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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 CD, which was shockingly easy.

While a Playstation needed a special chip to run pirated discs, a vanilla Dreamcast could play any pirated CD you could throw at it. It was Game Over for Dreamcast 18 months after it was released, pirated discs had destroyed the market, and Hideki Sato was responsible.

Source: https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/

by alexjplant6 hours ago|

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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 could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.

> Hideki Sato was responsible.

I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?

by chocochunks2 hours ago|

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Yeah, I think it would have had other issues if it carried on further too. Games were starting to understand using the 2nd analog stick and the DC controller was also missing 5 buttons that the Xbox and PS2 controllers had. Even some GameCube ports felt weird because of the missing buttons and that only had 4 less buttons and a 2nd analog stick.

by alt2275 hours ago|

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> I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole

I dont necessarily agree with the guy you are posting to, but if Hideki Sato is being bestowed the glory of 'Designer of all Segas consoles' then he also needs to hold responsibility for their failings, of which there are many.

by IshKebab5 hours ago|

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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.

by wk_end38 minutes ago|

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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.

by some-guy2 hours ago|

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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)

by SilverElfin4 hours ago|

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You may call those a debacle. But I think it was a great time in the world of gaming and electronics in general. Commercial failures aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can still be fun.

by jgon3 hours ago|

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You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.

by glimshe5 hours ago|

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I don't buy it. NES and Atari 2600 piracy were widespread yet they were successful. Same for Nintendo DS and even the PlayStation in some markets.