DREAMCAST

Here's some pasta.

I wouldn't say that was the main reason for the Dreamcast's commercial failure. Ultimately it boiled down to Sega's years of mismanagement which started around the release of the Sega CD. Between the Sega CD, the 32X, Saturn, and to a lesser extent the Game Gear Sega flooded the market with hardware and very little software support. Years of the consumer investing in the hardware with very little return on the software side of things greatly hurt the consumer confidence in the company. By the time the Dreamcast came out the company was financially hurting and not many people were willing to buy another piece of poorly supported hardware. Surprisingly though, in my opinion, Sega actually did a great job supporting the console especially in first party releases.
Considering the very short run of the console the Dreamcast actually has a pretty strong library. Shenmue, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 (arguably), Skies of Arcadia, Jet Grind Radio, Seaman, Space Channel 5, Powerstone 1 and 2, Virtua Tennis, Phantasy Star Online, Chu Chu Rocket, Samba de Amigo, Ikaruga, the fighting games listed below, etc. Granted, Sega itself seems to have gone through a "let's release really quirky games" phase around this time which didn't do too much to help it's marketability. Ultimately though it was years of mismanagement that killed the Dreamcast not really any major flaw in the system or the library.
TL;DR Poor management= Dreamcast's untimely death

http://www.411mania.com/games/columns/158009/Ask-411-Games-Special-Edition-10.18.10:-Sega-Of-Japan-V-Sega-Of-America!.htm

This is a good read for a thread like this.
I guess I did forget about this guy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcIYDxmnKHY

But that was in Japan.

>SEGA mismanagement.
>SEGA Saturn screwed over many developers and they never truly forgave SEGA.
>Release Dreamcast, it's gaining traction but the Xbox and PS2 are on the horizon.
>PS2 comes out, has DVD player.
>Dreamcast has no DVD player.
>SEGA loses JPN.
>PS2 and Xbox take control in USA.
>SEGA loses USA.
>Fighting between SEGA USA and SEGA JPN continue
And there you go.

Some guy here explained all of this way better than I could, but basically:

>In Kalinske's own words: "I went to Japan and told the board we had to take Altered Beast out of the hardware, put our best title Sonic the Hedgehog (which was joint US and Japan development) in, lower the hardware price to $149.00, staff up in the U.S. and develop a lot more American Sports and licensed titles, Provide large incentives for the 3rd Party community to support us, and take on Nintendo in our advertising by making fun of them, telling the world that our Genesis Games were better, and targeting teens not kids ( i.e. we became one of the largest advertisers on MTV). The board talked in Japanese for about an hour, at the end Nakayama -san said we don't agree with anything you want to do and started to leave the room. I thought that was the shortest CEO tenure in history, but he turned at the door and said "I promised you a free hand so go ahead with your plans, we'll support you".

Once they stopped listening to Kalinske, everything went south.

>Tom Kalinske and his team, who had been so successful in making Sega a relevant hardware company in North America, had been pretty much stripped of all power, basically doing what Sega of Japan told them to. By July of 1996, Kalinske had had enough, and resigned his position as President of SoA, taking most of his executive staff with him. In a show of support for Kalinske, Sega founder David Rosen also left the company. Strangely, Hayao Nakayama, the man responsible for almost all of the decisions being made at Sega, also resigned in deference to his old friend, Rosen, though he did remain on the board.

>More importantly, the decisions made during that time by Sega of Japan (and to some extent, Sega of America under new leader Bernie Stolar) took the fan-friendly image Kalinske had given Sega and basically destroyed it, as Sega abruptly cut support for all systems but the Saturn despite the millions of Genesis consoles still sitting in homes around the world. A couple of years later, Stolar would pull a similar stunt by publicly announcing that the Saturn was "not Sega's future" while the system was still on the market, basically killing what little support was left for the console.

Also can't forget this:

>Stolar is remembered for his controversial policies on what games would be permitted release in America, most notably banning RPGs and 2D games, which he felt were "too nerdy" to represent the fledgling console's public image, and didn't properly demonstrate the PlayStation's processing power.

>too nerdy

God Tier:
Tom Kalinske
Nick Alexander
Hayao Nakayama
Hajime Satomi

Shit Tier:
Bernie Stolar
JF Cecillon (spent the Dreamcast's PAL marketing budget on...Arsenal football shirts)
Peter Moore (the Shenmue 2 fiasco; gave the US rights to MS purely so he could get a job at MS).

Only Sega games I am looking forward to are the 3DS classics. The Sega of today would never make things as cool as Space Harrier and Ecco.

Not the other guy, but at the time the market was pushing hard for 3D and SEGA was building a 2D powerhouse console. When they realized 3D was the future they slapped 3D on to it as decided in some board meeting, and the console became a glued on mess of multiple processors hard to program to.

The saturn has great games, but hardware wise it's a fucking mess. Having the 3D based on quadrangles instead of triangles didn't help either.

I get the impression that anyone who owned a Dreamcast really loved it. There's always mention of it meeting an undeserved end. Was it (or its library) noticeably better than other consoles or are people just being nostalgic and polite about a dead brand? You know, like not saying bad things about a person at their funeral.

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