"And because Sega is working with Swatch, we wanted to encourage the use of the BEAT system."

This was also marketing driven, it seems.

Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)

"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."

https://web.archive.org/web/20021208112249/http://www.sega.c...

I _just_ got my dreamcast with PSO back online and was wondering what time it was displaying!

Thank you for helping me discover the source of this little brainwurm.