I had so much fun playing the Dreamcast, I could never figure out why it didn't do well.
I owned one, and absolutely loved it. But the amount of games you could buy compared to the alternatives was a massive drawback, and Sega didn't have enough household names like Nintendo to pull through.
Blu-ray has been a successful format, not at all like what happened to LaserDisc. Given the increase in the speed, reliability, and availability of broadband over the last decade (hence streaming) plus the aforementioned acceptability of DVD, Blu-ray's window of opportunity and overall potential were considerably narrower and more limited than DVD's.
However, if this were the reason for the demise of the console, we could expect large volume sales of the (loss-leader? or close to it?) console, and limited game sales.
Instead, unfortunately for Sega and ultimately, everyone, we saw limited sales of both the Dreamcast console and its games - a sign that the console itself was simply defeated by the PS2, rather than piracy.
Another argument here is that the PS2 suffered from a similarly trivial "swap magic" exploit just after release, where as long as the disc drive never registered a disc ejection, running code could simply be switched out for another piece of running code.
By the time Dreamcast piracy was common place, the console was already cancelled.
That said, I do agree with your point about the fighting games. They’re definitely played better with arcade sticks (same is true for beat em ups on most systems though).
So, uh, like Skyrim in PS3?
Edit: apparently wrong again! not my day today.
From the page linked.
Most people I knew had one, but nobody payed for games because you could just use a boot cd and play pirated games endlessly.
One of my friends had hundreds upon hundreds of games. More than any of us could ever play.
Statistical data showed that people were not buying the Dreamcast even though the games were easily pirated. Therefore piracy had no bearing on the console.
The Dreamcast needed sales and Sony's hype machine and SEGA's past reputation lead to consumers avoiding the Dreamcast.
The Dreamcast, however, ran a PowerVR2 chip which was much more familiar for anyone with prior dev experience.
Perversely the PlayStation 2 was more complex due to custom hardware like the “emotion engine”. But Sony already had enough momentum from developers and consumers for any such difficulties to become game changing.
People are still developing games for it using open source libraries. There was recently a 3D racing game released.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pixelheart/arcade-racin...
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/dn275r/sega_sa...
Remember that Windows CE was just an alternative to the actual SDK, and it was something like DX 5.
Nobody has mentioned piracy, but it's worth noting that Dreamcast's proprietary GD-ROM format was cracked pretty quickly, allowing games to be pirated with a regular CD-R. This article [2] and HN discussion [3] goes into detail about the technical implementation of the format and how piracy came about. That didn't help Sega's financial position.
For a bit of personal history, in mid-2000 I worked with Sony America on a PS2 title for the upcoming PS2 release while I was a game designer at Pandemic Studios. I would have much preferred to work on a Dreamcast game because the console and its games were just brilliant and forward-thinking. I never got a chance to work with Dreamcast's tooling, but I heard it was quite good. By comparison the PS2 was extremely difficult to work with at the time, the tooling was terrible... we had to hire several consultants and struggled getting it performant.
EA also didn't bring their games over. The stated reason from Bing Gordon was their developers didn't want to work on it, but given my own experience I don't believe it.
[1] Around the time the Dreamcast left the market, the firstgen Xbox launched, and went on to lose $5-7 billion trying to crack the market. Microsoft had the deep pockets that Sega lacked, and their willingness to spend also caused losses at Sony as they locked horns in subsequent generations.
Square never developed for a SEGA console so that was no blow to SEGA Square not being a developer.
The Dreamcast, at least from the commercials I remember, didn't really seem all that appealing by comparison and the games available for it never really stood out to me or anything, at least at thr time. I have played some Dreamcast games since and did enjoy them, it would have been cool if it hadn't died and things had gone differently for sega. I always did love the genesis I spent about as much time on that as I did the nes and snes as a kid.
I remember I didn't even hear about sonic adventure until I got the sequel on the gamecube years later. Both of which are actually pretty great games.
But we had a lot of choices on the n64 and most of the time my siblings and me or my cousins and all of us played together so we had a lot more choice of stuff we could all play together. There was tons of great 4-player games on the n64. Some i think are still the best 4 player games out there.
GoldenEye, perfect dark, the multiplayer on Conker's bad fur day, the mario party games(except the first one...that bastard killed all our control sticks...stupid weak n64 controllers and those devious stick spinning mini games designed to sell more controllers.), super smash brothers, mario kart, diddy kong racing, Iggy's wrecking ball, I dunno, I could just keep listing games all day.
The n64 still probably, gives hands down the most choice in and arguably some of the best local 4 player gaming experience out there.
It was the same reason why none of us had a playstation growing up and why we ended up with a GameCube for a ps2. Not as much opportunity for multiplayer.
That console generation had a clear winner, despite Nintendo doing its own wonderful thing as usual. Sega were out of the running, due to bad previous consoles, price, Sony's frankly dishonest publicity about what the PS2 would be able to do, some great hits coming to PS2 first, the DVD drive, and just the general network effect that means the winner of a format war sells many more units.
Or, for that matter, the same basic story as the prior generation as a whole: PS1 sold about 100 million, N64 33 million, Saturn 9 million. The Saturn got undercut by the Dreamcast but both were clear also-rans while Sony just ran away with the market.
Thinking about Sega kind of straddling the generations also just drives home how many moves in a row for them just didn't work: the 32X, the Sega CD, the Saturn, the Dreamcast.
Having played Sonic Adventure 2 about a year ago on the DC, I have to emphatically disagree. SA2 is hot garbage. Maybe the GC version was better, I don't know, but I really couldn't see what people liked about SA2.
I did really enjoy SA1, but since that is colored by nostalgia I can't say for certain it isn't exactly as bad (though I seriously doubt it).
Here's one of the big ads I often saw on TV... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT1Tbc_PD2k what is a Dreamcast?
Another UK ad... they had the word "Dreamcast" on the Arsenal top... https://nirvanacph.com/welcome/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/dr... what is a Dreamcast?