It's a nice story, but you're right to say it's not true. If easy-piracy was the cause, you'd expect the attach rate (games-sold-per-console-sold) to be much lower than other contemporary consoles, because pirated games still needed legitimate Dreamcasts to be sold. But it just wasn't [1]. They simply didn't sell enough Dreamcasts for the reasons you say, and others.

[1] https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio

Peter Moore, then the head of Sega US doesn't even mention piracy as a factor [0]. But then Tony Chen who designed the Xbox 360 security system says it was a major factor [1]. Note that Moore was head of Xbox at that time.

0: https://youtu.be/0ZBR4uHec_k

1: https://youtu.be/U7VwtOrwceo

The person with the job to fix a particular problem claims problem is super important. I'm sure you can imagine my surprise.

Piracy might not have been the cause of Dreamcast's demise, but it was definitely rampant on that system. Anecdotal but I knew someone with a binder full of pirated copies of literally every single Dreamcast game ever made, which isn't something I had ever encountered on any other console at the time (sometime around 2000 or early 2001?). My understanding is this wasn't particularly unusual for a resourceful Dreamcast owner with a broadband connection.

The problem comes when one assumes someone with a binder full of pirated games would otherwise have a binder full of legitimate games. Pirating is likely their hobby. If they couldn't pirate Dreamcast games they would just pirate something else. What they likely wouldn't do is turn into a legitimate collector if pirating weren't an option. These people got into pirating because they were cheapskates.

And Dreamcast game pirating, while it had a very visible scene, was not something a common user would do.

It's not so cut and dry. Yes, there are some people who never pay for anything and only pirate something. But for most people it just depends on what's easily available. See e.g. movie and music streaming services being successful today, despite widespread piracy 20-25 years ago.

In the case of Dreamcast pirates, while I'm sure they wouldn't pay for every game or even most games, many of these folks would very likely purchase some games, had pirated copies not been ridiculously easily available for free.

In the specific case of the person I knew, he had purchased games for plenty of other consoles.

I too am skeptical that piracy was their biggest problem.

I was a Sega fan, but I had no interest in the Dreamcast because I had been burned by the Saturn. When they did eventually decide to discontinue the Dreamcast, they had a fire sale to get rid of them. I, and a bunch of my friends, did end up getting Dreamcasts at that point since they were dirt cheap and there was a fantastic library of games that were easy to pirate. But had piracy been the key issue from the start, Sega wouldn't have been sitting on a glut of unsold consoles to begin with.

I forget what the numbers were, but the Dreamcast needed every single console owner to buy something like 4 controllers each with their own rumble pack and VMU and then about a dozen games.

But then Sega had to go full fucking Sega and the Dreamcast had a fishing controller, a microphone, keyboard, mouse, light gun, and fucking maracas.

I seem to recall every Japanese console of that era having options for fishing, kb/mouse, and shooting. You have a point with maracas, but please never forget the congo drums for the GameCube/Wii and the Guitar Hero controller for literally everything with a video output.

Yeah, SEGA gotta SEGA. The fishing controller was great, wasn't it? I still occasionally drag out my old system just to play SEGA Bass Fishing 2 with the rod controller.

I get that argument but it’s not like the Dreamcast was the Saturn. There was lots of third party support, I feel like lots of units moved… the timing with the PS2 was messy but…

I don’t remember the story but I do remember reading something about how Sega US was pretty hype to continue with the Dreamcast and got a bit blindsided by the decision to stop.

Fun aside: I only learned about pirating on Dreamcast thanks to an article in Tips&Tricks talking about it being a problem. As a kid I did not grok that maybe illegally downloading games is no bueno

Good third party support but crucially EA didn't want to release sports games on it, reportedly because of SEGA's first-party efforts here.

you got the story wrong. EA wanted exclusivity of sports franchise and Sega said no.

Yeah, I said it sort of backwards but that’s what I meant

This is correct. The DC was already dead on arrival because Sega s finances were already deep in the red.

Also, PS1 and PS2 was easy to pirate too, and it thrived

Early PS1 and 2 piracy weren’t nearly as easy or widespread as the DC, IIRC both required hardware modchip installations before disc swap soft methods were discovered, where the DC’s only major hardware piracy hurdle was having a CD-R writer capable of burning the DC’s format.

DC piracy flourished because of easier to find ISOs and a faster internet than the PS1 gen of consoles. PS2 had piracy issues at the same time of the DC, but PS2 piracy was much tougher to do due to the larger game disc sizes transferring over the wire and subsequent uncompressed video and code developers didn’t have to optimize for and pirates had to compress or cut to compensate.

When I got a N64 I remember clearly that the N64 major downside was that piracy was much harder, but everyone was buying cheap PS1 pirated disks on street vendors. Like, very very cheap, and no internet connection required.

That was in Brazil btw.

IIRC you could use pirated games on the PS1 by first booting it off an audio CD with a lot of tracks, then swapping the disk at a certain point in the boot process.