SegaNet

» see seganet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed seganet. wrong console and wrong country, both at once. the dreamcast was rare in turkey in 2000, and the few people who had one used it for offline games like soul calibur. seganet was a north-america-only dial-up isp tied to a console that was already obviously losing the generation to the playstation 2. by the time i was old enough to think about console online services, the xbox had launched and xbox live was the conversation.

sega launched seganet on september 7, 2000. for $21.95 a month you got an isp plus access to dedicated low-latency game servers, with the planetweb browser bundled in for general internet use on your dreamcast. by late october sega was claiming 1.55 million dreamcasts had connected to the service. that number flattered the install base more than the active subscriber count, but the engineering was real.

then in january 2001 sega exited the console hardware business. the dreamcast was discontinued. without a console to sell, seganet had no recruitment funnel. the isp side shut on july 20, 2001 and subscribers were ported to earthlink. game servers limped on for two more years until the last phantasy star online sessions ended on september 30, 2003.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the seganet pitch in 2000 made sense on paper. console gamers had no easy way to play online. pcs needed configuring. a console with the modem built in and the isp prepaid was a real consumer-friendly product, especially in the us suburban market where dial-up was still default. sega-owned servers meant the company could promise sub-100ms latency at a moment when matchmaking on pc games was a coin flip.

phantasy star online was the killer app. shipped in january 2001, it was the first console mmo with full online play, and it ran on seganet for north american players. for a few months in spring 2001 a dreamcast on seganet was a credible online gaming machine.

~ what really happened ~

the dreamcast was the problem. it had launched in 1999 with a strong library and was outsold three to one by the playstation 2 through 2000-2001. sega lost money on every console. the company killed dreamcast hardware in march 2001 and exited the platform business entirely. seganet was an isp that existed to serve a console that no longer existed.

microsoft watched all of this and built xbox live the right way. broadband only, no isp side, with a clean subscription that handled authentication and matchmaking. xbox live launched in november 2002 and was effectively the seganet idea minus everything sega had gotten wrong. seganet's game servers held on for one more year of phantasy star online before sega closed them on september 30, 2003.

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