Sega had a chance to hold on to enough market dominance to remain as the third console player even after this, but then their fate was sealed at the very instant they decided to put a CD-ROM drive in the Dreamcast instead of a DVD drive.
Dreamcast was released at a bad time, DVD components were still expensive so if they’d included a DVD drive it would have provided some future-proofing, but the console would have been even more expensive than it already was
The lack of a DVD drive isn’t what killed the Dreamcast. I’d argue that the nail in the Dreamcast’s coffin was when software piracy on the platform became trivial.
There is no way they could have put a DVD drive and the necessary playback hardware in the Dreamcast and still sold it for a price people would pay in 1998. Standalone DVD players still cost $600-$1,000 back then. The argument should be that Sega launched the Dreamcast too early, but they were in dire straits and needed to replace the Saturn sooner than later. I’m not convinced they had much choice.
I think the PS2’s success is a lot more complex than “it was a DVD player and a game console in one”. The PS2 also benefitted from the massive amount of momentum built on the PS1, backwards compatibility, a better controller, and much faster hardware.
I was in my early 20s when the Dreamcast came out. The discussions online and amongst people I knew had a lot to say about the DC and PS2. Storage never once came up that often
It was always polygons. Sega was saying 3M (highly detailed and textured ones) and Sony was saying 66 or some ridiculous shit.
People were just waiting on it
Yes, by the time the PS2 came out DVDs were getting bigger and that definitely pushed a ton of people to get one as their first DVD player, since most were still over $200 so the ps2 was nearly free (fun point, that’s how I convinced the lady I needed a ps3 in 2012)
But really it’s about the marketing and PS2 hype. No one knew the Saturn existed, and it’s largely due to everyone forgetting about them after the complete disaster that the Saturn was in the US
What grinds my gears with all the people (whether Denuvo officials or elsewhere) that claim that it has no effect on performance: they only focus on average FPS. Never a consideration for FPS lows or FPS time spent on frames that took more than N milliseconds. Definitely not any look at loading times.
I’m willing to believe a good implementation of Denuvo has a negligible impact on average FPS. I think every time I saw anyone test loading times though, it had a clear and consistent negative impact. I’ve never seen anyone check FPS lows (or similar) but with the way Denuvo works I expect it’s similar.
Performance is more than average framerate and they hide behind a veil of pretending that it is the totality of all performance metrics.
Yeah the rubber fell off of one side immediately. And opening it up to try and fix it was a hassle. From the article activist shareholders forced them to work towards right to repair, but if they don’t switch to Hall effect sensors it’s really just forced to repair. Potentiometer controllers have a forced shelf life, and controller manufacturers are fine with that. Now they’re just making money selling the parts too.
I hope to see a bigger push across all tech for this. We can’t possibly do better in the fight to improve the climate if we keep using gadgets that have to be replaced every two years.
That’s what I’m fucking talking about. Trying to fix my elite 1 was a nightmare. The prices seem really high but fuck at least they’re selling the damn things now
I hope they find a way to make my SSD replaceable, because based on what I know it's not possible because of how it's married to the CPU and motherboard with a security key you can't copy to a new drive.
Oh really? Every SSD has an end date, you can’t overwrite them. Yet Microsoft has a special (encrypted) partition in the internal XBOX that has to match the main board. Because of this, you can’t simply open it and swap the drive. In many cases, cloning the partition has failed necessitating sending the entire thing to Microsoft to fix (for a fee).
I see where you are going with this… But let’s be clear this is not an attempt by them to make you fail at fixing it, but an attempt to avoid manipulations for jailbreaking/bypassing it’s security and block piracy attempts. That said yes, that has consequences for the repairability. And that maybe, I am not expert, there might be better ways to handle this.
Thank you for your response. I get what you’re saying but no matter what your stance on piracy is, it’s gonna happen. Absolutely inevitable. If (but mostly when) that encrypted partition is broken, they will load up a new 4TB SSD loaded with games they didn’t pay for, add the encrypted partition, pop it in their Xbox Series X, and they’re off to the races!
But in the meantime, absolutely everyone suffers. Anyone who has an SSD fail (remember: they have limited write cycles!) will pay the price in lost saves and time/money spent sending it to Microsoft. And after the encryption is defeated? Then only legitimate Xbox gamers who pay for their games will be hurt by this. And keep in mind it also adversely affects the less technologically-skilled people more.
So in summary, yes; I absolutely will blame Microsoft for implementing a measure that will only slightly slow down piracy attempts while permanently punishing and inconveniencing everyone else…
I get what you’re saying but no matter what your stance on piracy is, it’s gonna happen.
Except… It didn’t. Obviously they know what they’re doing because Xbox one has never been broken and is about to be retired. First console that could ever make that claim.
Most ssd write cycles are massively high and a console isn’t writing that heavily anyways.
I had to force myself to not get BG3 before I finish WOTR at least. I love games like these but after a few dozen hours the cognitive load or something becomes too much and I just feel exhausted from them, there's too many things to track for little benefit.
It will cost 3 times as much, make the entire old library of games obsolete, only allow you to buy games from Apple, and have a strange controller that their marketing tells you is better but everyone knows is objectively worse.
arstechnica.com
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