25 years later, who really killed the Dreamcast?

On October 14, 1999, the Dreamcast was released in Europe, a year after the dismal failure of its Japanese launch. Barely a year and a half later, Sega killed its console and abandoned the market, then in great financial difficulty.

With a lifespan of only three years, the Dreamcast is one of those video game failures that left its mark. Launched on November 27, 1998 in Japan, and October 14 of the following year in Europe, the Dreamcast nevertheless had everything going for it: a striking catalog, unrivaled power until then, and the possibility, rare at the time, of to be able to be connected online.

However, Sega, then a console manufacturer, killed its console after just 8 million copies sold. It was March 31, 2001. 25 years after its arrival in France, the Dreamcast remains for many a true textbook case, which almost plunged its manufacturer into an unprecedented financial catastrophe.

An overpowering console quickly outdated

“The Dreamcast was a bit like Sega’s last hope,” remembers Guillaume “Antistar” Leviach, video game journalist and streamer.

The complete failure of the Saturn, the predecessor of the Dreamcast launched in 1995, pushed Sega to release a new generation of console, a year and a half before the Playstation 2 which was due to arrive in stores in 2000. Sega then planned to continue to offer a gaming experience close to arcades.

“At the time of its release, the Dreamcast was undoubtedly the most powerful console on the market, and by quite a long way. But a year later, it was overtaken by the PS2, even if the power gap between the two machines was n “It’s not huge either,” remarks Oscar Lemaire, video game industry specialist for Ludostrie and author of the book “The History of the Dreamcast” at Third Editions.

Among the cult games of the Dreamcast, we count on licenses which still exist today: “Crazy Taxi was one of the console’s greatest successes in the West, and one of the precursors of freedom of movement in the open world,” recalls Oscar Lemaire. “Shemnue is another of these precursors, conceived directly as a console game, but handicapped by the fact of experimenting with something which was still very poorly mastered.”

“The Dreamcast has ceased to exist in the media”

The Dreamcast will first suffer from a pitched battle between Sega Japan and Sega of America. The two divisions do not agree on the way forward, whether at the marketing level or at the level of current developments: “Even if the Mega Drive had managed to beat Nintendo in the USA, Sega Japan was not very happy the way Sega of America had managed it on the marketing side,” explains Guillaume Leviach.

The boycott of Electronic Arts, which will never agree to offer an episode of FIFA or NFL on the platform, will not help matters either, particularly in the United States.

The cause is known: Sega develops its own sports games internally, NFL 2K et NBA 2K. “These are games that scared Electronic Arts who saw them as dangerous competition for their own sports games, to the point that they wanted to force Sega to cancel them.”

Sega will also end up selling its sports licenses to Take-Two (which notably owns Rockstar, the studio behind GTA) which is enjoying success with NBA 2K.

25 years later, if Sega still has difficulty talking about the failure of its console, a logical culprit stands out: the Playstation 2.

“As soon as the PS2 was released, the Dreamcast ceased to exist in the media,” recalls Guillaume Leviach, who also remembers that, ironically, the president of Sega, Isao Okawa died barely 15 days before the console was discontinued. – decided two months earlier.

“That’s what independent developers at the time say: they were interested in the Dreamcast, would have been happy to work on it, but they knew it was in their financial interest to first focus on the PS2 and learn to master it,” adds Oscar Lemaire. “They knew it would do better, and like a self-fulfilling prophecy, that’s largely why it did so much better.”

He concludes with a note of optimism: “Sega fought well with the Dreamcast, and it’s tragic for them, but they found themselves facing the strongest competitor in the history of consoles.”

A statement which is reminiscent of Microsoft’s current fate with Xbox, which is struggling to convince players to buy its consoles, while its games are enjoying success… on Playstation 5.

Almost thirty years after its arrival on the market, the Dreamcast has finally become a cult console for an entire community. Modders have thus embarked on creating a version of Minecraft specific to the machine, and its official games sometimes sell for hundreds of euros.

There was even talk, in 2023, of a “Dreamcast mini”, a miniature version of the console in the tradition of the NES mini and the Super NES mini. But cost issues ultimately made Sega abandon the project. Once again.