Sega Dreamcast: Ninjas vs. Pirates

As early as 1992 Sega began it's slow and agonizing death in the console market. The Sega CD, an update/add-on CD drive to the Genesis, debuted at CES(Consumer Electronic Show) with few impressed by it, as it did not offer much improvement over the Sega Genesis. In 1994, another Genesis add-on, the 32x, entered the market. The 32x was released in November as an item for the "Christmas Rush" but it's severe lack of supply and numerous technical problems caused an early decline. 1995 saw Sega's first true 32-bit console: the Saturn. Entering the market unopposed, Sega released the Saturn at the high price point of $399 and only was able to sell 80,000 units in the five months previous to the release of the Sony Playstation, which sold 100,000 at the lower price of $299 upon it's launch. The release of the Dreamcast in 1999 meant that Sega had put out five console hardware products in the time it took for Nintendo to put out two.


The Dreamcast was actually a big step ahead for Sega as well as the entire gaming industry. It was the first home console to feature a built in 56k modem for online play. Another advancement Sega made with this new console was the use of GD-rom disks as opposed to the older CD-rom format. The GD-rom format was developed for Sega by Yamaha and a new way of reading the disks allowed for 1.2 gigabytes of data storage. With launch day sales exceeding $98 million, the future of this new console looked bright, but little did Sega know, they had doomed themselves once again.


Sega did very little to protect their games, in fact, the only encryption was the GD-rom format itself. This was quickly overcome and hackers were able to create the Utopia Boot Disk which allowed pirated games to be played on the Dreamcast console. Napster also made its debut in 1999 and even though it was primarily used to share .mp3 files, it brought file sharing and P2P (Peer to Peer) networks into the mainstream, spawning other websites and applications which added to the ease of distributing pirated copies of Dreamcast games. In early January 2001 Sega released a Broadband Adaptor which allowed players to upgrade the speed of their Internet connection... and also the speed at which they could transfer game files to their computers.

On January 31, 2001 Sega announced that it would no longer be producing the Dreamcast. Sega's lack of support had driven many third-party game developers to the newly released Playstation 2. Many gamers followed suit, and with the announcement of the Nintendo Gamecube and Microsoft's X-Box, Sega chose to bow out of the console race