Lazy8s said:
Many automatically dismissed fringe companies like this on the basis that they wouldn't be competing directly at retail with the major manufacturers and using the same business model. It's always possible that the business models of these peripheral competitors can sustain through recurring subscription fees on even a modest-sized userbase.
Joe DeFuria:
I mean arguably, X-Box live finally got on-line console gaming prety much "right"....but they were not the first to try it, and probably applied lessons learned from other failed attempts like Dreamcast.
Not arguing the point, but a small correction: the Dreamcast's withdrawal from the market doesn't retroactively invalidate any of the successes it did have - its online initiative was highly accomplished. It had a better adoption rate among users of the system than on Xbox, had total online registrations comparable to PS2, and housed one of the single most popular online games in Phantasy Star Online with over 400,000+ registrations on DC. Their custom ISP network had data centers along its backbone to increase the speed for dial-up users, and the console also had a broadband network adapter peripheral available. There was also growing developer support for the initiative and a nice range of critically acclaimed games.
Dreamcast's was free, xbox's is pretty interesting in that they got people to pay for the service.(how well did sega.net do compared to xbox live? ok, sega.net was a full isp, but still, if anything that's more worth spending money on)
And PSO on gamecube had an even greater amount of subscriptions, not sure what it currently is, but at one point it was over 600,000, and even higher than xbox live for a little while.
And you can't really count dreamcast's bba, it seemed like sega almost went out of the way not to use it. A total of like 4 games supported it, quake 3, ut, and pod 2 all had better pc versions and weren't that hot on dreamcast(and quake 3 without mods was worthless to me on pc, ut a little bit better, and pod 2 never even got on the radar). PSO version 2 supported it(and 1 did too, but it was a hassle to get working), but that was the one game sega charged for. I think they were trying to push sega.net, and that's why they didn't really support the bba, even when the japanese versions of games did. Dreamcast had, imo, the best online(it had a browser for finding russian porn and seeing it on tv, supported email to get viagra ads and downloading files including saves and jpeg images like porn for jet grind radio, which brought a whole new meaning to the word grind) with some fun online games, and some of them actually included online play as a bonus to a single player game too, rather than as the only selling point! It was also easy to use and free, and had a mouse and keyboard(for finding porn easier), with it's only downside being the lack of bba support.(I missed out on so many dc online games because of that, though I did plug in the old 56k every oncee and a while just to check it out and see what I was missing...it was always goodness that I couldn't get in on...of course dc's modem only support was better than gamecube's nonexistent....though mario kart and pso were good for a little while)
I would hate to have to download complete games that I PAY for.
So I take it you're fine with downloading games you don't pay for, or you're fine with walking to the store and buying them? This just combines the two methods into one! While you're downloading, go take a walk to the park or something.
