People were ready and willing to accept a new competitor into the video game industry. The 3DO also received a lot of media coverage and pledged support from third-party developers thanks to light licensing costs.

Even with the use of chips such as the Argonaut-developed Super FX for the Super NES or Sega's SVP, rendering 3D was still taxing on their respective hardware. The Super NES and Genesis could only render rudimentary 3D graphics, and at very low framerate without the assistance of enhancement chips in their cartridges. The 3DO was also one of the first consoles capable of rendering textured 3D graphics natively, giving it an edge as the industry-wide 3D transition approached. The console was fairly beefy for its time period, heavily outstripping both the Super NES and Sega Genesis in processing power at the height of their console war. Panasonic was the first licensee with the 3DO REAL, with GoldStar (LG) and Sanyo providing their own versions later, 3DO ALIVE and 3DO TRY - the latter only releasing in Japan - and Creative Labs releasing the 3DO Blaster, an expansion card for PCs which has the actual 3DO hardware on it and only required a CD-ROM Drive and a Sound Blaster 16 or equivalent card, not relying on the PC's processor and graphics card at all.Īs history has not been entirely kind to the 3DO, it's easy to overlook how it was legitimately primed to take the world by storm. Sony and Microsoft actually sell their consoles for less than what they cost to produce, but make the money back and then some on game licenses and subscription fees that most console manufacturers utilize. While this may have been seen as an innovative business model at the time, it heavily contributed to the console's high price since it not only added an extra middleman that increased the cost, but also meant that the system couldn't rely on the razor and blades business model Explanation A business model of releasing the main unit at a (relatively) low cost so people will buy complementary items, in this case games, and thus generate profits that way. Instead, The 3DO Company licensed the blueprints of the console to various manufacturers, which provided their own versions, similar to the then-popular VHS standard for home video.

The system was unique in that it wasn't manufactured by the parent company. The 3DO Company was founded by Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, which he left to form 3DO. The platform was an attempt to create a standardized video game console format. The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, or just 3DO for short, was a 32-bit console released by the now-defunct 3DO Company in 1993.

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