COLLADA

Sony kicked off COLLADA in 2004 ahead of the PlayStation 3, because studios needed models, materials, skeletons and animation out of Maya, 3ds Max and Softimage without writing one exporter per tool. The work was handed to the Khronos Group, and files got the .dae extension, for Digital Asset Exchange. In 2012 it also became an ISO specification.

The trouble was breadth. The format could express almost anything, so every exporter picked its own subset, and a file from one application often opened half-broken in the next. It worked fine as an intermediate step in an asset pipeline but was far too verbose to load directly in a game. Khronos answered in 2015 with glTF, narrow and binary-friendly, while the rest of the industry kept using FBX.