I disagree. Loved the Dreamcast, was there on 9.9.99 but Sega’s finances were in the toilet at the time. The 2000-era Dreamcast software with rare exceptions was outdone by PS2 launch titles. It would not have held its own by the time the Xbox or GameCube launched. The games that were popular for that generation would not have been feasible on the Dreamcast. Sega would’ve needed something new around 2002-2003 in order to compete but the nonstop poor decisions Sega made in 1994-1998 was enough to hamper the Dreamcast from ever having much potential.
People could say that Nintendo does well with weak hardware but their IPs were never truly on Nintendo’s level in terms of sales, except for Sonic, which was popular in the early 90s but also was mismanaged. In fact, it’s still mismanaged to this day.
I mean, I'm not just spitting in the wind, here. The Dreamcast lasted for many years in Japan after Sega of America discontinued it. The last commercial Dreamcast game in Japan came out in 2007, over half a decade after the system was "dead" in America.
That said, I think there's something at work beyond hardware issues or system marketing, and maybe this has been talked about by people and I've never head it, but... Sega's decline and the decline of the arcade are, I think, linked. Look at Sega games, going all the way back to the Master System. Sure, they had plenty of console originals... But they also had a ton of arcade ports. And even a lot of their originals were arcade-
esq games. I mean, it makes sense... Sega themselves were an arcade game company, too. Plenty of first-party Sega arcade games, while after Donkey Kong Nintendo kind of gave up on new arcade IPs, just turning out the Verses versions of some of their console games.
So Sega became the go-to console if you liked arcade games. Particularly brawlers, in the Genesis era, and fighting games in the Saturn and Dreamcast era. Sure, Nintendo got some. Playstation got it's share, too. But for Sega they were kind of their bread and butter. And although those genres never
died, I don't think they were able to support a home console company on their own. Which would possibly be another reason it did better in Japan - arcades lasted there where they didn't here.
PCs are individual, consoles are standardized.
Again, not
really true. I mean, yes, it's true in the modern era, where for "PC" you mean "descendants of the IBM legacy". But if you go back to the olden days, many home computers were basically standardized appliances. A C64 was a C64 was a C64, for example, save for the same sort of minor hardware revisions over time that even consoles have. In terms of designing for them, they were all identical. The most variation you had to deal with was whether or not a user had a floppy drive or a tape drive.
