Topic: The OFFICIAL Big N rumor thread *bring your own salt*

[Ymeegod]

Damn pirates killed the DC.  Any CD-burner worked.  Also Sega was bleeding money for years so they couldn't afford to support the system after year one.

Nintendo's making a profit on the WII U, it's not selling the hardware at a lose and software sales are decent though still a lot lower than than were during the WII golden years.

[BranDonk Kong]

The "cost" of piracy is way overblown. The demise of Dreamcast had nothing to do with piracy. Nothing. The PS2, EA Sports, and Sega's lack of marketing killed the Dreamcast. If piracy killed consoles, then the PlayStation would have died quickly, the DS and 3DS would have died quickly, the Wii would have died within  weeks of release, the PS2 would have died, etc, etc. All of those consoles mentioned thrived in spite of rampant piracy.

[ShyGuy]

"Florida Man Violates DMCA" 

If I remember correctly, Sega was loosing money quite rapidly and didn't have much in reserve when they dropped the Dreamcast price to $50 and cancelled it. The company's overall financial issues caused them to cancel the console.

[BranDonk Kong]

I'm not advocating piracy, just saying that as bad as it may be on some consoles, it's never put any of them out of business. I don't know how I got that title anyway, I guess because I explained how to install Nintendont to play GameCube games on the Wii U or something. I buy all my games. Movies...not so much.

[TOPHATANT123]

I would say that piracy is still a big issue, especially like on DS where it was probably more common than legitimate purchases. Dedicated pirates will always find a way and that isn't so much an issue since it's a very small percentage of the audience, however once it becomes easy to do and more convenient to the general public than actually paying for it we start to see sigificant drops in software sales. Bold prediction here but I'd say if 3DS had the same piracy protection DS had, which is so say basically none, it wouldn't be the saving grace it is to Nintendo now and they would be in a very different situation financially.

[BranDonk Kong]

So, you thing more people pirated New Super Mario Bros., for example, than purchased it? Nearly 31 million people bought it, for the record. That is a bold statement, and one that is not based in reality. Mario Kart 7, on the newer-to-piracy (and harder to pirate) 3DS has sold 12 million.

Anywho, back to NX...

[TOPHATANT123]

Ah yes you are right, I am miss remembering it, looking into it was the PSP that had a piracy rate higher than purchase rate.

[nickmitch]

Didn't the DS require special hardware (a card that took micro-SDs) in order to pirate?  The Dreamcast only needed two things that were likely already in your home: a burner and a blank disc.  Though the files may have been harder to come by, I just remember it being so easy that everyone I knew who had the console was pirating games.  (Not me, though. I got strong morals.) I just can't picture piracy not being a big nail in that coffin.  Though I'm just going on anecdotal evidence and substantial facts.

[Stratos]

Piracy doesn't hurt the "big" games. But I know several people who pirated The World Ends With You on the DS and raved about the game and how they hoped for a sequel. It did irritate me in that instance because the game sold low enough to not spur a sequel in a good long while. What has it been? 10 years? I'm not saying that piracy is the reason, but I would suggest that the niche and indie games are the ones with the most potential to suffer from piracy.

[BranDonk Kong]

Piracy does hurt software developers, some more than others, but again that can be overblown. I only have anecdotal evidence, mainly just people on message boards, but it seems at least a good chunk of software pirates would have never purchased said games to begin with. A game pirated != a sale lost. I can't say that's a majority, or even a half, or really any subset, but it's part of the equation. Piracy does help hardware sales though.


Back to the Dreamcast - it had a good chunk of million sellers, and 2.5 million sales of Sonic Adventure out of 8 million total console sales is pretty decent, and probably enough to make the point that piracy was not a major (as in console-killing) issue.


PSP did have an unusually high piracy rate, but it also had a very small slate of good games, especially of the mass-appeal type.

[ShyGuy]

Yeah that is an interesting point. The old argument was the people who were pirating Photoshop couldn't afford to buy Photoshop anyways.

Anyway, with so much becoming digital download only, physical media piracy is becoming less of an issue. On the other hand, people dump Wiiware games to Dolphin, so they are still pirating digital only games.

I expect the NX (and other platforms) to have online verification like Steam or like Xbox One was supposed to have.

[MagicCow64]

I am in the camp that piracy concerns are generally overblown and that piracy can in fact be beneficial under certain conditions. The PSP (and DS as well) would have sold substantially less as a hardware platform had it not been a pirate haven. In terms of a pirated game experience not taking a purchase away, I mean, it's probably like a .3, but the purchase of the hardware and need to purchase certain games that don't work otherwise and whatnot probably makes up for it. And really piracy is performing a genuine social good in preserving games, so it's kind of a cost that the makers should be willing to bear in the face of at best indifferent industry concerns about preservation.

[Nile Boogie Returns]

I always thought more than anything, Dreamcast failed due to its lackluster drive. If the DC had a DVD player built in, Sega XboX 360 might have come out 8 years ago and Shenmue 5 could be the 2015's big Holiday title.




"I have dreamed a dream, and now that dream is gone from me"

[Ymeegod]

The PlayStation needed to be modded though vs the DC was able to play burned CDs right from the get go.  Two the price of CD-burner's was nearly $1000 back when PS1 launched and around $50 by the time DC launched meaning tons of people could afford them.  Since you didn't need any special hardware, what people even without internet were doing were "purchasing" games and returning them after burning a copy.

PSP sales were the same, hardware wise the PSP sold 75+ million UNITS but software was a joke (outside of Japan who don't pirate games as much of the rest of the world).

[Ian Sane]

I think the Dreamcast's failure was a result of two major issues:

1. Sega was coming off the Saturn and the 32X and had generally destroyed consumer trust in them.  The Dreamcast was a great console with great games and Sega were pretty much doing everything right but gamers didn't trust them enough to just immediately buy the console without first waiting to see what the PS2 offered.

2. Sega financially was not in a good enough position to survive anything but a major overnight hit, which they didn't get.  The Dreamcast would probably have done fine if it had a chance to build an audience over a generation.

The Wii U isn't Nintendo's Dreamcast though, it's their Saturn - following a successful console with a misguided product that was not at all what consumers were looking for and quickly looked completely out of its league with its two competitors.  The NX is more likely to be Nintendo's Dreamcast - the comeback console where the manufacturer learned from their prior mistakes (at least I HOPE that part happens).  Only Nintendo has stronger finances and could survive a slow steady comeback without the NX needing to be an overnight sensation.

[BranDonk Kong]

The PlayStation only needed a GameShark and a spring (or a pen cap or anything that pressed the "lid is closed" button) to play games off of CD-R. I don't know what you'e talking about with not needing special hardware - Dreamcast games are on a GD-ROM, so you could not copy them with your PC's drive, you have to have the DC serial cable and it took (if I remember correctly, from what I've read) about 24 hours to copy a disc - you could, however, copy a PSX game with any CD burner. PS2 only needed a GameShark and a piece of plastic.


This is getting out of hand though, I suggest we make a "general piracy discussion" thread (not a how-to).

[Ymeegod]

"The PlayStation only needed a GameShark and a spring (or a pen cap or anything that pressed the "lid is closed" button) to play games off of CD-R."

And that workaround came towards the end of it's life and needed additional hardware, vs DC which needed nothing from day 1:(.  Big difference.

As far "Dreamcast games are on a GD-ROM"  LoL, only a few select games required more than 720MB.  Very few 1GB games.  You didn't need an connection to the Dreamcast neither.  PC burners could read the disc files just disc swap.   

[BranDonk Kong]

CD burners could burn images, but CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs could not read the GD-ROM discs - okay there were a handful of drives that could be modded and rip some discs (at least parts of the discs). The GameShark swap worked without the hardware dongle (which came with the GameShark), you only needed the dongle for cheat codes, not for playing games off of CD-R.


And for the record, day one is only true if you consider "10 months after release" to be day one.


http://consolecopyworld.com/dc/dc_backup_faq.shtml#0


Full disclosure: I burned a lot of Dreamcast games back in the day. I did not own a Dreamcast until at least a year after it was discontinued, however.

[Ymeegod]

That info is so not correct.

You can "trick" your burner (I had an 2X CD burner first generation) into 1:1 ratio with GD-ROMS.  The only issue would be if the game was over 720MB (or 1GB if you overburn) and very few DC games were.   

Disc swapping:

"The second method consisted on the typical disc swapping. It worked by introducing a CD filled with data on your computer, and swapping it with a GD-Rom without your computer knowing it. That way the PC thought there was data all the way to the end of the disc, due to it using the CD’s TOC, instead of the newly swapped GD’s  TOC. This method produced a 1:1 copy of the disc."

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[Ymeegod]

What's funny is your agruement is that piracy didn't hurt the DC but your own link quotes this
" In January, new releases started coming few and far between, since most of the games that could have been ripped had already been ripped. In mid-February 2001, Sega announced the end of Dreamcast unit production would take place on 31Mar01 citing the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, and many third party companies scrapped their DC games in development even if they were near completion for more viable platforms, such as the Playstation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft X-Box. "

[Nile Boogie Returns]

Piracy absolutely contributed to the demise of Dreamcast. Picture the year 2000, I'm a young sailor on board USS Hayler and we pull into a port in South America (Peru I recall) Long story not as long I buy 10 DC games plus the Freeloader disc for 40 US dollars if it was even that. Since the internet was a baby and I was on ship I had no Idea how games were sold over seas. So save for a few newer games that came out after Jan 2001, there wasn't a game I had that was an actual retail game sold through Sega.

[BranDonk Kong]

The line about "new releases" is talking about games being ripped and posted online, not about retail releases, which were never that robust.

[BranDonk Kong]

Every retail Dremcast game was 1.2GB. Not all of it was "real" data. You could not trick your burner into burning a 1:1 copy, ever. You could burn a CD-R image that typically had downsampled audio or video files, or even  re-linked/replaced video files in order to fit the actual game onto a 750MB or 800MB disc. I believe some burners could burn 99min CDs, but even that was not enough room to make a 1:1 copy.

[Ymeegod]

"Every retail Dremcast game was 1.2GB"

Yet the actual data was less than that 95% of the time.  So the CDR DC copies didn't record all those "empty tracks" so it's not 1:1 by your standards. 

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[Soren]

I would like to think you kept reading Brandogg's post after the bit you quoted. I mean, at least the sentence directly following it. But I don't know man...this whole thread's gone someplace weird...