to be limiting their potential to Sega hardware", and Stolar had suggested Sega should have sold their company to Microsoft. In September 2000, in a meeting with Sega's Japanese executives and the heads of the company's major Japanese game development studios, Moore and Bellfield recommended that Sega abandon its console business and focus on software, prompting the studio heads to walk out. Nevertheless, on January 31, 2001, Sega announced the discontinuation of the Dreamcast after March 31 and the restructuring of the company as a "platform-agnostic" third-party developer. Sega also announced a price reduction to to eliminate its unsold inventory, which was estimated at 930,000 units as of April 2001. After a further reduction to $79, the Dreamcast was cleared out of stores at . The final Dreamcast unit manufactured was autographed by the heads of all nine of Sega's internal game development studios, plus the heads of Visual Concepts and Sega's sound studio Wave Master, and given away with 55 first-party Dreamcast games through a competition organized by GamePro. Okawa, who had previously loaned Sega in 1999, died on March 16, 2001; shortly before his death, he forgave Sega's debts to him and returned his worth of Sega and CSK stock, helping Sega survive the transition to third-party development. As part of this restructuring, nearly one third of Sega's Tokyo workforce was laid off in 2001. 9.13 million Dreamcast units were sold worldwide. After its discontinuation, commercial games were still developed and released for Dreamcast, particularly in Japan. In the United States, game releases continued until the end of the first half of 2002. Sega continued to repair Dreamcast units until 2007. As of 2014, it was still receiving new independently developed games formatted for MIL-CD, a multimedia-enhanced format developed by Sega and supported by Dreamcast. After five consecutive years of financial losses, Sega finally posted a profit for the fiscal year ending March 2003. The announcement of Sega's exit from hardware was met with enthusiasm. According to IGNs Travis Fahs, "Sega was a creatively fertile company with a rapidly expanding stable of properties to draw from. It seemed like they were in a perfect position to start a new life as a developer/publisher." Former Working Designs president Victor Ireland wrote, "It's actually a good thing ... because now Sega will survive, doing what they do best: software." The staff of Newsweek wrote that "from Sonic to Shenmue, Sega's