[emil0r]

A combination of bad PR from Sega Saturn, fanboyism of Nintendo over Sega, Sony absolutely killing it with Playstation One and hyping Playstation Two to pieces leading to few game studios making games for Dreamcast, which lead to fewer sales, etc.

I owned one, and absolutely loved it. But the amount of games you could buy compared to the alternatives was a massive drawback, and Sega didn't have enough household names like Nintendo to pull through.

[itisit]

I'd add PS2's DVD playback capability as another contributing factor to the Dreamcast's demise. Was kind of a big deal at the time.

[neurostimulant]

I think PS3 was the cheapest bluray player you could buy when it was released. It probably boost sales a bit like PS2's DVD playback feature.

[agumonkey]

weren't DC games easier to copy too ?

[jandrese]

It may be a minor quibble, but I found the DC controller to be rather hard on the hands. The edges were just sharp enough to be uncomfortable after a good round of Marvel vs. Capcom.

[laumars]

I quite liked the DC controller. Never felt the comfort issues you’ve reported on (but everyone’s hands are different).

That said, I do agree with your point about the fighting games. They’re definitely played better with arcade sticks (same is true for beat em ups on most systems though).

[city41]

I don't think it's minor. It's a very uncomfortable controller. It certainly dampened my interest in the console a bit.

[erickhill]

The Capcom fighting games on Dreamcast were arcade quality at the time. Absolutely stunning. My favorite was Marvel vs Capcom. I wasn't very good at it, but I was mesmerized by the graphics and great overall UX.

[toast0]

IIRC the Dreamcast and the Naomi arcade system are very similar. The arcade systems have about twice the ram, and can run from rom cartridges as well as optical media (read once on boot into a dedicated disc cache), and there's some variants with interesting I/O, but there wasn't a difference in compute or GPU capabilities.

[lloeki]

Notably Soul Reaver 2 was aiming for a Dreamcast release but then moved to be a PS2 exclusive, and there was a fully playable port of Half-Life that never saw an official release.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Half-Life_(Dreamcast_port)

[opencl]

I've played the Half Life port, it is playable but had some fairly major issues. The framerate, controls, and load times were all pretty bad. The save files would become larger and larger (and took longer) as you progressed through each level to the point that in some sections a single save would occupy well over half of the VMU's capacity.

[Dirlewanger]

The hype/release of the PS2 is understated. It was massive. Since then nothing has, and nothing probably will, rival it again.

[astronautjones]

EA not supporting it did a lot of damage, though ironically almost every sega sports franchise was better than their games

[dleslie]

EA refusing to publish games was a killer, too. Albeit 2K sports was a great line at the time, but EA owned all the important licenses.

[triangleman]

Couldn't developers have easily ported their Windows games to Windows CE?

[muststopmyths]

I don't believe Windows CE had DirectX until later, so there probably wasn't any compatibility path.

Edit: apparently wrong again! not my day today.

[numpad0]

PC port from DC games happened for some titles but I’d imagine the other way around would have been difficult.

[kjaftaedi]

I think they lost because they were too easily hacked.

Most people I knew had one, but nobody payed for games because you could just use a boot cd and play pirated games endlessly.

One of my friends had hundreds upon hundreds of games. More than any of us could ever play.

[Grazester]

That is not true. It has been debunked so many times. Sega and there poor decisions during the end of the Genesis era(add-on that cost consumers hundred and then dropping support soon after) and Saturn days(surprise early launch angering developer, consumers and retailers enough for them to never carry the Saturn) lead to the death of the Dreamcast.

Statistical data showed that people were not buying the Dreamcast even though the games were easily pirated. Therefore piracy had no bearing on the console.

The Dreamcast needed sales and Sony's hype machine and SEGA's past reputation lead to consumers avoiding the Dreamcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d2xuRwYUt4

[pjmlp]

And being relatively hard to program for, which made many studios ignore it.

[laumars]

That was the Saturn you’re thinking about. The Saturn had two sprite based processors and did 3D by skewing those tiles. This also presented other problems like with transparency (morphing squares into triangles causes problems with alpha blending). It was how Sega arcade boards also worked at that time and so Sega engineers were well versed in writing 3D engines like that but the rest of the development community had settled on the now standard approach of triangles. Couple that with the lack of an SDK and a dual processor system in era before developers were used to writing for such hardware and you had a very problematic console.

The Dreamcast, however, ran a PowerVR2 chip which was much more familiar for anyone with prior dev experience.

Perversely the PlayStation 2 was more complex due to custom hardware like the “emotion engine”. But Sony already had enough momentum from developers and consumers for any such difficulties to become game changing.

[Grazester]

As many have pointed out it was very easy to develop for. The developers of Dead or Alive 2(Tecmo), one of best looking 3D fighters on the Dreamcast state stated that developing on the Dreamcast was like writing a sentence with a pen whereas on the PlayStation 2 it was like writing a sentence with a brush.

People are still developing games for it using open source libraries. There was recently a 3D racing game released.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelheart/arcade-racin...

[wk_end]

Was it? That’s not something I’d heard before (unlike, say, the PS2/3, Saturn, or N64, where complaints like that are common). What made the DC hard to wrangle?