[alexjplant]

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches... I could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.

> Hideki Sato was responsible.

I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?

[Tiktaalik]

Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.

Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.

Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.

[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.

[IshKebab]

I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche.

DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.

[wk_end]

Let's throw on one more: consumers had lost faith in Sega. The Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn (in the US) were all abandoned by the company (for understandable reasons, but still). Why shell out another $200 for yet another system which was going to be prematurely dropped in a couple of years? Which, of course, was exactly what happened.

[some-guy]

Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)

[jolmg]

You make it sound like dual shoulders were standard, but PS(2) was the odd one for having that. None of N64, Xbox nor Gamecube had them. It wasn't really until the Xbox 360 that you'd see it outside of Sony.

[some-guy]

Now that you mention it, maybe I'm thinking more of the dual analog sticks than the shoulders. But yeah, Gamecube at least had a Z trigger in addition to the shoulders.

[chocochunks]

Yeah, I think it would have had other issues if it carried on further too. Games were starting to understand using the 2nd analog stick and the DC controller was also missing 5 buttons that the Xbox and PS2 controllers had. Even some GameCube ports felt weird because of the missing buttons and that only had 4 less buttons and a 2nd analog stick.

[Grazester]

Here's what's interesting.The Maple bus and the Dreamcast supported a second analog stick, They just never added it to the controller.

[SilverElfin]

You may call those a debacle. But I think it was a great time in the world of gaming and electronics in general. Commercial failures aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can still be fun.

[alt227]

> I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole

I dont necessarily agree with the guy you are posting to, but if Hideki Sato is being bestowed the glory of 'Designer of all Segas consoles' then he also needs to hold responsibility for their failings, of which there are many.

[jgon]

You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.