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thiago_fmtoday at 2:34 PM5 repliesview on HN

The reason the PS2 was successful it was because it was very easy to unblock it and use pirated games.

The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.


Replies

jsheardtoday at 2:39 PM

It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could burn a game to a CD-R and have it Just Work without modifying the console in any way. It being both a total piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.

Not to say that easy piracy is necessarily a death sentence for a console, the DS succeeded in spite of ubiquitous and cheap flashcarts, but the Dreamcast shows it's not necessarily a path to success either. There are just more pertinent reasons for a system to sink or swim.

sumtechguytoday at 5:11 PM

I think that it was a game player and a DVD player had more to do with the success of the thing. Oh and it plays psx games too.

I owned both. The graphics/games were of similar quality. Having a larger game storage gave the ps2 a decent advantage. The dreamcast seemed more interesting. But the PS2 had a better customer feature set.

tom___ntoday at 3:05 PM

In models built prior October 2000 - it was very easy, just boot up Utopia loader and then you were able to run any game from CD.

httpsteriotoday at 2:53 PM

Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.

The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.

AdmiralAsshattoday at 2:38 PM

What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.