The Sega Saturn is a prime example of how that was not the case. They brute forced it and it cost a fortune as a result. Sony essentially matched it with generic parts for cheaper and developed it in a shorter amount of time along side them, the Saturn build did not directly inform its development.

Edit: in one of the books I read on this subject - I think it was either Replay or Console Wars, there is a great account of how when the Saturn dropped somy was very nervous because it was out well before the PlayStation was released. They immediately grabbed one and disassembled it, only to discover the monstrosity under the hood that made them feel very secure in their decisions. The two dedicated chips getting 3D to work right out the gate drove the cost up immensely. They knew they didn’t need to beat Sega to market because they were bleeding cash at an unbelievable rate. The game sales would never cover that.

No one is saying Dreamcast didn’t have a great library. The problem was Sega was on the brink of financial ruin when it launched and it simply didn’t move units due to its price point, awkward timing between consoles, and as you said prior saturation with their consoles.

I remember nobody trusting Sega to not abandon yet another console after a year like all the others so a lot of people stopped buying their brand.

Only decision Sega made in direct response to their competitors was the price drop after Sony kind of forced them to. I didn’t really say anything beyond that.

As for NeoGeo yeah big missteps/misinterpreting of the home gaming market’s direction

I used to play the maze puzzles for quake 3 arena to unlock cool shit like unlimited ammo, low gravity. My dreamcast was in use for many years being taken to parties where we played quake 4 player with crazy game options like that. That vmu got passed around to the point we were mapping out the maze on paper. Those were great times.

We all had binders of pirated Dreamcast games…

I think I’m starting to see why it died.

Louder on pirated games than official ones IIRC. The laser worked harder to read them.

Didn’t the pirates find out that they could copy the games onto regular CDs using some backdoor from the format of Karaoke CDs? You just need that famous loader CD to swap discs.

I’ve heard the pirates soon optimised the layout of the data on their versions so that there was less strain of the drive.

And no compelling games library. What do you buy a Wii U to play? Bayonetta 2?

I had buttons get stuck on mine that I tried to fix but couldn’t.

That damn thing had some of the most fun games ever.

I remember original Xbox being the first console that banned people for modding their console. I and everyone I knew had modded PS1 and PS2.

The PS2, bad third-party relationships, and a limp Western market strategy. Even with competent management it’s quite possible, even likely it still would have been the last console Sega produced, but it could have gone a full generation with better support.

Mega drive would have sounded cool when it came out, though it’s perhaps the most dated sounding name of the bunch.

Turbo Grafx was pretty cool tho.

Even in the 70s and 80s they were coming up with cooler names for consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey and the Intellivision. Atari named a bunch of their consoles after big cats, though they didn’t live up to their names. At least there was some imagination.

It was easy like 15 years ago, now you just get a expansion card to hook up a usb thumb drive and have the entire catalog on it.

AliExpress has a part that replaces the disc reader. Let’s you play games on the console from SD card.

For others without a console, redream works pretty well for most games, even on a fairly old PC.

Oh, Sega was limping along well before the Saturn’s failure let Sony finish them off. They completely fractured their market when they botched both the (expensive to manufacture) 32X and SegaCD, canceled the integrated (cheaper) Neptune, then failed to showcase the Saturn as their next generation while simultaneously making it too hard to develop for.

Even when Dreamcast finally became a clean-slate for Sega, it was far too late to serve as a 5th chance.

Second chance in that the Dreamcast was doing very well in the west, but not in Japan. They elected to kill it because the Japanese side was struggling. I dont think they saw much continued success without them. It was Peter Moore who ultimately made the call to kill the Dreamcast.

For the Dreamcast, specifically, there was a show on G4 (on cable, before merging w/ TechTV) that I remember casually watching a bajillion years ago that discussed what happened with the Dreamcast. Basically, the PS2 is what happened.

There’s this 5 second blip of the program that burned itself into my brain where someone from Sega was talking about how awesome and exciting things were one moment, and then PS2, then *cricket sounds*. They mention how they had to stop production because they literally had warehouses filled with Dreamcasts just sitting there.

It was kinda nuts for them 'cause the Dreamcast actually sold pretty ok until people learned about the PS2’s price and the fact you could watch DVDs on it, which alone was huge. Sony just fuckin instantly annihilated everyone so hard with the PS2. It wasn’t feasible, timewise or financially, for Sega to iterate on a new system fast enough and somehow dump all the systems they had lying around, and they knew if they wanted to contiue to exist, they had to switch gears to be mostly software/publishing, aside from arcade cabinets.

Though (to me, sadly) Sega shed the last of their arcade board-makin days in 2021, they are the reigning champ and legends of bigass video game machines. They made more than 500 arcade games and produced over 20 arcade system boards that ended up being able to run stuff like huge Unreal Engine 4 games on dual 50" screens. They sold the last of their arcades back in 2022, leaving a pretty dope legacy behind, even though they’re still kicking around otherwise. I guess COVID was to their arcades as the PS2 was to the Dreamcast.

Why do most youtubers act like the only target audience is teens? It’s cringe.

Sure beats the other method where I also don’t know what I’m picking lol

Definitely a Nintendog