MetaFox wrote:az_bont wrote:How many people had a fast enough broadband connection and a CD-writer in 1999/2000? I'd be willing to bet that there weren't many.
The Dreamcast wasn't cracked until 2001.
Sega announced that the Dreamcast was being discontinued in
January 2001. How could piracy have had a serious effect if the console was dead before it even started?
MetaFox wrote:There's also the matter of eBay piracy - hundreds of auctions of pirated games sell on eBay every year - and even more so on yahoo auctions, as it's less policed.
Most of the more popular Dreamcast games managed close to a million units or more. A few hundred eBay auctions are hardly likely to upset Sega's wallet too much, especially as most of the games wouldn't have been bought at full price anyway.
MetaFox wrote:Dreamcast piracy is more widespread than the typical PC owner with a burner piracy that happens on other consoles, for the simple fact that the pirate games on the Dreamcast are selfbooting. Heck, most of the people that buy pirate games aren't even aware that they are buying pirate games..
With your typical "PC owned with a burner" he can copy Playstation games from friends or stores, which just isn't possible with the Dreamcast.
Games
could be downloaded, but this was during a time when BitTorrent was not available and the eDonkey network was in its infancy. The only real way to get the games would be via newsgroups, and few people have the means or the skills to get files off of there. Especially at a time when most Dreamcast owners would be sing dial-up for their internet connection.
The Dreamcast had plenty of time to turn a decent profit, but it just never sold enough games. There were more than 250 games released in America alone before piracy on the Dreamcast even existed, and only
three of them sold more than one million copies, and then only just. By comparison,
the N64 had 7 time as many games that sold more than one million copies, with the Playstation managing more than 17 times as many as the Dreamcast.
I am prepared to accept that piracy was a contributing factor, but there were much more significant reasons for its eventual failure, most of them the fault of Sega.