No, Xbox Isn’t SEGA

gamesreviews.com:

There’s a lot to criticize about Microsoft’s multiplatform “Everything is an Xbox” switch. Some are even comparing them to SEGA. Anybody who was there at the time knows it’s about as inaccurate as you can get.

The Dreamcast is one of the greatest consoles ever made. It’s exclusives ooze style and cohesion. Whether it’s Shenmue or Sonic Adventure, you can tell it’s a SEGA game, and a Dreamcast game too.

But none of that mattered, because the Dreamcast was dead before it arrived. The SEGA Saturn, and all the fighting between east and west, had made one of the greatest consoles ever made a non-starter. Then people found out you could burn discs, pop them in the console and it’d just play. The dead got deader.

SEGA, primarily a gaming company, pivoted to third party because it was the only way they were going to survive. Anybody who thinks that about Xbox, let alone Microsoft, is kidding themselves. So deep are they in the console war trenches that their brains are apparently broken. There’s a lot to be said about the current situation, and very little of it matches up with the Dreamcast.

For an easy starter, SEGA wasn’t the biggest third party publisher before it shut its console division. Xbox owns Call of Duty, and for every copy sold on PlayStation, 70 percent is going home to Microsoft. Xbox probably makes as much off CoD alone as SEGA did in its entirety for 1999.

SEGA pivoted because they had to. Microsoft have pivoted because they want to have their cake and eat it too. It might not work, but that’s what they’re trying to do.

Look back to the early 2000s, and you’ll see an industry that’s just discovered a golden goose. You know that the PS2 is the only place where you can play almost everything worth a damn, and it’s a nifty DVD player too. The Xbox isn’t out yet. The Dreamcast is dead. The Gamecube, God bless it, is trying its best. Nintendo is probably dead, someone says in the schoolyard when you mention Melee.

You bought a PS2 for exclusives and there