If the Dreamcast was the "king of fighters", why did it do badly?

One thing that I found odd was that the Dreamcast was THE system to own if you were a fighting game fan. From Soul Calibur to Guilty Gear X, almost every fighting game you were looking for at the time would have been on it.

Examples

  1. Soul Calibur
  2. Dead or Alive 2
  3. Power Stone 1 & 2
  4. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
  5. Street Fighter Alpha 3
  6. Street Fighter 3:3rd Strike
  7. Marvel vs. Capcom 1 & 2
  8. Capcom vs. SNK 2
  9. Street Fighter 3:Double Impact
  10. Garou:Mark of the Wolves
  11. Last Blade 2
  12. Guilty Gear X
  13. Mortal Kombat:Gold
  14. Project Justice
  15. Plasma Sword
  16. King of Fighters

In fact, the only fighting game series that probably wasn’t there are the Tekken and Samurai Shodown games.

Yet, in one of my game books, this is how the game systems of that era stood:

First Place - Game Boy
Second Place - Playstation
Third Place - Nintendo 64
Fourth Place - Dreamcast

Any idea why this was so? Because the Dreamcast also had decent games of several other genres such as Skies of Arcadia.

I’m sure that several of you here owned a Dreamcast at some point and played those decent games.

Anyone knows why the Dreamcast didn’t do as good as the other systems?

Poor marketing on Sega’s end combined with the Sony Hype Machine.

I got one word Sony. However I don’t place full blame on them, I place full blame on the mindless masses.

Not to mention it only died early in the US where fighters aren’t as popular, it was alive and kicking for a pretty long time in Japan.

Not enough people care about fighters, so you can’t sell a system with those kinds of games. It’s all about sports games and the ‘killer apps,’ whatever those happen to be at the time.

DC games have still been coming out in Japan, even after all this time. It was said the last two games ever where released last year, but word has it there’s a couple more to come. Whether it’s true, who knows…

piracy

Well the problem for the Dreamcast was not the games themselves as there were a lot for people to choose form. Fighters, Shooters, RPGs Sports (2K games > that EA’s garbage)and There was even a Rainbow Six and Quake 3 on it. The problem for the DC was it came out a very awkward time. It launched before the PS2 but all it did was play games and CDs at $199 (I think that was the launch price). People already had news that the PS2 was coming and it played these tings called DVDs that had movies on them. and it was about eh same price or less than DVD players were at the time. So people waited for the PS2 so they could play games and DVDs. If the DC had DVD built into it then the DC might have stood a chance but without it and then developers abandoning it for the PS2 it was the nails in the coffin. Piracy not with standing.

funny thing is Sega had thought about making the DC a DVD player when the launched it but decided against it.

They simply released it at a bad time. But I managed to get one when it was on clearance a while back.

  • …get rid of #13. That shouldn’t even be considered to be a fighting game. Bad luck. And there were alot more KoFs. In fact, 98 to 2002.

  • Sc. hit it on the nail. SEGA was a terrible father. It didn’t provide proper third-party nutrition from America and Japan for the DreamCast. And those two weren’t small dinky companies, mind you. Those were Squaresoft and EA, two powerful companies that could have done some quality work for the DC. When big companies are not a part of the game provision system for a new console, you know it’s not gonna fly for long. As stated, the industry nowadays is not what it should be, but what it has become because of the commercial aspect of it all.

SEGA is good at jumping the gun without doing the proper research. The majority public graded the others better because of staying potential. The sixth generation somebody was foreshadowed because of its limitations.

-…Demon: What’s sad is that the developers who are still making these games are only throwing out shoot em ups. Capcom should man up and give America El Dorato Gate :(.

Fighters alone wont sell a system. Period.

Beating dead horse

It takes more than just fighting games to sell system. The Neo Geo had nothing but fighting games and it did poorly.

The number of fighting game fans is miniscule compared to the number of sports game fans in the USA or RPG fans in Japan.

Or in this case, a dead console. Good night, everybody! I’m here all night. Tip your mods.

It was ridiculously easy to play “back-ups”. No soft- or hardware modding necessary.

And nobody had a lot of trust in Sega, after the Saturn flopping, Sega CD and Sega 32X

Crappy game.

Crappier game.

Decent games, but not really fighting games, hell the sequel was almost a party game of sorts.

Crappy port.

Crappy port.

Sucky port.

Only good ports, notso sure about MvC1 tho.

Semi-satisfactory ports.

Awful ports.

Irrelevant because of XX and its later upgrades, and X wasn’t all that great.

I don’t know how you came up with this game. :confused:

Decent game.

Updated port of crappy game.

Every Dreamcast KOF port was garbage, just like the LB2 and MOW ports.

I don’t know why people keep having this faint belief that the Dreamcast was the console for fighting games when it was nowhere near that, ever. Its only real claim is that it is the only console to have a perfect or at least near perfect port of MvC2 (CvS2 is irrelevant since the PS2 port is more or less the same, ok it had higher resolution but that didn’t affect gameplay).

Over 90% of the fighting games on the Dreamcast were shitty ports, but on second thought it’s not like pointing out the facts will change the common misconception that the Dreamcast was the fighting game console of choice, since most of the fanboys are too stubborn to listen to any form of reason.

becuz of the number of fighting gamers

I suspect that some of the people who ask for Dreamcast releases do so basically because they believe it will be easy to pirate.

(Of course some others wanted DC releases for nobler reasons.)

acctualy IIRC dreamcast acctualy made money durning its run. It was more profitable for what it was spending or whatever to say that term then the first Xbox was… Difference is Xbox could fail and they still have millions billions or whatever to keep it alive, where as dreamcast was acctualy makeing money but not enough for it to umm stay alive… I know there was a report about this somewhere but where now I know not.

As any arcade owner will tell you, being the king of fighters doesnt make you the king of money.