I think one of the most fascinating failed consoles of all time is the 3DO. For those of you not too familiar with the system and the philosophy - think of your Blu-ray player, it doesn’t matter if you got it from Samsung, Panasonic, Sony or any other company, it will play any Blu-ray you have, same goes for your CD or DVD player. The only media that does not operate that way is gaming.

The 3DO was that idea, but for gaming, a technical open “standard”, that could be licenced out, rather than a closed ecosystem like PlayStation or Saturn. Didn’t matter if your 3DO came from Samsung, Panasonic or another company, they might have their own unique extra features, but they would all play your 3DO games fine.

The system unfortunately failed, selling only 2 million systems, as it could not compete with the exclusives, marketing or hardware power of Sony’s Playstation or even Sega’s Saturn.

While I think the idea was definitely neat, it probably came too early before a solid hardware standard could really be established, in the early 90s a hardware design choice could mean entire genres of gaming couldn’t work on the hardware. And safe to say the 3DO would have no chance of running the games gamers were playing just 4-5 years later.

Flash forward to 2026 (or even just 2013) and gaming hardware looks much more similar across the board, most games run on decade old hardware and playing a game on a Switch vs PS5 is like the difference between watching a movie on a dvd vs a blu-ray. 
So could the 3DO idea work today, and would gamers be better off? Companies could release physical blu-ray copies of their games for a 3DO standard, that would play in your Panasonic player or Samsung player or whatever, much like movie studios release their films on blu-ray today. The physical distribution is not centralized around the platform owner, but individual labels can release discs as they wish. The “3DO” players could then optionally also have “apps” for digital store fronts and/or streaming services.

What do you think? Would it be better? Would physical media have a better chance at survival?

The 3DO model started much earlier in 1982 by MSX which was designed by ASCII and Microsoft Japan, with the hardware manufactured and led by Panasonic, Sony, Yamaha, and Philips. The last evolution of the MSX (named Turbo R) was only manufactured by Panasonic who would later support the 3DO. They (and Sanyo and GoldStar/LG) continued to believe in this model when everyone else moved on.

MSX was my first owned gaming system and I loved it. But its model doesn't suit corporate greed. The fat cats just want to lock you in their ecosystems to maximize profits. I guess PC is the closest thing to what you're suggesting and yet ironically it was PC that popularized digital and will lead to the demise of physical games...

The only area where 3DO differed from other consoles was hardware manufacturers. Software wise it was still a walled garden. No matter whether it was made be Panasonic or Goldstar (now known as LG), it was horrendously expensive, the same price people are balking at now, only in dollars that were considerably less inflated. it was essentially a Panasonic console anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Goldstar 3DO.

The main issue with the 3DO is that PC gaming does a good enough job of being an open platform. Consoles are there to be closed platforms, and there advantages to both approaches. I don't think a console like the 3DO provides enough of a distinction from what's already on the market.

The Nuon, in some ways, tried to carry that idea forward. It was a gaming platform inside of DVD players. Ones made by Samsung, Toshiba and RCA. It is the spiritual successor to the Jaguar.

We would be better off with just cheaper prices. Like, thats it. Literally it. No need to overdesign consoles. No need to do new gimmicks. No need to overthink anything at all whatsoever. Wallets rule the world. Just make it cheaper.

Maybe? But probably not. The NES closed system model brought the price of consoles down considerably, considering they didn’t really need to worry about hardware profitability to cover R&D and operational expenses. Additionally, they brought the general quality of games up by excluding software that had blockers and game breaking bugs (a few slipped through, notably some of the Marvel games), but that was a rarity.

This model actually served to fix the industry after the more open hardware models mostly destroyed it by alienating consumers with high prices and low quality software that would make even the buggiest games of today look brilliant.

Granted, things have improved a little since then. Games are mostly distributed through online storefronts which I believe have a QA process that serves the same purpose as the hardware distribution “seal of quality” gate in the software output pipeline.

I don't think that we would be better off, but I expect Sony and/Microsoft to go that way at some point to avoid the blame of price hikes as then they could start out the price higher and/or blame the high prices on their OEM partners..

I expect the end result to look similar to the GPU market, where several companies and brands use the same basic chips and build their own cards out of them. In this case, I expect Sony/Microsoft to set the specs of the console and the manufacturers then build a console around those.

So, errrrr, how many of you bought into the original wave of Steam Machines from a decade ago?

Only under these conditions
1. Cheaper models available that still function well (decent enough build quality and so on)
2. The games are similar at least to the output right now and hopefully not more than slightly worse.
If people could get a new PS5 for $300-$400 right now that would be great.