Former EA Sports, Xbox, and Sega exec Peter Moore has recalled the Dreamcast's dying days and how difficult it was to get the company out of the hardware market.
While Xbox effectively took its place in the market, it was a huge deal when Sega decided to call it quits on console hardware after the back-to-back sales disappointments of the Saturn and the Dreamcast. And while Sega may have been able to hold its own against the GameCube or Xbox (although it would likely still have been fourth place), the absolute monolithic beast that was the PS2 was not going to be stopped by anyone.
This is a sentiment held by former Sega of America boss (turned Xbox and EA Sports boss) Peter Moore, who said in an interview with Eurogamer: "The Dreamcast got off to a tremendous start and really blazed the trail for online gaming.... But in the teeth of the launch of PlayStation 2, and everything Sony could do financially that Sega couldn't do, it became very difficult."
Moore continued, "We were in the eye of the storm of the PlayStation 2 launch, so unfortunately, we had to get out of the hardware business and move to be a third-party software business."
But abandoning the console market isn't as simple as stopping production on consoles and making games for Nintendo, as Moore explains, "This was not a very easy and smooth transition for a company that built its business on hardware in the arcades, and obviously the Genesis and the Sega Saturn and, of course, the Dreamcast. So it was traumatic. It was difficult."
Sega did take to things pretty quickly, establishing relationships with each of the console makers, with the likes of Super Monkey Ball and Jet Set Radio Future being launch titles for the GameCube and Xbox. Moore explains that his job during that time was "to start to move the company, build relationships with our former foes, and start to figure out how we could be - which they are, still to this day - an effective, powerful, maybe profitable, third-party publisher."
According to Moore, Microsoft "came a little bit to our rescue" and "enjoyed having Sega in the industry," with the relationship stemming from the Dreamcast running on a Windows OS, which would later lead to Moore taking a role at Xbox, where he would famously get a Halo 2 tattoo.
