SEGA’s greatest museum piece

When I have kids, I’m sure they’ll be geeks. In fact, I’ll make sure of it! My plan is to start them off young – make sure they learn to count starting at zero, and give them a brief introduction to binary, then move them on to data structures and algorithms, illustrating the push and pop operations with stacking cups. As they grow, I’m sure they’ll be some family outings to museums – not your boring natural history stuff, though – proper ones about computers and games consoles, and no doubt hidden in a corner behind untouched glass panes will be one of these.

“Daddy, what’s that?”, my son will ask.

“Ah, that, son, is a Sega Dreamcast. At one point around the turn of the century, it was the most powerful games console on the planet!”

“Where there lots of good games for it?”

“Oh yes! Lots! In fact it pioneered the way for a lot of what was to come. It was the first console ever to have online games. Many people, even to this day, maintain that it was one of the greatest consoles ever made.”

“So they sold lots of them, then?”

And it this point I’ll bore my son with the tale of how one company made the best product, and still failed.

Why did it fail?

Most consoles fail because they’re really crap, overpriced, or both, but the Dreamcast was neither. The true reason the Dreamcast flopped was because of what had gone before, and what lay ahead.

Sega’s many add-ons

Let’s take a look at Sega’s early ’90s console making days – I’m going to deal with UK based names and dates to make my life easier. In 1990, they released the Mega Drive, which did pretty well. Then they released the Mega CD add-on in 1993, which added a CD drive. Then, in the next year, they released the 32X, reverting back to cartridges as the future of gaming. The year after this, in 1995, they released the Sega Saturn, and just two years after that, they started talking about the Dreamcast.

Had you been rich enough and foolish enough to keep up with Sega’s console  and add-on releases, you’d have spent over £1000! (My many and varied sources say the Mega Drive was £190, Mega CD – £270, 32X – £170, and Saturn a whopping £399 – random internet figures, so may not be accurate). As you can imagine, with the games really not justifying this kind of expenditure, Sega annoyed a lot of gamers.

Now think about this as a games developer. Games might have been simpler back then, but they still had a long development time. Sega’s break-neck pace of releasing new things just because they could seriously screwed over the developers. EA, who are about as cross-platform as they come, even refused outright to make any games for the Dreamcast at all! This meant that Sega themselves were the ones developing, or at least publishing, many of the best Dreamcast titles.

Beaten by rumours

Ultimately, what really killed the Dreamcast wasn’t even another console – it was just the rumours that such a thing existed! With 100 million PlayStation owners in love with their consoles, just the mere idea of a PlayStation 2 was enough to make them wait, save their money, and bypass the Dreamcast completely.

Lessons learnt

“Daddy, what’s that thing?”

“Oh, that? That’s an Android phone. That’s from when Google used to make phones.”

“Why don’t they make phones any more?”

“Well, it’s a lot like the story of why Sega don’t make consoles. It’s funny, they even tried the same marketing tactics. Look at these old posters!”

“Ultimately, though,”, I continue, “Google failed in the phone market because of fragmentation – that’s when lots of different versions of the same platform exist at the same time. Like Sega, they didn’t have a very clear direction for the future. It seemed like they had products, like Android and Chrome OS, that competed with themselves in some ways. And they released new features so fast that no-one could keep up. Combine that with a crazy system for OS updates through the network carriers, lots of different screen resolutions and hardware, and an app marketplace that hid away paid for apps, and lots of developers started to give up on Android. That’s why Daddy never made any Android apps, but instead became a millionaire through making games on iOS. And everybody else, knowing, that the next iPhone would be out in June, would rather wait for something that was just a rumour than buy an Android phone.”

“But Daddy, didn’t they learn from Sega?”, Json asks (I told you I would make my son a geek!).

“It’s funny, everyone at the time was telling Google that fragmentation was a real problem. But they never saw it coming. I guess they were just too big and too arrogant for their own good.”