this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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The 32X and Saturn releases were confusingly close to each other and could easily lead to some confusion with consumers. Releasing both a disk console and a disk addon for the existing console in the same year could confuse people on whether they needed the new console or just the disk addon, especially with marketing that didn't exactly make it clear. Similar issue the WiiU had with people thinking it was an addon for the Wii and determining they didnt need it. If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
SEGA just didn't pick the right console features for the right time. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time releasing in 1998, but by the time the PS2, GameCube, and especially Xbox launched just 2-3 years later, the Dreamcast hardware looked extremely outdated, because it was.
I mostly agree, except for this
You're effectively saying that development of the Dreamcast should've begun before the tech for it even existed. The Saturn's development began back in 1992, after the release of the Model 1, when 3D graphics were a wild dream for home consumers. The Sega Model 3, which served as a basis for the Dreamcast, saw its first arcade release in 1996. M3 was super powerful, but in 1996 it'd also be prohibitively expensive for any home consumer to afford. The Dreamcast that the world saw in 1998/1999 was literally impossible to achieve back in 1996, the "best" thing would've been something like a Saturn 2.5 which maaayyybeee could've run Model 3 games at significantly lower quality.
Not necessarily. Even if the hardware wasn't exactly the same, it came out too close to the Saturn. Had there never been a Saturn and the Dreamcast, even if it was slightly weaker like a Saturn 2.5, would have launched in 1996, the console would not have done so poorly. It also would not have been so quickly outclassed by its competition, as it would have directly competed with the PS1 and Nintendo64 the same year.
Its really all to my point that piracy had nothing to do with the console's failure. There were other problems with the Dreamcast that caused its death.