> > And awesome quirky stuff like > > Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 and Jet Set Radio. > > Which is the root of the problem. Sega gave gamers what the loud gamer voices on the > Internet claimed to want: quirky, non-cookie-cutter games, often with big slices of > "OMG Japan" fully intact. Even some of the third-party stuff was off the beaten path. > But what gamer-nerds on the Internet want isn't what the mass audience wants, so none > of those great games sold very well. Whereas Sony led with Madden and FIFA and Tekken > Tag Tournament and the rest was history.
I don't know. The Dreamcast library seemed pretty cookie cutter to me. Launched with platformers, racing games, and fighting games. All pretty standard stuff.
I think it was really more a matter of most Dreamcast games being ports of shallow arcade games that were designed to be played for about 10 minutes. I mean, 18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker for $50? Are you kidding? There's like 5 minutes of game there.
There simply weren't that many meaty home games made for the Dreamcast. There was Shenmue, Phantasy Star, and a couple of other meatier games, but it was just overwhelmingly a shallow Naomi port dumping ground.
It's not a coincidence that the traditional arcade industry and the Dreamcast shat out at the same time. People wanted Devil May Cry and Grand Theft Auto 3--not cheap Naomi arcade game ports. The time had passed for that kind of stuff, and they were still doing the same old thing.
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