking for something niche you backed the reviews and bought the AAA titles. You couldn't afford not to, well maybe in the late 80s/90s you could take a punt on some of the C64 budget games some of which were better than full price releases and I do have a modest catalogue of 22 C64 games.

I don't think I was untypical. I can't remember any of my mates having anymore than a handfull of games either for MD, SNES, N64, Dreamcast etc.

I've never owned a Sony Console but I can remember the PS1 was pirated massively. As you say Sega sold 8 million consoles cracked out of the box but almost every kid from my estate had a modded PS1 and lads would even come around and knock on doors selling PS1 cd's. Be interesting to know if percentage wise the DC or PS1 was pirated more but I suppose it boils down to what you're saying Sega couldn't take the hit and maybe it would have taken another 8 or 10 million units sold to make the platform viable with legit game purchases. I wonder if things had if been different if the Dreamcast hadn't launched with the mil-cd functionality.

I think the main thing was 8 million consoles where cracked at once .. Ps1 or ps2 you had to go out of your way to play copied game.. In australia you could buy copied dreamcast games with covers for $5 each at the markets every sunday.. selling ps1 boot legs was much harder to the normal public they needed to pay someone to do the deed on the console..
The cost of install was most times over $100.. Backyard it was illegal to do so.. SO the normal person was not wanting to deal with this.. You seen more people doing it for the ps1 as it sold more..

Most dreamcast users did not need to buy copied games they did them self at home..

No dreamcast owner had to say hey I will get a modchip it was done for them in one day...


30 million ps1's where not cracked at once on 1 day like the dreamcast with big news all over hey guess what you can do no modding just burn a cdr..

Any console that gets cracked all at once with no need for any hardware mods is doomed even if there was no ps2 Sega would of brought out a new machine to fix the problem i doubt it would of lasted a day more ether way..

Much more major thing.. We only got tonyHAx for ps1 last year now you can kind of doing it like dreamcast.. how many years later lol


Main point people dont understand every console got a modchip over night for free

Always forgot every dreamcast was cracked at once .. Ps1 ps2 it was not all at once and you had to pay for many years to get it modded or have skill to do it your self softmods came almost at the end of both of those two's life..

There lies the problem comparing ps1 or ps2 piracy to Dreamcast ..

Every console was broken on 1 day for all..

I agree with everything you said about piracy hurting sega Ian.

Other factors that hurt them:

Public sentiment after shitty 32x and Saturn launches
Sega of America vs Sega of Japan feuding
public waiting for Playstation 2 launch

Piracy has always been a big deal since napster hurt the music industry. But I have always been of the opinion that consumers bought products when the economy was better and they had excess money to spend on entertainment. During the dreamcast life cycle so many economic changes happened that people didn't have the spending money they used to and looked to piracy to still get their entertainment.

Ian you're quote is from wired article july 2000. So piracy was big deal to them 10 months into cycle.
Economic changes that also happened during dreamcast 3 year life cycle:
Chrysler motor company announced it was cutting 38,000 jobs in Nov 2000.
Delphi Auto cut 11,500 jobs March 2001
Lear Corp. cut 4,800 jobs in 2001
September 11, 2001 terrorist attack flattened the economy
Enron scandal happened Dec 2001
The job cuts continued all the way into 2002

Last week’s announcement by Ford Motor Company that it would eliminate 35,000 jobs, including 22,000 in North America, was the sharpest expression of a job-cutting trend that has continued unabated in the US in the new year. Two million jobs were shed by US corporations in 2001, and the first two weeks of 2002 have seen further layoffs carried out in all segments of the economy—from retail to manufacturing to finance.

All this happened during three year life cycle of dreamcast in the market it sold the most units in. 2 million+ potential customers lost their jobs, terrorist attack, and then war with iraq.

Sonic Adventure sales happened at beginning on console cycle when no piracy and economy still ok.

I'm in danger of learning something lads :p some real interesting points being raised.

dubcity wrote:I agree with everything you said about piracy hurting sega Ian.

Other factors that hurt them:

Public sentiment after shitty 32x and Saturn launches
Sega of America vs Sega of Japan feuding
public waiting for Playstation 2 launch

Piracy has always been a big deal since napster hurt the music industry. But I have always been of the opinion that consumers bought products when the economy was better and they had excess money to spend on entertainment. During the dreamcast life cycle so many economic changes happened that people didn't have the spending money they used to and looked to piracy to still get their entertainment.

Ian you're quote is from wired article july 2000. So piracy was big deal to them 10 months into cycle.
Economic changes that also happened during dreamcast 3 year life cycle:
Chrysler motor company announced it was cutting 38,000 jobs in Nov 2000.
Delphi Auto cut 11,500 jobs March 2001
Lear Corp. cut 4,800 jobs in 2001
September 11, 2001 terrorist attack flattened the economy
Enron scandal happened Dec 2001
The job cuts continued all the way into 2002

Last week’s announcement by Ford Motor Company that it would eliminate 35,000 jobs, including 22,000 in North America, was the sharpest expression of a job-cutting trend that has continued unabated in the US in the new year. Two million jobs were shed by US corporations in 2001, and the first two weeks of 2002 have seen further layoffs carried out in all segments of the economy—from retail to manufacturing to finance.

All this happened during three year life cycle of dreamcast in the market it sold the most units in. 2 million+ potential customers lost their jobs, terrorist attack, and then war with iraq.

Sonic Adventure sales happened at beginning on console cycle when no piracy and economy still ok.

Yes fantastic post i agree with this was bad time people tend to compare copied games on ps1 or ps2 but just not even compare-able

My main point is every console was cracked at 1 time it broke sega just think of it.. Anyone reading it think of it.. Then maybe rethink what you use to..

No sony console or the others where cracked on 1 day all at once with no modding needed.. Not in it's first 10 months.. they had time to build a larger user base ...

All the above is also relevant on what Dubcity is talking about.. People tend to say copied games did not kill the ps1 or ps2 they had years and years of soild growth before any softmods and a user had to pay for hack modchip to play said copied games.. It was a consent you had to want to ..

Dreamcast owner knew i could just burn that game or buy .. Humans are not good with temptation..

Ian Micheal wrote: Yes fantastic post i agree with this was bad time people tend to compare copied games on ps1 or ps2 but just not even compare-able

My main point is every console was cracked at 1 time it broke sega just think of it.. Anyone reading it think of it.. Then maybe rethink what you use to..

No sony console or the others where cracked on 1 day all at once with no modding needed.. Not in it's first 10 months.. they had time to build a larger user base ...

All the above is also relevant on what Dubcity is talking about.. People tend to say copied games did not kill the ps1 or ps2 they had years and years of soild growth before any softmods and a user had to pay for hack modchip to play said copied games.. It was a consent you had to want to ..

Dreamcast owner knew i could just burn that game or buy .. Humans are not good with temptation..

100 percent agree. We would like to think the best of others but given temptation people will go to piracy. For a while closest Sony consoles came to piracy was bleem and even then you still had to have original copy to play.

Cass wrote:
2. Piracy killed the Dreamcast.

No one reason for me or smoking gun but as a teenager in the 90's everyone had chipped PS1. I think EA was a bigger reason.

This was my original take but Ian I think you make a compelling argument that piracy was indeed the most significant reason for the fate of the Dreamcast. Props to dubcity also for some great macro level insight.

On a side note and I appreciate it will be different in other parts of the world but where I grew up a working class council estate in Ireland almost every kid I knew who had a PS1 had it chipped - they also chipped the cable TV boxes both were done on an industrial scale - the guys knocked on the doors and and came to the houses and offered their services people didn't go to them. After they installed them they called round on a weekly basis and sold cd's for a fiver. We also had cheap cigarette and counterfeit goods being sold door to door - it was a different world back then.

Yeah that sound like not the same world. Example was in australia being caught with a modchip or even buying one was illegal .. My ps1 with modchip was well over $400 they would charge like a bull because of it.. Very rare to find a ps1 in 2nd hand shop with a modchip i have bought 6 of them over the years here in east cost mostly because they was $5 not one had a chip or modded. Even rarer to find a saturn with modchip.. Other thing a ps1 with a modchip you could not sell or put for sale .. All changed now but was a major thing then.. Example psxmodchips.com was shut down and other Internet sites at the time selling them was removed one by one.. Even being able to by the chip.. I had a small site that i had click thru from modchips.com they was taken down etc.. In australia i was the only one i knew with a modded ps1 very early and it was very costly and i knew people.. These people modded console sold drugs and other seedy things.. That was the type of people that did these things at the time in australia..

Just giving my world was not as common int he rest of the world to have a modded ps1 in the first 3 years at all.. Most did the swap trick with game shark and bit of tape and it was a hassle.. could not play many 2 disks games etc..

great thread, really a pleasure to read into

i know that mine could be a rare example, but i have started to use burned games on DC only when i could not find anything more on sales here
sad also to remember how Sony itself acted toward sellers, back in the day

imo Sony in first and the frenetic hype for PS2 killed the Dreamcast (first round ) before piracy

The Dreamcast was a dead end before its release, many books talk about that (MEGA CD + 32X + SATURN failures). Piracy is far from the main reason that Sega is not a device manufacturer anymore.

In 2000's, Internet transfer speed was very very very slow (at least in europe), it took hours to donwload games and many households did not have any access at all and sometimes more than a night to upload a game. Not to say that it was not so easy to find games. CDR were not so cheap back in the time too.

I had my Dreamcast in mid 2000, and I bought about 25 games (3-4 games were preowned).
More than I can finish to 100% in 1 year when Sega said that Dreamcast will be discontinued. For piracy I used my dad's computer to play PC games. I began to burn some backups in early 2003, when I bought the OG XBOX.

@Kremiso : I think the same for Sony, that is why I never bought one for their consoles