Game Sack

[DragonmasterDan]

If you know where I can see this more detailed sales data, please share. I've been unable to find more detailed breakdowns.

http://www.vgchartz.com/analysis/platform_totals/

This is mostly just reposting of NPD final data. Systems were sold after January 2001, but it gives you a pretty decent idea. Unfortunately the NPD data during that time period wasn't available to the public. So finding detailed sales data specifically relating to US hardware sales (like month to month numbers) isn't going to be possible considering the age of it.

Added in edit: Dreamcast is down there at #19. Keep in mind this is covering tracked sales to the public. Not sales to wholesalers etc. They produced 10 million systems, but not that many were sold new through retail while it was widely available on the market.

[spenoza]

Unfortunately, those numbers don't help me much. What is clear is that the Dreamcast sold well enough in its first 1.5 years, better than any new-to-market console before it.


I'm going to speculate (because even hindsight isn't 20/20 in cases like this) that Sega's biggest problem with the Dreamcast wasn't Sega at all, but NEC. If Eidolon's Inn is to be believed, the Dreamcast's initial offering in Japan could have been over 500,000 units, despite a lack of titles, had NEC been able to supply the PowerVR Chips. The same could be said of the US launch as well. And if the console had been that much more present in the market upon release, it would have provided that much more incentive to software developers to stick with the platform, despite fears about piracy (which existed on PC and Playstation for years and yet didn't kill either of those markets).

Despite DVD playback, I still can't figure out why the PS2 sold as well as it did. Developers were pulling their hair out over that system. It was like the Saturn all over again. I wonder what Sony's early libraries and dev environment were like for folks who didn't really care about tapping the PS2's real power reserves. It's possible Sony managed to gloss over enough of the crap that if you were OK making a mediocre game you would be just fine.

[DragonmasterDan]

Unfortunately, those numbers don't help me much. What is clear is that the Dreamcast sold well enough in its first 1.5 years, better than any new-to-market console before it.

I don't think that's accurate either and certainly not clear.

 I think the N64 sold better in its first 1.5 years on the market (were you strictly reffering to the US on this, because for the Dreamcast the first 1.5 years on the market globally would put it in April 2000) for example. The problem is that worldwide data for those time periods isn't widely available. For the US a company called NPD was doing Toy and Retail Sales Tracking (or TRST), but it strictly tracked sales in the 50 US states, Famitsu magazine does most of the tracking for Japan. Europe and elsewhere in the world wasn't widely tracked for sales.

Added in edit: By March 31st 1998 (just slightly over 1.5 years on the market) the N64 sold 15.22 million units. Roughly a time and a half as many units as the Dreamcast had manufactured. http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Nintendo_64 This basically re-enforces that the N64 sold better in the same time frame.

Also, here's NPD info for the Dreamcast in the US. http://www.goodcowfilms.com/farm/basement/ga-archive/sega-dc-sales-03-04-2003.htm archived from the old Gaming Age Forums.

So that covers US direct sales for the Dreamcast.

[spenoza]

Well, clearly that's a misconception I bought into, then. The system still had a fantastic launch, though, and, since what-ifs are pretty par for the course around here (this is a PCE/TG forum, after all), I'll say I think the DC could have beaten the N64 in the US (time-frame for time-frame) had the console supply been available at launch. Or maybe I just like to blame NEC. They are the perennial whipping boy around here.

[DragonmasterDan]

Well, clearly that's a misconception I bought into, then. The system still had a fantastic launch, though, and, since what-ifs are pretty par for the course around here (this is a PCE/TG forum, after all), I'll say I think the DC could have beaten the N64 in the US (time-frame for time-frame) had the console supply been available at launch. Or maybe I just like to blame NEC. They are the perennial whipping boy around here.

The N64 had supply issues as well

Also, from what I can extrapolate just from those numbers, the ratio of systems sold in the same time frame were at least 2 to 1 in favor of the N64. I'm not sure any minor changes to the Dreamcast would have changed things significantly enough to turn that tide.

[spenoza]

I'm not saying anything would have ultimately changed the course of the Dreamcast's life, but it's possible the system could have sold significantly better than it did. Pre-orders were enormous and cancelled in droves, especially in Japan. Any better is still better, and is still a good thing, IMO.

[GohanX]

Despite DVD playback, I still can't figure out why the PS2 sold as well as it did.

I would say it was mostly hype. The PS2 was supposed to be the everything system, and if hype were believed, 200x more powerful than anything the world had seen. As a Dreamcast/PC gamer, I was pretty disappointed when a local shop got an import system and the games didn't look any better than stuff I already had.

[Mathius]

Mathius, I find the Eidolon's Inn articles to be interesting, but lacking in references and fact-checking. The Saturn article is distinctly opinionated in places and hard to take seriously, despite containing some rather valuable insights. I'll need to read the Dreamcast one more fully, but I would be wary accepting it as a reliable source.

And now that I'm on page 3, they've already bungled a huge amount of important technical data. I can only assume the corporate politics stuff is within the realm of being correct, but the technical information they throw around in that piece is way off base in a number of important places.

What technical info did they screw up? I'm just wondering.

Further, the hyperbole is annoying. Allow me to quote... "literally eye-popping graphics"  I know what literally means. It is synonymous with actually. And yet, I don't know anyone who's eyes were popped by the Dreamcast's graphics.

My eyes may not have popped but they certainly were astounded by the graphical power of the DC back on launch day.

[spenoza]

I believe the Saturn can do texturing and lightshading in hardware.

Basically the only programmers who swore that the Saturn was a beautiful box of wonder that nobody was properly tapping were people working at or closely with Sega. Others, including the programmer of Saturn Quake (perhaps the single most polygon-heavy Saturn game) said that its architecture is stupid for 3D games, and that the Playstation is way faster at 3D drawing anyway.

The Saturn can do Garoud lighting using an additive model, but I'm not sure that works well with textured polys in most cases, thus many Saturn lighting examples are at least partially software in nature. I wish I understood what I just typed better than I actually do.

Saturn texturing is a weird beast. I get the feeling it does texturing in an odd way. I tried reading up on this, including the dev manual, so this is conjecture. The sprite and texturing engines are one and the same, and lots of different sources say that poly generation is somehow an extension of this engine, yet the Saturn seems to do 2D and 2D integration with 3D more smoothly and effectively than the Playstation. The Saturn architecture is a bit odd, and not nearly as straight-forward as the PS1 (which follows a much more traditional model, and also uses math shortcuts for speed, sacrificing accuracy), but I don't know that that means it is "stupid" for 3D games, despite what that programmer from Lobotomy claimed. He claimed the Saturn couldn't use one large poly for a wall, but instead had to use several small polys. This doesn't make a lot of sense without qualification. It is possible the Saturn can't do repeating textures on a surface, thus requiring multiple polys for a wall in order to get a repeating texture pattern, but even that doesn't completely make sense to me. It might have something to do with this information I found on the Rockin'-B web site: "The SEGA Saturn cannot change texture coordinates in game by hardware. This means that textures are pre-mapped and cannot change (except very few and very limited programming tricks, not worth mentioning) which is required for some of todays lightning effects." But I don't see how this would interfere with, say, making a big wall.

I want to know more about the Saturn, but it's really hard to find good info distilled into understandable terms.

I would say it was mostly hype.

JKM, yeah, in truth there's not much on the PS2 that the Dreamcast truly couldn't do. The PS2 can do some nicer visual effects and a few more polys in a scene, but PS2 texturing kinda sucks balls, and memory management on that console is a bitch. A quick and dirty port is, for the same effort, going to look less good than a Dreamcast game, and even the great games don't look too much better. Grand Theft Auto III had a large world but the textures were bland and the frame rate less than quick and smooth. The Dreamcast might have had trouble with the poly counts involved in far enough draw distance, but what you could see would likely look a lot better.

[Black Tiger]

Basically the only programmers who swore that the Saturn was a beautiful box of wonder that nobody was properly tapping were people working at or closely with Sega. Others, including the programmer of Saturn Quake (perhaps the single most polygon-heavy Saturn game) said that its architecture is stupid for 3D games, and that the Playstation is way faster at 3D drawing anyway.

The same programmer was the most vocal in saying how easy it is to develop for Saturn and how you can get more out of it than the Playstation, to the point that he called those who didn't get good results 'simply lazy'. When they made a version of Powerslave/Exhumed for Playstation, they had to chop it up to get it to run well enough and the effects still took a hit.

It was only some time after Lobotomy's support for Saturn had led them down the road to financial ruin, that he started lashing out against the Saturn in clearly emotionally biased comments. You could say that he was only lying on one side of his opposite comments, but his work for the Saturn supports his positive comments and his negative ones are tainted by what happened to their company.

[SamIAm]

I love me some Saturn games, but I think the best 3D games on the Playstation pretty much speak for themselves.

Also, I believe I remember reading a discussion in a homebrew forum about how the Saturn tends to warp its polygons once they get too big. That's what that programmer was talking about when they were discussing big walls, I think. The Playstation does this too, though.

Keep in mind that the programmer who made the PS version of Powerslave was a different guy. Ezra Dreisbach was the original Powerslave programmer and the Quake programmer, and his test-port of Quake to the PS was his first PS game. When he says this:

The most striking thing about the PlayStation port was how much faster the graphics hardware was than the Saturn. The initial scene after you just start the game is pretty complex. I think it ran 20 fps on the Saturn version. On the PlayStation it ran 30,but the actual rendering part could have been going 60 if the CPU calculations weren’t holding it up. I don’t know if it would have ever been possible to get it to really run 60, but at least there was the potential.

I have to think he's not lying.

As for the AM2 projects that supposedly used the sound CPU to help get extra-high polygon counts, it's quite a stretch to expect anyone else to do this. Even so, the Saturn Shenmue video doesn't appear to pull off much that the best Playstation games didn't.

Of all the reasons to love the Saturn, being good at 3D must be toward the bottom of the list.

[spenoza]

So, to get back to Game Sack, I think you guys do some great editing (Gee, Joe's a video editor by trade. I wonder if that is connected somehow...)

You also do pretty good clip selection and seem determined not to whore yourselves completely to only the highest-profile titles.

[DragonmasterDan]

JKM, yeah, in truth there's not much on the PS2 that the Dreamcast truly couldn't do. The PS2 can do some nicer visual effects and a few more polys in a scene, but PS2 texturing kinda sucks balls, and memory management on that console is a bitch. A quick and dirty port is, for the same effort, going to look less good than a Dreamcast game, and even the great games don't look too much better. Grand Theft Auto III had a large world but the textures were bland and the frame rate less than quick and smooth. The Dreamcast might have had trouble with the poly counts involved in far enough draw distance, but what you could see would likely look a lot better.

The PS2 could do considerably higher poly counts than the Dreamcast could, the PS2 initially was bumpy out of the gate as Sony downgraded the GPU performance, as a result there was a lot of early games with "jaggies", jagged polygons due to the lack of hardware anti-aliasing, but those problems got solved fairly quickly through clever programming. Yes, first generation PS2 games didn't look any better than what was on the Dreamcast, but something like Dragon Quest VIII is inconceivable on the Dreamcast.

[spenoza]

JKM, yeah, in truth there's not much on the PS2 that the Dreamcast truly couldn't do. The PS2 can do some nicer visual effects and a few more polys in a scene, but PS2 texturing kinda sucks balls, and memory management on that console is a bitch. A quick and dirty port is, for the same effort, going to look less good than a Dreamcast game, and even the great games don't look too much better. Grand Theft Auto III had a large world but the textures were bland and the frame rate less than quick and smooth. The Dreamcast might have had trouble with the poly counts involved in far enough draw distance, but what you could see would likely look a lot better.

The PS2 could do considerably higher poly counts than the Dreamcast could, the PS2 initially was bumpy out of the gate as Sony downgraded the GPU performance, as a result there was a lot of early games with "jaggies", jagged polygons due to the lack of hardware anti-aliasing, but those problems got solved fairly quickly through clever programming. Yes, first generation PS2 games didn't look any better than what was on the Dreamcast, but something like Dragon Quest VIII is inconceivable on the Dreamcast.

I'm not sure that we know that for certain. The PS2 had a long market life, so libraries and development tools improved. The Dreamcast had such a short development life that I'm not sure the system was really ever tapped out. I am certain that the PS2 could push around more polygons. I don't know that I could say with confidence that that difference is enough to truly make a difference. I am not certain that the Dreamcast couldn't at least manage a passable version of anything featured on the PS2. The Dreamcast's limits are still somewhat unknown.

Further, the PS2 can push a HUGE number of unadultered polys. As soon as you start doing stuff to them, the poly rate drops dramatically. The PS2 was a very flexible piece of hardware in that instead of having lots of built-in hardware effects, it was highly programmable, but using those programmable effects really cut poly rates. Combine that with the miniscule texture memory and many PS2 games had to reduce the frame rate or effects to get higher poly rates. The DC had an excellent Z-buffer implementation, even better than the Xbox and PS2, so while it can't put as many polys on screen, it is extremely efficient and rendering only the polys it needs to render, and it is very efficient at ruling out polys that don't need to be rendered. So, under game conditions with texturing effects and all, yes, the PS2 could render more complex scenes with higher poly counts, but not as dramatically more as Sony has traditionally claimed. I do think with some close-to-the-metal programming and some good design decisions that the DC could manage results that are admirably close to the PS2, at least for the most popular and mainstream games. The games that the PS2 produced that the DC couldn't touch are the ones that use minimal effects and lighting and focus more on extracting more polys at the expense of visual acuity.

[Samurai Ghost]

How I see it from a strictly hardware perspective:

Saturn 2D > Playstation 2D
Saturn 3D < Playstation 3D

But with the DC/PS2 it's not so clean cut. The PS2 is capable if rendering more polygons and the heavy development that went into some of the later PS2 titles really pushed what the system could do. The Dreamcast was more limited with its polygons, but what it DID render looked amazing. No jaggies, bright colors, everything was so smooth. And the fact that is fizzled out so soon makes me wonder what kind of games would be developed for it if it stuck around longer...