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Comment by dismalaf | Hacker News Reader

Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.

It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. On one hand it was massively impressive for the time, on the other, most people's desire to buy another console was probably at a low and then PS2 and Xbox stole the show.

It probably also didn't help that Sega Genesis was a fiasco with all the weird add-ons.

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Personally, I love the "fiasco" of secondary add-ons to consoles across the generations, from the Cassette drive from Atarti 2600 to Sega CD and 32X.

> It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64.

> then PS2 and Xbox stole the show

So in your opinion, when was a better time to release th Dreamcast?

Their hardware business was doomed by 1998, FF7 and Gran Turismo had given PlayStation momentum that neither Sega or Nintendo could hope to match, but Sega was in a particularly tough spot because of years of misguided decisions.

They could have extended the Saturn's lifespan to 2000 and thrown their lot in with the PS2 after release, but it seems many people at SoJ were emotionally attached to the idea of selling consoles.

The Saturn was the bestselling Sega console in the Japanese market by a wide margin, so I’m not convinced that SoJ was the party pushing for a new console.

They wanted a console they could write a full-3D Sonic game for, the Saturn couldn't quite do such a game justice.

Either same time or before the N64 or closer to when the PS2 and Xbox were released. Sega missed an entire generation but then released between generations. Also they released right as N64 and PS1 games were arguably at their peaks.

I keep wondering if it would have been better for Sega to launch it at the same time but in the west first instead of Japan. The Saturn was DEAD by 1998 outside Japan. That extra year might have actually meant something.

> Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.

And maybe that could've led to the standardized use of hall-effect joysticks from chasing the success of the Dreamcast. One can wish.

Piracy took a huge toll on Dreamcast. It came out during the rise of P2P file sharing and you could just burn CD's of the games to play without needing to mod the console in any way.

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