Why did the Dreamcast fail?
The Dreamcast failed because it was in the shadow of the PlayStation 2. Developers feared that their games wouldn’t sell on Dreamcast because people would be waiting for PS2, and people didn’t want to buy the Dreamcast unless good games were guaranteed. You can see how the vicious cycle is in effect. The original PlayStation’s dominance guaranteed a market for the PS2, that people would buy it based on name alone. Sony’s exaggerated claims of performance (in purely theoretical, ideal conditions, so they weren’t necessarily false advertising), of course helped this along. Names and expectations aside, it’s quite possible that the Dreamcast, with its year-long lead over the PS2 to market, would have won the battle. You can be certain that developers wouldn’t have been in a rush to develop for PS2, with its convoluted and unfriendly architecture – the same problem, in fact, that sunk the Sega Saturn.