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Atari and THQ Show Mixed Financials, Game Details
An anonymous reader writes "GameMethod reports that for the fiscal 2004 first quarter, Atari announced that net revenues and income were down from last fiscal year, but still positive. Strong sales of [the somewhat controversial] Driv3r for both PlayStation 2 and Xbox are being cited as the main success, but the dip in comparative figures is being attributed to last year's release of Enter the Matrix, Atari's commercially successful (over 5 million units sold), yet critically jeered game. [Atari's Bruno Bonnell commented on the loss of the Unreal license that Epic's proposed deal was 'not acceptable from a profit point of view for our strategy.'] On the flip side, despite a net loss of $3.9 million for the fiscal first quarter of 2005, THQ announced a positive outlook for the remainder of the fiscal year. Full Spectrum Warrior for Xbox drove sales for the quarter, ranking as the top selling Xbox game and the second best selling title for the month of June."
I don't know, as long as atari keeps releaseing fine games like ET The Extraterrestrial, I don't see why their profits should decrease.
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I'm not surprised Full Spectrum Warrior sold well. It's a great game, with superb graphics and loads of atmosphere. However, I'm a bit taken aback by what it says about US Army tactical training techniques.
First of all, if you haven't played the game, I should make something clear. This is NOT a realism-shooter. When I bought it, I was expecting something broadly along the lines of the Rainbow Six games. However, it's nothing like this. Essentially, it's a military-themed puzzle game. Your soldiers behave like game-pieces on a board and there's no element of aiming or of using quick reactions to dodge incoming fire. Instead, you move your soldiers around and deal with a variety of thinly disguised puzzles. For example, if one of your two squads runs into a group of enemies behind cover, they will be unable to kill them. You won't be able to manually aim and pick off the enemies... instead your soldiers will trade fire with them, but not hit them... at all... ever. If your own soldiers are also behind cover, you'll then get a complete stalemate. You might be able to solve this situation by moving your second squad into a position where they can fire on the enemies without the cover interfering, and to achieve this, you may need to use the first squad to supress the enemies. The enemies behaviour, including which squad they will shoot at and, indeed, whether they will shoot at all, is all very mechanically determined. Every "puzzle" has a solution you can find which lets you beat it without taking any losses. In fact, you fail the mission if one of your soldiers dies.
I'm not trying to make a political point here... as it happens, I'm in full agreement with the US/UK invasion of Iraq, even if the implementation has gone a bit awry in places. However, I can see some serious limitations in this as a training tool. I can see why the game doesn't make players aim manually etc... these are obviously skills that need to be practiced on a firing range, not in a computer simulation (although try telling that to the hardcore video-games-are-evil-and-train-our-kids-to-kill activists). However, the idea of every battlefield problem having a neat solution seems to be to be training troops for failure. Surely, in real combat, a lucky shot *can* take out somebody behind cover and the enemy often behave irrationally. I'd be seriously worried about something like this stifling adaptability and resilience on the battlefield.
Of course, I've no actual military experience, so maybe I'm talking crap. Feel free to mod me down.
To put that in perspective:
Super Mario 64 - 5.94
Grand Theft Auto 3 - 5.35 (million copies sold)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - 2.63
Metal Gear Solid - 2.43
Enter the Matrix - 5 million(?)
Which one of these things...is not like the others? Admittedly these numbers are US sales, perhaps Enter the Matrix sold these ridiculous millions of copies in Europe and Asia. Again, though, that seems somewhat implausible.
Also, as anyone with any sort of business acumen will tell you, units sold speaks very little about net profit. And let's not forget that Shiny reportedly paid $10 million for the Matrix license. What's that smell? Ah...fresh books. Delish.
I guess my only real reason for writing this is that I find Bonell to be somewhat unsavory and feel somewhat unnerved by the possibility that anyone takes him or his company at their word. He strikes me as something of a con man. I don't like that he bought and is now wearing Atari's rough-sewn skin as a branding rain-slicker and I don't like his comments about the future of gaming what games are supposed to be:n ytimes.com/2003/12/21/magazine/21GAMES.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.
For an excellent summation of why Bonnell's comments are a proverbial avalanche of bullshit:
http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_12_01_blogchive
Anyhow, the only point of that rather shallow tirade was that I sincerely hope no burgeoning game designers are being led astray by the parade of delusion that is Infogrames' press releases.
By the way, the source on those statistics is http://www.the-magicbox.com/Chart-USPlatinum.shtml
What did Atari not like about Epic's deal? Did Epic want as much time as they needed to make the game and Atari wanted them to throw out half-finished games instead? Did Epic want a share of the profits? I mean, it's the same guy who claimed that Enter The Matrix shouldn't pay extra (his comment on the WB "higher royalities for bad games" thing, he didn't have to pay, but if WB had that system in place earlier he would have had to) for brand damage since it sold really well (I'd call that "even more damage").
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
When Smackdown "shut your mouth" came out from THQ, it was revolutionary. A wrestling game with 60 modes and insane number of features and wrestler. They didn't really go anywhere new with "Here comes the pain".
They need to bring back another superb smackdown with even more of everything. There is still so much room to improve.