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Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

videogameschronicle.com

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Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#31

Post by some-guy »

IshKebab wrote: post #10
alexjplant wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches..…

I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche. DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.

Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#32

Post by wk_end »

IshKebab wrote: post #10
alexjplant wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches..…

I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche. DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.

Let's throw on one more: consumers had lost faith in Sega. The Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn (in the US) were all abandoned by the company (for understandable reasons, but still). Why shell out another $200 for yet another system which was going to be prematurely dropped in a couple of years? Which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#33

Post by ekipan »

grouchomarx wrote: post #12

Wonder if they can get any more ads on that webpage

I think everyone agrees with the sentiment but practically speaking that ship sailed decades ago. Browsing the web without uBlock or similar is ill-advised.

Morbidly curious, I turned off my blockers and it's not as bad as I expected honestly. I can still read the article copy.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#34

Post by Tiktaalik »

alexjplant wrote: post #6
philistine wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated C…

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches..…

Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.

Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.

Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.

[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#36

Post by mjevans »

philistine wrote: post #5
crims0n wrote: post #3

What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier. The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zei…

Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated C…

IMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections.

Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#37

Post by jolmg »

some-guy wrote: post #31
IshKebab wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche. DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.

Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)

You make it sound like dual shoulders were standard, but PS(2) was the odd one for having that. None of N64, Xbox nor Gamecube had them. It wasn't really until the Xbox 360 that you'd see it outside of Sony.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#38

Post by jolmg »

dismalaf wrote: post #9

Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day. It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. On one hand it was massively impressive for the time, on the other, most people's desire to buy another console was probably at a low and then PS2 and Xbox stole the show. It probably also didn't help that Sega Genesis was a fiasco with all the wei…

> Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.

And maybe that could've led to the standardized use of hall-effect joysticks from chasing the success of the Dreamcast. One can wish.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#39

Post by kilpikaarna »

trzy wrote: post #25
kilpikaarna wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for you work! It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games w…

Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.

Well, as someone who still regularly plays arcade games I first played decades ago, but gets bored with most modern home games halfway through the tutorial, I'm sad that the incentive and design skill to create those 15 minute intense gameplay experiences has largely been lost.

(Not claiming it would make business sense to try to cater to weirdos like me, or denying that it made sense for Sega to get out of the hardware game or whatever. But probably 95% of their output post-Dreamcast I find completely uninteresting. :)

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