Though the Dreamcast launch was successful, Sony held 60 percent of the overall video game market share in North America with the PlayStation at the end of 1999. On March 2, 1999, Sony revealed the first details of the PlayStation 2 (PS2), which Ken Kutaragi claimed would allow video games to convey unprecedented emotions. Sony estimated the PS2 could render 7.5 million to 16 million polygons per second, whereas independent estimates ranged from 3 million to 20 million, compared to Sega's estimates of more than 3 million to 6 million for the Dreamcast. The PS2 would also use the DVD-ROM format, which could hold substantially more data than the Dreamcast's GD-ROM, and would be backwards-compatible with hundreds of popular PlayStation games. Sony's specifications appeared to render the Dreamcast obsolete months before its US launch, although reports later emerged that the PS2 was not as powerful as expected and difficult to develop on. The same year, Nintendo announced that its next console, the GameCube, would meet or exceed anything on the market, and Microsoft began development of its own console, the Xbox.
