I think that's the story being told, but I think the real problem is that the Saturn sucked, and the 32x, and the sega cd. Sega killed so much of their good will, that they barely had any customers left to pirate games. I only know one person who had a dreamcast, and they mostly had legit games with a few pirated ones. On the other hand I knew atleast 10 people with modded playstations, and mostly pirated games. I only buy Nintendo consoles, so I remember being jealous of their ability to pirate. Though I just remembered the kid who was doing the mods having a zip disk adapter for his N64.
Pretty much all Nintendo consoles have been pirated, though.
The story how the Gamecube was cracked is also quite interesting, ironically also related to SEGA. The way they cracked it was with the GCN port of Phantasy Star Online by them. The first thing that game did when it connected to the SEGA server was to download a binary patch and execute it. People figured out they could just DNS spoof the server and run pretty much anything they wanted.
You needed a pretty specific set of stuff for that to work, though. You needed an early version of PSO as well as a Gamecube broadband adapter. By pure chance I had that back in the day and I remember getting this to work, attaching the gamecube to my pc with a long crossover cable between two rooms, trying to figure out the network settings and running the spoofing software. Good fun.
Piracy on the original Playstation was gigantic and also probably a big reason for why they ended up dominating the market. I know a ton of people that picked one up over the N64 because if you got a mod chip put in and new someone with a CD burner you could expand your game library for the cost of a rental.
I don't think any piracy will ever compare to DS piracy. You could put all the games you wanted on a micro sd card, stick it into the R4 (or any of it's many clones) and there you go. And for the last couple years of the DS these cards could be had for under $10. Even the Wii required some effort to soft mod, and you still had to care about updates. The DS was totally broken however.
The Dreamcast sold well at release and some time after (in North America at least), however Sega's financial situation was bad they didn't have loads of cash like Sony or probably even Nintendo at the time.
The system was selling well but not well enough for Sega to recoup it's financials.
Also EA boycotted the system completely and was not publishing games for it. Add to that the hype of the PS2.
Just a perfect storm for Sega, even though they really made good console correcting a lot of their earlier mistakes.
Moore stated that the Dreamcast would need to sell 5 million units in the U.S. by the end of 2000 in order to remain a viable platform, but Sega ultimately fell short of this goal with some 3 million units sold.
Well the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast.
In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
Well, for PS2 a soft mod became possible after Mr. Brow's "Independence" exploit around 2003.
Sidestepping the "Mechacon" (the DVD driver chip) happened a few years later, modifying ISO to mimic a "video" DVD and using a "loader" resident in RAM...
There was actually a trick for the PlayStation that allowed you to play pirated games without any hardware mods. It involved starting a game with the CD case open, and using your finger to stop the CD from spinning at certain points. I was quite young at the time and never mastered the method, and we got a hardware mod for the console at a later point.
Wow, that brings back memories. IIRC, you actually had to (while booting/disc spinning) pull out the a retail disc at a certain point, put in your burned disc, and do that exchange once more.
I remember a hardware mod that was just a spring you put in the door latch sensor to prevent it from knowing that you had opened the lid. There was a special loader disk you put in first that got it started, then stopped the disk so you could swap in your burned copy.
> In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
I wouldn't know anything about that. But I did love the original Splinter Cell and Mechassault games. 007 Agent Under Fire was also halfway decent.
You wouldn't want to lose your progress though, so I'd also suggest picking up an Action Replay so you can back up your game saves to PC. Just in case you lose your XBox or something.
If you need instructions, you could search `splinter cell action replay xbox` and probably find what you need...
But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners?
Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then maybe - but I recall the console itself being a bit of a flop?
> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO?
Does it matter? You only need a few people to download and burn the CDs, and sell them in stalls or out of a backpack. From what I remember from that era, physical distribution of warez through burned CDs was very common.
This was also the case for PC games and those made healthy profits in that era too. So blaming piracy seems to be more pushing a certain idea than the actual cause of Dreamcast issues. Especially since the hardware itself sold poorly - if piracy would be to blame, you'd see a lot of unit sales and low game sales. Which did not happen.
> how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO?
One active netizen with a CD writer was enough for an entire school :-).
I don't know what impact this had over sales. Back then (~2001, 2002) I knew people who bought a Dreamcast precisely because they could get cheap games.
My last class in highschool was study hall. I sold a ton of bootlegs and took orders from classmates and even teachers. Made about 50 dollars a day after costs.
> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners?
As I remember from my high school days, there were lots of people who were downloading ISOs (i.e. in their work or university, where they had access to fat 1Mb/s pipes), burning them and selling at a significant profit. Of course it was illegal, but still they managed to sell them through their friends or from improvised stalls on the weekend computer market, etc.
I remember a friend of mine giving me a big binder full of burned Dreamcast games after his console died and he moved on to a PS2. He certainly wasn't the technical type, I think his Dad "bought them from a bloke down the pub", so to speak.
I don't know if you're entirely misremembering, I had a Dreamcast around this time and I wasted a ton of time trying to pirate games - I'd set them to download and wait a few days to get the image. Then I'd have to use my buddies PC to burn (I had a Mac and you needed to use Nero or disk juggler on PC to burn them), write that in a special format and then hope the dreamcast would play it. Touching the computer while it was burning back then was a no-no too. I must've downloaded at least 20 games, but I think I only ever got one to work (Crazy Taxi), but I made plenty of coasters. The dreamcast taught me a lesson about the value of my time as I probably should have just bought the games. I saw Crazy Taxi for free in the Xbox store so I downloaded it the other day to kind of give me some perspective on how times have changed, it downloaded in under 10 minutes and was running. Back in dreamcast days, that was like a 10 day project.
I certainly don't think piracy killed the Dreamcast, it was a lot of built up 'bad will' by Sega and lousy execution. Third parties didn't want to develop for Sega, because Sega was flaky. I remember I had the broadband adapter for the Dreamcast, but it was only supported by one game(Quake). If I wanted to play NBA2K or NFL2K online I'd have to physically remove the ethernet adapter and plugin the dialup modem. Those games would have been great over ethernet, but as it was dialup online play had its share of frustrations. I had a Genesis, a Saturn, Master System and Game Gear before the Dreamcast but I think if Sega came out with another system after Dreamcast I may have had to bolt the company, they were the epitome of 'overpromising and underdelivering,' piracy gave them an excuse to focus in on the things they were better at (not selling consoles).
ISO files were available then. They were usually zipped split into anywhere from 10-50 different zip or rar files per ISO. Then I remember usually having to click through some ads or something for each file. It was a long frustrating process. Chances are the download would fuck up on one of the pieces, one of them would be corrupt, or by the time I got them all the emulators I had weren't able to play them all that well.
At this point in history, at least in the U.K., you could go round the back of your local car boot sale on a Saturday to find someone selling unauthorised copies of console games.
You could also rent a game from Blockbuster, and clone it. I know folks who did this. I don’t really know if more was involved as it was a bit before my time.
I don't think such an argument would hold water. The original PlayStation's success came from being the first system really designed for 3D, having a very competitive price, being incredibly open to third parties, and having Sony's marketing power behind it. Piracy was, as always, an overstated factor.
It was 4 consoles fighting for attention around that time:
Sega Dreamcast
Nintendo 64
Microsoft Xbox
Sony PlayStation 2
The sales of the Xbox and Dreamcast never catched up to those of the N64 or the PS2. I would say the market was over saturated around that time with 4 stationary consoles.
The Xbox's more natural competitors were the PS2 (which had come out the year before) and the Gamecube (which came out about the same time).
Maybe the Dreamcast too, in theory, but I think it had long been obvious it was a goner. I think Sega might even have dropped it by the time the Xbox was released.
The N64 was 3 years old by the time the Dreamcast came out. The Dreamcast was killed before the Xbox was released. Also, the original Xbox sold 24 million units compared to the N64’s 30 million.
The GameCube and Xbox were fighting for second place that generation.
>It was 4 consoles fighting for attention around that time: Sega Dreamcast Nintendo 64 Microsoft Xbox Sony PlayStation 2
Yes and no. N64 was 3 years earlier. PS2 was a full year later, Xbox/Gamecube were two years later.
I've always been confused how Dreamcast didn't win a that fight. The previous three rounds of console launches were heralded by improved graphics technology and immediately took over the market (1990 SNES/Genesis, 1994 Playstation/Saturn, 1996 N64). Dreamcast came out when nothing relevant had come out for 3 years, with a generation better graphics and a 1-2 year head start on competitors.
If Sega hadn't burned so many bridges with the SegaCD and Saturn they probably would have been a strong competitor in that generation. But both developers and customers were wary of their shenanigans by that point.
I don’t think it played as big a role as people tend to remember. There were a lot of forces in play that contributed to its demise. The biggest one being the PS2. Even though the Dreamcast had similar or better specs than the PS2 it wasn’t considered a real 3D platform by a lot of the game magazine critics. It was released on time unlike the PS2 and XBox so they were comparing shipping hardware to fancy, not factual, renderings and considered the PS2 the winner because of it. Plus, Sega was a bit scatter brained, releasing platform after platform with no time for maturity. Game developers were holding back for the one true platform.
Then Microsoft stepped into the foray and was just throwing money around like crazy for exclusives. They were the smallest fish in a shrinking pond.
> Even though the Dreamcast had similar or better specs than the PS2 it wasn’t considered a real 3D platform by a lot of the game magazine critics.
Wat? That sounds like you confused the Saturn and DC. The Saturn had iffy hardware choices for 3D (because nobody saw the PlayStation coming), but the DC was a 3D system through and through. I don't recall anyone at the time claiming otherwise.
Your right about the aspects of the Dreamcast being a legit 3D console. I do remember at the time though a lot of people bying into Sony marketing regarding their “emotion engine” chip that would render 75 gagillion whats its a second and would be the most astonishing thing you have ever saw. Once the system was released it was pretty underwhelming from a visual perspective, but that didn’t stop many people from arguing with me about how graphically superior it was.
> That sounds like you confused the Saturn and DC.
No, the logic was the game critics were underwhelmed by the 3D hardware of the DC at the time. While it was state of the art for 1998. When Sega started shipping the DC Sony put out videos of PS2 previews and DC sales tanked. Also, at $499 the Saturn was DOA. No one but enthusiasts could afford that.
Part of it was the DC came out in between cycles. An undecided buyer would sit out purchasing waiting for all 3 consoles to arrive. By then the DC was years old hardware wise.
If so, it would be one of the only cases I know of where IP piracy led to financial ruin of the content creator.