Slashdot Mirror
3DO Files For Bankruptcy
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Reuters report via Yahoo News announcing that game publisher and developer 3DO has filed for bankruptcy. As the article indicates, the former console hardware creator "..has struggled to gain a foothold in the competitive games business and has relied on Chief Executive Trip Hawkins for recent funding." Even a recent attempt to buck their reputation for bad quality games by funding higher-budget titles such as 'Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse' seems to have ended in failure, since industry sources are indicating all except 20 employees have been laid off, effective today, as the company looks to sell its properties.
This sums up everything I remember about 3DO recently. I mean, I do find it rather remarkable that they held on for so long after that console with their name on kind of didn't do so well ... but between then and now, have they done anything interesting? Remarkable? Something that makes this death tragic? This is not a rhetorical question, I really wanna know.
Hmm, indeed. Is anyone still seing the blank article on the main page?
You'll only get it if you're logged in and have 'collapse sections' or similar ticked, so that you can see subpage-only posts listed on the main page, I think?
I find it strange how the last article I read about Trip Hawkins(which was in the newspaper) mentioned his passion for the game business, and I suppose that shows in how he was trying to prop it up with his own cash at the end.
This is exactly why CEOs make so much money. The good ones truly believe in the company, and in the industry. Some of these people are pure visionaries. Put the right people under them and watch the company explode.
But did he really just do that bad a job managing it?
3DO never had the muscle to fight Nintendo, or later Sony in the home console market. They made most of their cash from the arcade scene - which has been falling flat lately. I imagine that would be a fairly difficult market to break out of too.
I wouldn't blame Trip too much. Lots of companies rode the arcade wave for quite a while, but only the ones who can jump ship fast enough will survive. Sounds like 3DO got pulled down with the ship instead... Funny, I don't remember them being the captian of the arcade market. That'd be Sega IMO.
3DO started as a console company by designing the 3DO game system with the plan of licensing the architecture to other manufacturers (most notably Panasonic) who would build the actual machines. Once that failed (after many attempts and some spectacularly expensive machines), Trip and the gang tried to restyle themselves as kind of "the fresh, new EA" (presumably he felt that he was the reason EA was successful and so he should be able to easily do it again). Instead, they ended up becoming a company of hacks (or at least run by hacks) trying to capitalize on their very few successes by turning out bad sequel after bad sequel (see "Army Men"). They've always been the slowest to catch up with the technology curve (if they ever did) and their game designs did nothing to redeem that deficiency.
Anyway, no, 3DO had little or nothing to do with arcades. Instead, they're a PC/console game developer that's managed to destroy itself despite the fact that video gaming is more popular than ever...Something even Acclaim hasn't managed. Nice job, Trip.
As some of you have noticed, we've had a couple of strange technical problems on this post (specifically, the post initially looking blank, for those logged-in with sections collapsed on the mainpage, and some other weird display issues.)
:P
Thanks to people for mentioning it so fast, though - we're working on fixing it. Please continue discussing 3DO as if your life depended on it?
I should try and work up something vaguely resembling sympathy for this company, but quite frankly, I find it impossible. They've had it coming for a long time, with the string of bad Army Men titles, and the implosion of the Might and Magic series, both of which are their own fault. 3DO serves as a perfect study for the case against firing the highly skilled designers and programmers in order to cut costs.
My heart does go out to those displaced by the meltdown though. I wish the industry was at the point where they could find work at somewhere with better treatment of their employees.
This site is pretty funny, and pretty accurate too. Shame the message board doesn't work anymore, there were some hilarious posts from former employees.
economics 101, never ever, ever pump your own money back into your dieing company. find the problem with the company and fix it. if you can't fix it yourself, you get someone who can.
throwing money at a problem doesn't always make it go away. look at aol time warner for an excellent example of that type of mess.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
In my opinion the Heroes of Might and Magic series were the only good games they made. It's too bad if HOMM5 would never be made since I really loved the previous games.
Hopefully some company will purchase the rights to the HOMM-series and release HOMM5.
Man this is disappointing. The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse game had serious potentional. I'd imagine the game will still get released because it was pretty far along but now I got this feeling they're gonna cut corners to get it out cheaper. :/
It's completely coincidental but just two days ago FreeDO (a 3DO emulator dev team) released the public beta of the first 3DO emulator to see daylight. I haven't tried it because I don't have any original 3DO games anymore nor have i access to bootlegs. I am really interested in the quality of the emulated games because i really think the 3D0 console is one of the most underestimated consoles of the early nineties. Back in those days it was pretty hip, just like the NeoGeo, but it suffered from the same drawbacks. That big black box was darn expensive for kids! Anyway it's really weird when you think that for almost every console there has been built an emu while the 3DO had to wait till 2003 before somebody compiled a working emulator! You can find the emulator and information about it here:
http://www.freedo.org/