Console The Downfall of Sega’s Involvement in the Console Industry

[JayAgostino]

Besides the extremely poor sales of the Dreamcast, what do you think influenced Sega to give up its market to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft? It's something that always puzzled me. I never really understood why the Dreamcast was such a failure amongst console gamers...

 

[diamond.g]

Sega 32x and Saturn were the downfall. Dreamcast was a great system that also came out a bit too early and had a big issue with piracy.

 

[SuperMatt]

I had a Dreamcast and it was a great system. The Genesis was great for its time. The systems in between those two, as @diamond.g mentioned, were uncompetitive, at least in America.

 

[Nycturne]

Sega 32x and Saturn were the downfall. Dreamcast was a great system that also came out a bit too early and had a big issue with piracy.

Even years after it died, pirating games was too convoluted and time consuming for many to do it, and the pirated copies were usually missing something that the retail version had, and suffered from noticeably worse loading time. Who wants to download a 1.5GB rip of Skies of Arcadia that’s slow to load, had the audio recompressed to fit CDs and takes days to download over 56k modem on top of requiring special tools to burn?

The Dreamcast actually had good attach rates, higher in 2 years than the PS2’s first two years. But they sold consoles for too much of a loss that even high attach rates weren’t enough to break even, on top of other financial issues and 3rd party support issues.