Mario's in da HOUSE!

Double-S- · Post by **Double-S-** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 11:55 am

So, how does nobody buying their product make Sega stupid? Except for maybe the somewhat bad marketing.

Edit: Beat by GG!

chriscaffee · Post by **chriscaffee** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 12:39 pm

They don't learn from their mistakes? Gosh guys, I didn't think that was a toughy.

Post by **Crazy Penguin** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 1:10 pm

I can't think of many mistakes Sega made with Dreamcast. It's the general public that's stupid.

Post by **Green Gibbon!** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 1:11 pm

What serious mistakes would you say they repeated? I'd say by the time the Dreamcast rolled around, they were doing everything right and it still wasn't working.

chriscaffee · Post by **chriscaffee** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 1:36 pm

CD
32X
CDX
Nomad
Saturn

plasticwingsband · Post by **plasticwingsband** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 1:44 pm

As GG! said before, even though the Saturn's a piece of shit, it's an utterly lovable piece of shit.

Light Speed · Post by **Light Speed** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 2:16 pm

The problem was that the Playstation got an assload of advertisments that helped pump it into the mainstream market. By the time the Dreamcast came out no one cared and they wanted to wait for the PS2.

Neo Yi · Post by **Neo Yi** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 2:19 pm

The problem was that the Playstation got an assload of advertisments that helped pump it into the mainstream market. By the time the Dreamcast came out no one cared and they wanted to wait for the PS2.

Makes sense, they lured me in.
~Neo

Spazz · Post by **Spazz** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:28 pm

And the PS2 made DVDs popular in Japan.

Grant · Post by **Grant** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:47 pm

I think people were just wary of the Sega hardware brand when it came to the Dreamcast. Like, "oh, this is another Saturn" thing.

Light Speed · Post by **Light Speed** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:51 pm

Well it flopped just like the Saturn. Mainly cause those fuckers thought that. Bitches!

Post by **Esrever** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 3:58 pm

Sega fucked themselves up the ass because they released too many consoles in too short a time. It discouraged people from buying any more. I know, at least, that's why I don't own a Sega Saturn.

The Dreamcast was wonderful, but it was already too late. Only a company with more marketing cash than Sega had could hope to compete with the PS2. And unfortunately, despite some strong launch titles, the Dreamcast quickly slipped into nearly a year in which there were almost no "must have" titles being released. JSR, Shenmue, PSO, Seaman, etc etc -- they came out too late. I don't know about you guys, but when I look at my rack of DC games, I don't see a lot of white cases.

Post by **Segaholic2** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 4:01 pm

The Dreamcast had one of (if not) the strongest launch line-ups ever.

In my mind, the only reason Dreamcast failed was because of everyone buying into PlayStation2 hype.

Light Speed · Post by **Light Speed** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 4:04 pm

I agree. I had so many arguments with people about how the Dreamcast was better than the PS2. They just wouldn't hear it, They wouldn't even try games on the Dreamcast they were just like, "FUCK THAT, PS2 IS GOOD CAUSE SOMEONE SAID SO!"

Post by **Esrever** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 4:36 pm

The launch WAS awesome. But a man can only play those games for so long before he starts to wish there was another game worth buying. After Christmas of 1999 (when, as you may recall, the Dreamcast sold very well), there was almost nothing of interest for months. That's not especially unusual in the very seasonal console world, I know, but those were the only months that Sega had to really carve out a market presence before the PS2 arrived.

I bought my Dreamcast in September of 2000. With the exception of Crazy Taxi, every single game that I bought with it was released the previous fall.

Double-S- · Post by **Double-S-** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 9:10 pm

Dreamcast's 2000 holiday line up was fuggin insane good.

PlayStation only succeeded because Squaresoft sold their souls to Sony.

muke · Post by **muke** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 12:18 am

Sega also makes the same mistake every time they release a system: TOO EARLY. I believe that if they waited to see what the competition had in store for them, then they could release last and really wow the crowd with new technologies that were not around when the other companies released theirs, like how Sony waited for DVD capabilities to become more advanced instead of rushing it to compete with Sega. This stradegy seems to work for Nintendo too, just take a look at the N64 and the Gamecube!

Post by **Segaholic2** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 12:29 am

The GameCube is getting its ass kicked. Great example.

Light Speed · Post by **Light Speed** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 2:13 pm

That's cause the damn thing has no 3rd party support. The GameCube doesn't have anything that the PS2 doesn't have aside from being more powerful, so if they did what you said they did, it was a lousy job.

Post by **Esrever** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:08 pm

The Gamecube isn't doing significantly worse than the Xbox, though. It's install base is just more evenly distributed worldwide than the big green box's.

So really, both the Cube and the Xbox are getting ass-rammed by the PS2, which I'd like to point out was the first of those three consoles to be released, and the most prehistoric in terms of the actual hardware power. The oldest, most technically inferior console is the king of the market right now. So I'm not sure that being too early is a problem.

The Dreamcast could very well still be around today (though admittedly breathing it's last breaths) if it had been backed by a bigger marketing campaign and a stronger, more constant lineup of marketable titles. The first party games were fantastic, but they were released in concentrated clusters followed by months and months of nothing at all. And there was virtually no noteworthy third party titles to fill in those gaps. And come on, like it or not, you can't launch a console in today's market without at least having third party support from EA... that's suicide.

Post by **Green Gibbon!** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:16 pm

CD
32X
CDX
Nomad
Saturn

The CDX and Nomad don't count because they were just rereleases of existing hardware. The Sega CD kind of sucked, but Sega wasn't alone on that one. NEC, SNK, and even Nintendo all had chips on that table. The 32X was a half-assed idea from start to finish, so it got the fate it deserved. The Saturn actually had a good amount of support in Japan, probably more than it deserved, but even though the hardware was a piece of shit there were some really excellent games released for it.

I would say that the only genuinely "stupid" moves on the company's part in terms of hardware would be the 32X, and to a lesser extent, the Saturn. In the Saturn's case, not only was it a messy, half-assed piece of hardware, but the launch was fucked up everywhere, which only proved that Sega was running with its tail between its legs from Sony. Unlike the 32X, though, it did get some phenomenal games which to this day you can't play anywhere else. And even though the hardware was poorly designed, at least the systems fucking worked, which is more than you can say for PlayStations even now.

The launch WAS awesome. But a man can only play those games for so long before he starts to wish there was another game worth buying. After Christmas of 1999 (when, as you may recall, the Dreamcast sold very well), there was almost nothing of interest for months.

That's par for the course. The fact that the Dreamcast did have a very successful launch in terms of quality games is, in fact, more than can be said for any of the consoles that have been released since. Not only were there no noteworthy games released for the PS2 until 10-11 months after its launch, but it didn't even have anything to play at launch. The best games available were a slightly enhanced port of DoA2, which was already long since available on the Cast, and the worst Ridge Racer game in the series. Xbox had the vastly overrated Halo and DoA3, which was good, but... still DoA2. Then there was nothing to play on that for, like, a year and a half, and even now pickings are slim unless you're a halfwit American country boy who thinks Tom Clancy is Jesus Christ and rides to GameStop on his goddamn 4-wheeler. The Cube had Monkey Ball as its sole launch savior, unless you're one of those drooling Nintendo fanboys who will defend the utter dreck that is Luigi's Mansion. And once again, there were no exceptional new games released for a solid 6-7 months after, and even now they're still barely trickling out.

Seriously, the Dreamcast had the best system launch I can remember, far better than the three that have come out since. Even if all the good games were released in the first couple of months and it slowed down until 6-7 months later, those launch games still add up to more quality titles in the same period of time (6-7 months) than any of the systems since have had. That lull after the launch is standard procedure.

Post by **Esrever** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:38 pm

Well, first of all, the PS2 was (at the time) the exclusive home of Madden. I know almost none of us play those games, but they are still a humungous driving force in the console market and we probably shouldn't forget about them. Madden is almost always in the top twenty best-selling games, year round. Madden sold PS2s.

Other than that, I think the PS2 could coast through the lull on hype alone. Upcoming games could propel sales because they were sequels or extensions of incredibly popular, system selling PS1 franchises like Final Fantasy and Metal Gear.

Sega's upcoming A-list titles, on the other hand, were almost entirely original properties. They couldn't cash in on the success of previous itterations, or even on the reputation of their developer. They were games that needed to "prove" to people that they were good. And they might have had a better opportunity if they could have gotten them out the door during the lull before the PS2 was released. They needed to maintain the momentum of the system's launch, which I think was propelled largely by the exceptional launch software and not by the marketing campaign or expectations of future titles.

The DC's first year was exceptional when compared to the other three consoles, but it wasn't exceptional enough to overcome their other disadvantages. It's not fair, and it made me very angry at the time, but that's how it goes. The best man lost.

Post by **Green Gibbon!** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 4:01 pm

Exactly, but that's not Sega's fault, that's what I'm saying. They did everything right and they still got fucked because of the general public's insatiable appetite for mediocrity.

Double-S- · Post by **Double-S-** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 4:12 pm

Esrever wrote:So really, both the Cube and the Xbox are getting ass-rammed by the PS2, which I'd like to point out was the first of those three consoles to be released, and the most prehistoric in terms of the actual hardware power. The oldest, most technically inferior console is the king of the market right now. So I'm not sure that being too early is a problem.

I thought Xbox's market share was up to 33% in the US. That doesn't seem entirely assrammed. Unless you're talking about Japan, in which case, yes, Xbox is being raped. But I don't think Microsoft even really bothered trying for Japan in this generation.

Post by **Green Gibbon!** » Tue Jan 11, 2005 4:48 pm

I haven't looked at any numbers in a while, but I would still assume that, worldwide, Xbox is a league ahead of the Cube. The Box is still annihilating the Cube here in the states, and while it's the opposite in Japan, the US market is several times the size of that. Both systems are being sodomized by the PS2 pretty much everywhere in the world, so it's almost a moot point.