Chuck D. Head wrote:Yes this scene does have potential. There are dedicated Dreamcast gamers all over the world. While there may only be a small amount of them, but there is potential for increases. What this scene needs is commerically released games. These games need to be well polished and well constructed, and unique games. If these games are worthwhile people will noticed. If the games are good enough and price fairly, people might just go out and buy a $20 DC. Gee, they are cheap enough.
Agreed. I am an avid Atari Jaguar collector as well as Dreamcast, but one of the major barriers to entry with the Jaguar other than the fact that there is not much of an installed userbase is that material to produce the games costs upwards of $50.00 per title. The Dreamcast has the benefit of being able to release games because of the wonderful KallistiOS system and the tools that Sega made available, intentional or not.
The problem of course comes from getting people to notice these commercial homebrews. If the scene gets more articles in EGM, in game magnizes, or game websites this will be no problem. But what the scene needs is people to promote the scene. If games comes out, go to all the forums which gamers visit and post links, and give information about the game. Of course, I do not know if the scene wants that much attention, unless the scene become a company.
Agreed. How I look at it is like this -- If people really like the game and they tell one or two other people about it, eventually it will get known. I can't see anything bad coming out of the scene getting more exposure -- the Atari Jaguar had BattleSphere (sort of a "homebrew") released for it, and now that it is out of print, it costs $250+ for a copy. Because of the attention BattleSphere got, more developments were made and more attention was paid to the Jaguar community in general. A lot of great games that were said to be lost forever were found because of that action, and they did better because BattleSphere set the bar so high.
The Dreamcast is different, but not so much so that I think that more exposure would be bad.
Hopefully though, they will buy it, but this brings out another problem: copy protection. Devers need a way to protect there work, or the scene might as well forget about commercial releases.
Copy protection is one of those things that stinks. Piracy is biggest reason that the Dreamcast died, and our decision to produce Feet of Fury (and these games) came from the fact that we think there is still enough of a market out there for people who would be willing to spend a fair amount of money on a new game and would not be willing to copy it. Because of the respect that Feet of Fury has had, if it has been ripped it is't widely available.
While I'm not stupid enough to think that piracy isn't a concern, I think the people purchasing the games understand how much effort went into the creation and that piracy of the game would seriously hinder any future releases of the same type. Because of that, I don't think that piracy of these particular games will be too much of an issue. It's a bridge that I don't hope to ever have to cross. I guess we'll just have to see.