A Sega marketing vet on why the Dreamcast failed

I'm not sure if I've ever made it clear here, but I'm a huge fan of Sega's final console, the Dreamcast.

I bought one at launch, and I distinctly remember being blown away by its compact size, its heft and its power (in terms of graphics). Its catalog of games also blew me away, thanks to titles like ChuChu Rocket!, Jet Set Radio, Samba de Amigo, Shenmue and Space Channel 5, among others.

Sadly, the system wasn't meant to be, as they say, and it was discontinued in North America less than two years after it made its debut.

Tadashi Takezaki, Sega's "head of project implementation department, president's office," talks about why the system was such a flop--when it comes to sales, at least--in a just-published article at polygon.com. (Which, it has to be noted, is based around quotes pulled and translated from a recent issue of Famitsu.)

In that piece--penned by Kevin Gifford, proprietor of what used to be one of my favorite gaming blogs, magweasel.com (it's rarely updated these days)--Takezaki shares that "when [Sega] developed the hardware, we looked over the mistakes we made with the Saturn and completely reworked our approach.

"We did our best to make the console approachable to a mass audience--from the system's design and coloring to the name itself," he adds. "As a result, we went with a compact, simple design with a warm color scheme, something completely different in look from older Sega systems."

As for why the system failed, Takezaki says "it was because we were forced into a discount war when we were already losing money on system sales. Sony [whose PlayStation 2 came out March 2000 in Japan] was part of the team that developed the DVD standard, and they could develop a system around that completely internally with their own chips."

Sega, in the meantime, "was buying everything from outside companies, so it was at a distinct cost disadvantage," he adds. "We couldn't easily cut costs on manufacturing, the software wasn't selling the numbers it used to, and then we were forced to discount the system."

To read more well-worth-reading Takezaki quotes, check out the full article at polygon.com.

Magweasel's back!

Don't sweat it if you have no idea what "Magweasel" is. After all, it's been many moons since I last mentioned this superb gaming blog, which has been rather spottily maintained by former GamePro editor Kevin Gifford since early 2009.

I say "spottily" because after pumping out a good number of brilliantly in-depth posts about games--those released for the famed PC Engine, especially--and Japan between the site's inception and August 2010, Gifford and his witty commentary basically fell off the face of the earth (with the exception of a brief reprise that lasted from March to June 2011).



Anyway, as you've likely gathered from this post's header, he's back. Not only that, but in the last five or so days he's published four posts--including this one about the Famicom port of Hudson Soft's Lode Runner and this one about Yoshi's Safari (aka Yoshi's Road Hunting).

I have no idea how long Gifford's planning to stick around this time, but I sincerely hope he does so long enough to make a sizable contribution to his incomparable "I ♥ The PC Engine" series, which is what attracted me to his blog in the first place.

Show me the money

A few weeks ago, someone contacted me via flickr and asked if I'd be willing to sell my copy of GamePro magazine's second issue (below).

I declined, although I'm not entirely sure why. After all, I rarely flip through that particular magazine, and I'm not saving it so I can sell it for more money at some later date.

It's a good thing I'm not holding out for bigger bucks, because according to this gamasutra.com article--penned by Kevin Gifford, author of one of my favorite gaming sites, magweasel.com--such a tactic is unlikely to be successful.

By the way, if you'd like to flip through issues of old gaming magazines without dropping a single dime on them, check out old-computer-mags.com and retromags.com.