10 Worst Mistakes Ever Made By Video Game Companies
3. Sega Choosing GD-ROMs Instead Of DVDs For The Dreamcast
Ahhh, the Sega Dreamcast, beaming 128-bit beauty and radiant visions of 3D blue hedgehogs, irreverent cab rides and epic Japanese RPGs into our moist eyes that had never seen anything quite like it before.
Like the Saturn before it, the Dreamcast hit the ground running. It outshone all consoles that came before, and beat the PlayStation 2 to the market. As with most other consoles, Sega was losing money on each console sold, but initially this was outweighed by income from the games themselves.
However, the announcement of the PS2 soon meant that people turned away from the Dreamcast. It could've been to do with the console's claims to being a zillion times more powerful than the Dreamcast, or its competitive price point, but arguably its greatest advantage was its reliance on the DVD format, and capacity as a DVD player.
When the $300 PS2 was announced at E3 in 2000, it was a bullet to the head of the Dreamcast. With people splashing out nearly that much on DVD players anyway around the time, millions made the jump to the PS2, leaving the Dreamcast's low-capacity, non-movie-playing GD-ROMs looking archaic by comparison.
Poor Sega didn't stand a chance...