i was giving an example of what a unified system would look like. Let's put a little more imagination into this -- what would happen if we had a Nintendo Wii but with the graphical horsepower of the PS3 and Blu-Ray and the online would use Microsoft's Xbox Live? And all at around a $400 SKU?
And if Hi Def wasn't your thing, the games would include a 480p mode and a $250 SKU which would have the horsepower of the current Wii, but would maintain the Xbox live stuff?
Nintendoownsmii, if the price of the console gets too expensive, then consumers will go ahead and buy a cheaper version made by a different company. Its much like if you saw a Sony DVD player for 200 dollars and a Toshiba one for 150, then you would get the Toshiba one if you thought the Sony one was too expensive.
Anyways, there would be many different generic variants of the same console-- perhaps EA would have their own version or Konomi would have theirs -- much like how HP, Dell, and Gateway all run Windows, but they have their own different brands and niches.
In the end, it should benefit the consumers and if they consumers spend more money on games and not having to buy 3 different consoles, then the game makers would all benefit!
Here's an excerpt from the 3DO article:
By the early 1990s, the video game market had become overcrowded with a plethora of consoles. Sega, Nintendo, Commodore, SNK, and Atari each had a video game system on the market. When viewed internationally, the chief competition for the 3DO during its peak had been Nintendo's SNES, the Sega Genesis and NEC's TurboGrafx-16 platforms. The higher quality of later CD-ROM based systems that emerged in the mid-90s (primarily the Sony PlayStation), the limited library of titles, lack of third-party support, and a refusal to reduce pricing until almost the end of the product's life cycle were among the many issues that led to 3DO's demise.
For a significant period of the product's life cycle, 3DO's official stance on pricing was that the 3DO was not a video game console, rather a high-end audio-visual system and was priced accordingly, so no price adjustment was needed. Price drops announced in February 1996 were perceived in the industry to be an effort to improve market penetration before the release of the promised successor of 3DO, the M2. Heavy promotional efforts on the YTV variety show It's Alive and a stream of hinted product expandability supported that idea; however, the M2 project was eventually scrapped altogether.
The second paragraph sounds eerily PS3-ish.
Anyways, it was the fact that the console market was OVERCROWDED, i.e. disunified and 3rd party developers had pick and choose where they wanted to develop their games.
