Funny letter in Diehard GameFan May 1994 issue.

[Rando1975]

I just finished indexing Diehard GameFan volume 2, issue 6 and I hard to share a bit from one of the letters printed. A reader claimed that 500 (yes, 500!) developers were working on games for the 3DO. GameFan corrects the writer and says there are about 30 developers working on 3DO games. I feel that even 30 may be a bit high for the 3DO. 500 seems to be a high number period! Were there anywhere near 500 development companies even around at that time?

[Sivilius]

Lol no not even close to 500. Now that being said Trip Hawkins & 3DO were catering to more than just game developers. Hawkins also wanted 3DO to eventually be a living room "multimedia hub" for games, movies, educational software, and other things. So perhaps the writer counted developers based on that and overinflated the number to 500?

Either that or the letter writer was a clueless bonkers 3DO fanboy....

[SynthMilk]

It's almost certainly an exaggeration, but maybe that figure is loosely based on the number of dev kits that went out.  I'm half remembering a story in EDGE or possibly the Ars Technica interview with Andy Gavin that said these kits were relatively easy to obtain from 3DO.