What if Xbox, not Dreamcast, had been discontinued?

Be free my brother, be free. It's nice to have a plastic box not shackled to your legs and having to hope and wait for a game you're interested in come out on a console you have cause you hate the other one for no good apparent reason.

What if my grandmother had balls?

Then that would make her your grandpa, which would mean your real grandpa either would have been gay or they wouldn't have had any contact with each other. Either way you wouldn't be here today.

When you already have hundreds of quality games, a console never stops being good. 360 is indeed one of the best consoles of all time. Opinions asside, going by critics and numbers alone, it's actually be the best.

Yeah, it's a shame Sony killed Sega :P

We would now only have PlayStation and Nintendo. If you are a fan of either then the best thing is for both Xbox and PlayStation to be around. Both Microsoft and Sony push each other to deliver the better experience.

@SolidGame_basic:

MS has plenty of $$ and it would out last Sega. Dreamcast has inferior GPU when compared to the original Xbox.

Twas the evil Sony / EA alliance that doomed the DC I mean, no EA games on DC especially no Madden back in that day was a real kick in the groin to DC.

Though NFL 2K was by far the better FB game. :P

Highly disagree.

that is true history. MS didn't throw money at Bungie, they flat out bought the company. MS threw money at Square Enix for RotTR. Also from one of your links: "Of course, Halo took a major departure from that point. Microsoft announced in June 2000 that it had bought Bungie, which had spent much of the 1990s focused on developing games on Mac. Bungie then turned Halo into a first-person shooter"

I prefer the FPS that came to be. Maybe Halo would have still been created but as an RTS. Not much of a fan of the genre personally.

Bungie was making Halo before Microsoft bought the rights. In fact, like most Bungie games at the time, it was being made for Mac and was going to be brought to PC later. Steve Jobs was pissed and made an angry phone call to head of Microsoft's games division.

@LJS9502_basic: In hindsight I should have said "helped create" instead of "created", but basically without MS backing the franchise it would most likely not have become the huge phenomenon that it did become, in my opinion anyways, for the purpose of this hypothetical discussion.

Yeah that response of his means Jack and Shit. And Jack's out of town. So you hate the 360 post 2009. So the 3 1/2-4 years before no longer count then? And the massive amount of great games on it disappear? Stupid.

MS bought more than the rights, they bought Bungie as a whole. And so what if Steve Jobs' panties got twisted? Apple should have secured the company then. It's business and two companies made the right move for the game and their finances going forward.

@cainetao11: All those multiplats, shit Kinect games and another Halo...................yay~

The SNES and the Genesis/Mega Drive had online before play before the Dreamcast.

I would of had a DreamCast then. Never owned one.

Dreamcast was discontinued before the Xbox One release, even then though, it was selling so bad if Sega didn't pull the plug then retailers surely would have, leaving just Sony in console gaming against Nintendo.

If it'd just been Sony leading the console market uncontested then we'd probably be a generation behind in terms of console power and features. A lot of what we got to enjoy last gen was the result of competition. MS doubled its planned RAM to accommodate for Epic's Gears of Was, Sony spent $950+ to produce each console that sold for $600, probably much of the cost being thought as necessary to compete with the Xbox 360 power and features. We probably wouldn't have saw such a thoughtless tactic be used.

If Sony had only the Wii to worry about, I'm sure they might have opted for not including the BR-drive, maybe even went for a completely different design in hardware that might have allowed for complete and full BC for PS1 and PS2 games because PS3 tech would have been drastically different and more in line with an evolution of PS2 tech. Maybe there wouldn't have existed a bridge between PC and console games and consoles would have had their own market in games. Maybe less powerful and less complex machines would have resulted in lower development costs for developers and publishers, lower gaming power might have resulted in lower standards for games allowing many smaller studios to stay relevant longer. Games could focus on artistic and creative aesthetics and gameplay rather than waste a generation on enhancing photorealism. Maybe the PS3 price would have been much smaller, not contributing a lot to Sony's finanial decline and thus helped them in their long term financial health in their other electronic markets.

What's interesting is what would the topic scenario done to built in HDD features, for instance if the PS3 had been built without one being mandatory then what great 7th gen features would we be missing? Demos, smaller digital games, DLC, patches/updates, app services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, etc, perhaps. Now, if that weren't there, would that have an effect on the development of app services and set top box devices? After all I feel that it was mainly the gaming consoles that many I knew got their feet wet with app devices for their TVs to get services, because it was included in the consoles they'd have anyways for gaming, rather than ask people to go buy a device for app services alone.

@Alucard_Prime: You said it would never have existed.. and it exist before that's al im sayingl...you never clarified any of that :)

@bobrossperm: the OG Xbox revolutionized console multiplayer. That alone has had more of an impact on the industry than anything any Sega console did.

That would be a mess, can't think of anything worse, MS have provided innovation through the years whether people like it or not.

@naz99: It's all good man thanks for clarifying :)

@cainetao11: It was going to be a 3rd person shooter not an RTS, either way it would have been a different game :)

Spread sheet shows different. Besides Kinect games didn't come until late 09-2010

FPS would be less kiddy.

Bioware would be full glory, making Baldur's gate 5.

Rare still alive.

Peter M. making AAAA GOTYs.

Remedy making great games.

No CoD rehashes.

It was first conceived as an RTS dude. Ask anyone here.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2003/06/19/halo-the-rts "You'll actually get a glimpse of the unreleased concept version of Halo. What you see is basically a 3D RTS that lets you not only control far from above, but in a close third-person view."

The original Xbox was just basically the Dreamcast but clunkier and black lol. The SEGA fanboy part of me would've much liked that actually..

But who's to say how that would've turned out? Everything happens for a reason.

Then it would have taken longer for Sega to crash, and there be a Nintendo and Sony only gaming world.

I knew about the RTS but always thought that was a separate game that got canned rather than it being the 3rd person HALO they was going to release not that it evolved into it just like a sci-fi version of MYTH the fantasy RTS they had at the time....well, i stand corrected :)

Wrong. Sega fans were NEVER demented. They actually put up a fight against Nintendo fans (the arrogant ones at the time), with rationale and knew how to back up their arguments. Obviously, you weren't alive during Gen 3 and 4.

The WORST things since HIV/Cancer to come out of gaming, would be Cows from the Playstation camp.

I was a SEGA kid with the Mega Drive so no I was alive, Xbox fanboys are the bane of gaming though.

Proof that Xbox did more harm than good

I suspect we'd have a much better selection of console games.

Sega would have gone under eventually.

Just look at the quality of their games. It's went down far.

just like the dreamcast, gaming would go on. I say this because what xbox and ms were known for also existed on pc. Til this day, i consider any ms console a poor mans pc.

sony 1st party are a little different, i'm not sure a lot of their games would do good on pc. Sure action games, but i don't think ratchet and clank, jak and daxter, sly and some other games would have done well as pc games .

Both the Dreamcast and the original Xbox were discontinued. Anyway Sega sucked during the last few years of their hardware years. So for me they aren't really all that missed.

Dreamcast was one of my favorite consoles ... and that answers your question ... I really dont think Xbox was a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast by any means even if the online part is somewhat true.

Fatal mistakes or not , Dreamcasts library was one of the best i ever saw ( till its premature death that is ) ever . I have so many great memories is ridiculous considering how it failed to appeal and died. DC >>> all Xbox combined

What if SolidGame_basic, not BioShockOwnz, had been banned?

I own both consoles but dreamcast was far better. If you look at them today dreamcast has many games that look good while xbox has none. Dreamcast would have had half life had it not been canned in 2001 and that game is better than halo. As someone who remembers dreamcast the games were fresh not recycled fps over and over again. Ps2 only won because it had a dvd player. Its a shame consoles got so far from games and more concerned with apps and broadcasts. Dreamcast was the last true gaming console. Some of the best games on Xbox were ment for dreamcast. Hotd, shenmue 2, soul calibur 2. Xbox would have shitty games like brute force. I remember when I bought code veronica I was blown away by the graphics. Name one Xbox game that looked better than that. It also had power stone. Sonic adventure, shenmue, thotd and many other great exclusives so it had far more great games in 2 years than xbox had in its whole life span in terms of originals Then you people bash the dreamcast controller. The first Xbox controller was a ding joke. The duke give me a break. A would without xbox would be better for gaming.

I'd be grinding a Phantasy Star Online game right about now. Microsoft should buy out Sega and make use of their IPs they tarnished.

They took risks because they were failing and they needed something to stick to the wall. MS was always going to enter the race.

The Dreamcast times, the only consoles that were still actively supported outside left over markets, was the Saturn in japan.

Yes it would have. Xbox also, even if Sega continued, would have still happened, as it did before the DC even came out, was being worked on. Also even if we say that didn't happen, and MS never entered, Halo would have still existed, it just would have been that RTS on macintosh that it originally was going to be.

Invalid. MS was the one who remade Halo into an FPS, it wasn't an FPS at first. The Xbox was already being worked on in 1999. Yes they did create the IP as it is now.

Yes, MS pulled the plug and even themselves still did software until the start of 2007, then TO's did the rest of the software support then. Xbox was already dead.

Actually it hurt a bit, especially Sega themselves, but it was already being worked on before it was announced. Some media took it as a sign.

Kinect games didn't come out in 09 at all if I recall.

Also this thread is strange, as long as a consoles was big enough to steal from PC gaming MS would have always entered. MS was also already fixing up the XBox before DC was out.

Dreamcast came out in 1998 in japan, xbox 2001 so it's no wonder the Xbox was more powerful. when dreamcast failed i got an Xbox because sega game It a ton of exclusives. I think the dreamcast had more staying power people still make games for it and it gets a lot of love.

The Xbox 1 was finalized around 99. Also Xbox 1 is a hard system to do a lot of things with, including emulate, while DC was easily piratable, and had simple design, which is why you se more people making games for it.

still play my day one "1st in line" ;) xbox..never any issues..

Sega had been the underdog every gen. They could edge out Nintendo but simply didn't have the resource to compete with Sony. The DC ran Windows CE and Xbox was a spiritual successor with major Sega exclusives. If the Dreamcast didn't fold, the Xbox could have been Sega's line of consoles.

Sega would still die off. More people would buy Gamecube, as it would be Sony's only competitor.

.......... lol I love scenarios that make no sense.
What if the original xbox was discontinued in march 2001 8 months before it was even released, since that is when the dreamcast was discontinued.

Ya a system that was rushed to the market broke down a lot best top five? Even when it failed to outsell Wii or ps3 lol better than sega if anything ms is the next Sega have similarities that's for sure never lead in sales