<div style='font: 12pt Modern; text-align: left; '>But that class is more obsessed about solving equation than actually thinking about whether the equations they're solving actually has any relevance to the real economic world.
There's a lot of interesting things you can model with just the 2 player game which is trivial to solve. On the other hand just because you've an N player game with 5 billion variables, it doesn't mean it's actually representative of anything that goes on in the real world.
"I too don't buy the "stupid American gamer thing". However, Americans do buy whatever they see on TV or hear hyped in the news, pure and simple. And nothing has been hyped or plastered on TV more than PS2 recently. Only Xbox's hype will compare, IMO."
That is how products get sold in the first place. If it's not advertised, it's not going to sell a lot. To take a more extreme example, if it's not on the shelves, then the game does not get sold, period. There are certainly deserving games that never made it to the shelves. It works like this in Japan too, especially consider the inventory gets rotated even faster due to the high volume of new games there.
"And for a long time, DC had the volume and the quantity (and still does really), yet it still failed. Why?"
No it does not. It's 3 million or so base just isn't enough to compete with the Playstation, not even with the N64. The volume of games on DC is severely lacking. 9 out of the 10 top sellers last year were from Sega. This is worse than the distribution you see in the N64. It lacks the variety to be competitive. You can't carry a system on just the 1st party.
"Because no one cares about the games. Why? Because nobody outside of hardcore internet types like the people here know jack about any of its games. In other words, Sega still has not captured the so-called "casual gamer" market. That's the purpose of the ad blitz. The ad blitz (IMO) has two purposes. The ad blitz serves not only serves to hype one particular game, but it also hypes the system."
I hate sounding like a broken record, but any feeble ad blitz Sega can mount will be destroyed by Nintendo and Sony for sure. Sega simply doesn't have the money, installed base, popularity, or the number of games to outblitz the entrenched Playstation, or even the N64.
No amount of ad would've done the DC any good. If anything, it'd have just hastened its demise, because there is no way Sega can compete head on in an ad campaign against Nintendo or Sony, which is what will happen if they want to sell it on hype.
The problem has always been, and still is, 3rd party support. Sony is not a strong 1st party developer by any stretch of imagination, and PSX is the undisputed winner of the 32-bit era. There simply isn't any 1st party strong enough to carry a platform by themselves.
"Also, ad blitz do indeed work with small installed bases. The PS2 hasn't really sold all that many consoles in the US because of production problems, yet I saw add blitzes for PS2 games from day one. They do that because they know that people will ignore the system if they don't keep hyping the heck outta of it. MS or Gamecube will come in and taker over if they don't."
It's still more than the number of Dreamcast sold so far. Sony also has the advantage of being the dominant player.</div>
