PS3 vs. 3DO: Is the Comparison Valid?

October 1st, 2007, 17:27 Posted By: wraggster

One anonymous respectable industry veteran told GameDaily BIZ that his company has been referring to the PS3 as the 'PS3DO' for some time now. The 3DO, introduced by EA founder Trip Hawkins back in 1993, sported cutting-edge tech for its time. A steep price ($699) and a lack of any real "killer apps" didn't allow the platform to live out the 32-bit era, however. By 1996 it was officially dead. 3DO's marketing even promoted the platform not as a video game console but more as a high-end audio/visual product. Sound familiar?

But is the comparison to 3DO fair? David Cole of market research firm DFC Intelligence certainly doesn't think so.

"I don't think there is any comparison at all to the PS3 and 3DO," he said. "The main argument would be that they were both priced high at launch. But 3DO was a startup company with a different business model to license their platform to hardware manufacturers who could really have cared less about promoting the platform. They also didn't have software support and thus they didn't have games to drive the platform. With no games, a shoestring marketing budget and no consumer base to start with it sold less than a million units in the time it was on the market."

Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter agrees. "It's a pretty stupid (and unfair) comparison," he said. "3DO was a new platform, no brand ID, not compatible with legacy software, and with no first or third party support. The PS3 has a great brand, a loyal customer base, is generally backward compatible, has a ton of third party support, and an ever-increasing number of good first party titles. I hope the industry veteran was kidding. If he was serious, he's a fool."

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=17610

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