— Ben Parfitt (@BenParfitt) April 8, 2014

Mr Parfitt’s quite right, too: Sega’s console completed its global roll-out by November 1999, and sold 10.6m units worldwide before it was officially discontinued in March 2001. Having struggled against its competitors, Sega had announced its departure from the hardware market two years earlier, and the Dreamcast was its final console before Sega reinvented itself as a third-party publisher.

There has been much speculation as to whether Nintendo is destined for a similar fate as Sega. With the Wii U struggling and its creators repeatedly cutting its financial forecasts, the signs, on the face of it, aren’t positive. Yet the fact remains that although the Wii U itself is undeniably in a precarious position right now – more precarious than the Dreamcast was in 2001, certainly – Nintendo is in a far better shape than Sega was towards the end of the millennium.

Although the Dreamcast’s failure to compete successfully against the might of Sony’s PlayStation 2 hastened the end of Sega’s console-making era, the company had been struggling for several years since its early-90s heyday. A series of add-ons for the Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis) had failed to take off. The Game Gear handheld console was hobbled by poor battery life and was dominated in the marketplace by Nintendo’s Game Boy. By the time the Saturn came out in the mid-90s, Sega’s position was already looking shaky; the Sony PlayStation had already emerged as a serious competitor, and Sega’s own market was diminished by the expensive and poorly-supported 32X add-on for the Sega Mega Drive.

By contrast, Nintendo’s reputation remains relatively untarnished. The Wii U may be struggling, but that’s partly thanks to poor timing and a strangely half-hearted marketing campaign rather than an inherent problem with its hardware. The 3DS remains a hugely popular handheld, bolstered by the sales of familiar games such as Pokemon X and Pokemon Y. As IGN’s Kezza MacDonald pointed out back in January, Nintendo has enough money in its coffers to survive an extended period of poor sales.

If Nintendo is commonly accused of anything, it’s of being too cautious in its approach to its properties and design. Industry analysts criticised Nintendo’s slowness to get a Wii successor on the market. That, and its failure to properly embrace online gaming, or to successfully court the interest of the biggest developers like EA or Activision.