At almost one year into its lifecycle, the PlayStation 3 has certainly not sold at the clip Sony would have hoped for, largely because of its steep price. Unless that rumored $399 model reveals itself soon, this holiday is going to be another tough battle for the $499/$599 PS3, competing with a $349 pro SKU Xbox 360 ($279 core) and a $249 Wii.

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.”

By contrast, Cole said that the PlayStation brand and strong software support have already made a huge difference for PS3. “The PS3 has all kinds of software support, billions of dollars in backing, a well known brand name, they are able to do marketing and it sold more units in its first few days on the market than the 3DO did in the 3 years or so it was on the market,” he continued. “PS3DO sounds cute and catchy, but as an actual basis for comparison it is pretty useless.”

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.”

But what does the man behind 3DO think? Trip Hawkins, who’s now running mobile games developer Digital Chocolate, told GameDaily BIZ, “Casual games like our Tower Bloxx and DChoc Cafe Series are breaking out all over, from mobile phones to the web to the Wii. Digital Chocolate is part of this huge trend, a classic case of disruption a la Clayton Christensen. Not just Sony, but the entire console game industry has overinvested in the hardcore market that wants higher graphics performance. Casual gaming is about convenience and social value, which is why smaller games on networked devices are taking off, while the mass market is not embracing expensive sedentary consoles.

“Ironically, 3DO failed in part because it targeted mass consumers with casual and social game themes, but that market was not yet developed at that time. 3DO was, like the PS3, ahead of its time, but in different ways.”

Source: Gamedaily

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