I don’t know. It feels like things always settle into two or three big players and maybe a few tiny niche players.

If Jaguar succeeded, maybe MS wouldn’t have made it and we’d still have three. Or MS would have bought Atari, so still three.

3D0 had a very interesting business model, but I’m not sure it’s sustainable for the industry. We seem addicted to powerful subsidized consoles.

both Jaguar and 3do were bad products. Atari was full of hardware bugs (apparently Tramiel the younger decided to ship after second tapeout before debugging was finished), and 3DO had hilarious price.

One reason that 3DO consoles were expensive is that the manufactures made nothing from game sales, unlike most consoles. There was a fee for making 3DO games, but it was small and only went to the 3DO company, not the manufactures.