Definitive analysis of the SEGA Dreamcast: The last effort of SEGA (A bit of its History) [1/2]
A little of you history
The Dreamcast is a video game console developed by Sega Games Company Limited, better known as SEGA, which is a Japanese company that develops software and hardware in the field of entertainment, being one of the most respected and well-known companies in the videogame industry for having created a lot of tabletop consoles, video games and arcade machines that today in day are classics of classics and exponents of the same genre.
The Dreamcast was launched on the 27 of November of 1998 in Japan and one year later in the rest of the world. It was a console developed in cooperation with two large and well-known companies which were Hitachi and Microsoft, having SEGA previously worked with Hitachi in what was the commercial catastrophe of the Sega Saturn.
The Sega Saturn was a failure commercially, having barely sales because it promised many things that it did not finish, besides it had a high price in comparison of its rivals and opted to be launched more quickly to win market before the competition than in that time was the Playstation 1.
This failure was a quite unexpected blow for Sega and it was the real beginning of the decline of the fans that later would not acquire more products of this company, being the Dreamcast the first one affected. In another definitive analysis I will speak explicitly of the Saturn here I will only give this mention, since it is important to understand in a basic way what this console was to understand the effect that I inherit from the Dreamcast .
The Dreamcast was in charge of inaugurating the era of 128 bits, also known as the sixth generation of consoles. We talked about the end of November of the year 1998, when the Nintendo 64 had a couple of years on sale and both the PlayStation and the Saturn four, so this new Console had a couple of objectives: to serve as a successor to the Saturn, which was really working badly in the market, and to compete with the Sony and Nintendo machines.
The console Sega enjoyed strong sales in its first season, which achieved greater success in the sale of units in its early days. In the United States alone, it broke a record of 300,000 units that were reserved and Sega sold 500,000 consoles in just two weeks, including 225,132 sold in the first 24 hours, which was a record at the time.
Everything seemed perfect in the life of this console, had been released with good titles, excellent graphics for the time, the reviews did not stop praising this revolutionary console. The entrepreneurs of SEGA were very happy because the console was doing as well as expected and even better, the first year of the console was an excellent season and a great demonstration of what SEGA could achieve .
But unfortunately this happiness did not last too long since almost a year and a half after its release, it was launched by Sony the Playstation 2 which was a real competition, remember that the Dreamcast when it came to the market, it only competed against consoles of past generations; so she had the market almost to herself alone for a whole year, but the moment a real competition was placed against everything collapsed to Sega, and not for little, because the Playstation 2 does not it was any competition, at present it is known for the merit of being the best selling desktop console of all time, so Dreamcast did not have anything easy.
In that then Sony had already hallucinated the gamers with the quality and potential that the Playstation 1 had, which was not small, since the own PS1 so to speak was the winner of his generation, so that a successor was the Boom of that moment, unlike the Dreamcast that unfortunately came from an ancestor who did not meet his followers, in addition to the Playstation 2 I had several things that the Dreamcast itself had not made it catapult so far, as being able to play DVD which was something incredible because it was cataloged as one of the best players of DVD cheaper market, there were people who only bought the console to watch movies in their homes. It also had a complete recompatibility with all the games of its predecessor the Playstation 1.
The only problem with the Playstation 2 is that it had great disadvantages in its distribution, because they were too exhausted in the stores. One would think that because of that problem people would choose to go with the Dreamcast which was an alternative that was available, but no, people were desperately looking for a Playstation 2 even reaching the peak of speculation in where you saw consoles published in Ebay in more than 1000 dollars.
Later came on the part of Nintendo the system Game Cube which was a console was a very practical console, with very good games and great control that finished burying what little was left of the Dreamcast I'll go deeper into the future of the Game Cube and the Playstation 2 in a specific definitive analysis.
That was the beginning of the end for SEGA and its Dreamcast. As soon as the media coverage of its rivals began to grow, its sales began to fall. Finally the executives of the Japanese company realized that they did not have the necessary resources to compete in a marketing war and chose to leave. And in that way SEGA decided to leave the console production and chose to dedicate itself exclusively to the production of video games, a business that continues to this day. And where there were three players (Sony, Nintendo and SEGA) there were only two left.
A curious fact is that the Logos of the Dreamcast are different in each region that was distributed, this to differentiate them since the console have regional block, ie a European does not read Japanese games to say an example. Also for reasons of copyright, at least in the case of the European because there was a company there that had a logo very similar to the orange spiral that we know so much.
So see you in the next!.
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