Just a thought I had

[lastcallgames]

Would the Dreamcast's community be as active if Sega had made another console after the DC?

Even assuming that they couldn't find a way to patch the MILL-CD exploit (which really enabled homebrew games to come out quickly (ergo, the homebrew scene for the other sixth gen systems is paltry compared to the DC), would Sega have allowed people to make and sell new Dreamcast games into 2017 if they had another console to support after it?

[SEGA RPG FAN]

Maybe, maybe not. The restructuring at the end of the Dreamcast's life probably made aggressively going after infringements a low priority. I'm actually surprised they've tolerated as much add they have. It's not like the company or their intellectual property went away following the DC's demise.

[Raen]

Sega doesn't care about homebrew and indie games, they don't have a legal saying to the subject. They care about their brand and IPs. The Sega Dreamcast and their other consoles are discontinued and unsupported products for a very big period of time already, so they don't care about what people do with the systems. Sega nowadays can almost say publicly that they just don't care, there's no money to be made with the systems themselves, only with newer 3rd-party ones (PS, Xbox, Nintendo systems, PC, etc).

Consider this: would the older 1st-party hardware developer Sega allow 3rd-party companies to develop portable SOC portable systems based on the Megadrive, like you have today (ATGames, etc), for example? With a few exceptions from valued official distributors and partners like TecToy from Brazil and Ecofilmes from Portugal, that always had some liberty to develop localized packages and versions of games and consoles, I really don't think so.

That being said, another story is if you try to mess around with their IPs and brands. Take a look to what they did concerning the fan made project called Streets of Rage Remake. They waited for the game to be finished (it took 8 years to develop, and according to the authors, it doesn't use a single line of code from the original Mega Drive games!), sent a C&D letter to the project authors and shut the whole thing down. You can still find the SoRR website up, but to get the game you have to resort to torrents and such. Another example is the YouTube videos takedown purge a couple of years ago.

You can mess with the Dreamcast and other consoles, you just can't mess with their IPs and brands.

[grimgravy014]

I would say whether or not the console that replaced the Dreamcast was backward compatible or not would play a role in how popular the Dreamcast remained.

[SirNyan]

It's hard to say. The crazy history of the console and the constant indie developer support has undoubtedly helped it stand out.