Slashdot Mirror
Infinium Labs to Miss Release Date
Saist (and several others) writes "WhereisPhantom.com is reporting that Infinium Labs will not release the Phantom until 2005.
" While this doesn't appear to widely reported or verified yet, coming as it does on the heels of recent news it's not hard to imagine that this is true.
This "company" sucks. I hope they get prosecuted into the ground.
In case that gets slashdotted like it did last week:
Coral Cache(yes, i already loaded it through coral so it should be in the coral cache)
Mirror 1
Mirror 1
Chris
The first one they have in the works for The Phantom is Duke Nuk'em Forever.
Yeah, right.
How do you miss the release date of "NEHVAH!!!"
I did hear they're waiting for the Duke Nukem Forever port, so that could be the problem.
2005, eh? Do they have advance knowledge of when hell is going to freeze over?
Really, only one in ten startups succeed... And those are ordinary startups, not one that are trying to compete against Microsoft and have a CEO with a history of fraud.
Shoulda blamed the delay on hurricane Ivan....
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
dunno if someone with uid of 3800 can be comment about other people "not having a life" ;)
If they really are banking on bringing out this thing out in november 2005 I cannot imagine worse timing. With PStwo being released, and other stuff Nintendo DS & PSP release dates growing ever closer. The Phantom is technologically dated before it has even been released. No-one is going to fork out for what is nothing more than a glorified X-Box/PC with Next gen eg PS3 consoles on the Horizon. And what about launch titles?
...
So Im predicting this is going to be a flop before it has even been release. (Unless they suddenly pull some magic cards out of the pack, I just dont think consumers are going to buy into a unheard of newcomer on the market so soon after christmas)
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Not that WIP's continuing work isn't appreciated.
The most telling indicator that this is true is that none of the major retailers will let you pre-order a Phantom through their site. Sony only confirmed the new PStwo today and you can already pre-order one on EBgames.com. However, neither they nor GameStop, Amazon, Best Buy, nor any other site I can find will let you pre-order the Phantom, officially coming out well within the pre-order window of most games & consoles. If the stores don't think it's going to happen, it's not going to happen.
I don't know. Most of what they have, you can see elsewhere first. But Infinium only knows the language of money. They didn't like HardOCP talking about them, they sued them. HardOCP didn't back down, and they won.
They don't like Penny-Arcade ripping on them, so they basically say, "They really love us, it's just a sort of hazing ritual they put the new guys in the industry through." Of course, they never said Bill Gates performed freakish acts of carnal violence, they just made a few jokes about how big it and its controller was. I think there's a long way between an eight hundred pound grizzley bear and a dead dog.
Infinium just can't turn off the hype/fud/doubletalk for ten seconds and make a serious effort to tell gamers what they're doing. Even Microsoft turned off the spin machine regularly and honestly laid it out: Here's our system, here's what it does, and here's the games you'll be able to get for it when it comes out.
We've gotten all hype and no substance on what the Phantom really does that makes it different than my PC can already do, and they have not one developer willing to admit that their game will be in the Phantom lineup.
Instead of pulling it out and telling us straight up (Jesus, I hope that doesn't sound as dirty to you as it does to me) what their deal really is, they attack or belittle everybody who attack them.
Infinium won't play by the rules, so this guy basically just said he'll play by theirs instead (and in the process makes a bit of an attack on their ethics). "You want me to go away, fine. You've got a bunch of investory money, you're not behind on the payments for the shiny cars that money bought you, and I'm not proud. Let's get with the checkbook."
I'm not saying its not a bit unethcial, but hell, if somebody put $100,000 on the table in front of me, I don't think my ethics would mean jack shit when they finished talking.
This has been done before. You start a company with a more or less reasonable business plan requiring millions of start-up capital. You get people on board with the cash. You go public to get even more cash and then you eventually burn up the start-up capital, claim you need millions more to continue, either you get more cash or you then close up shop. The founders/majority shareholders get out of it with a nice big profit.
All the while in order to stay within the boundaries of a legit business so you can't get prosecuted, you DO spend some money on some product development... Just not at the levels you SHOULD be if you fully intended to bring the company into full fruition.
Another strategy for the prime founder(s) is to make yourself such a pain in the ass that the other share-holders buy you out (again, at a huge profit). Wouldn't surprise me if you eventually hear that Bachus buys out Roberts.
By then of course the company is a bleeding shell with no hope of recovery and the original founder is living large.
Andre laMothe has managed to not spout shit endlessly and has produced a fantastic system called the xGameStation. it's aimed at a sligtly different market, sure, but he has managed to make a fantastic idea a reality, all without wasting billions of dollars.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I could just as easily turn around and ask "How little of a life do you have to have to immediately post on Slashdot about somebody else's life based only on the fact that they run a website?"
It IS a viable concept. Look at Stream? It took me a matter of moments to download an run Counter-Strike. Even if the system isn't perfect, its still a proof of concept
After seeing the "prototype" that HardCOOP got. It took a YEAR to develop that? They didn't even have any software for it!
It would of taking less than 3 weeks to get the prototype plastic box and case, as well as being under a $10,000 development hardware budget.
Six months is NOT enough. While it might be a simple matter of getting the spec's of the system up, the software is going to be the issue. I also doubt they will even come out.
Not surprised. /me waits to see Penny-Arcade on friday roasting them over a suculent flame of spite
Insert Sig Here
At this rate the release date will be pushed past the apocalypse. So when you see the four elephants of the apocalypse ride, you know we're... maybe... less than halfway there.
We all live in a #FFFF00 submarine...
The "Timothy Roberts can't orgasm unless he kills a dog" comic came AFTER they sued HardOCP -- Penny-Arcade was purposely trying to piss Infinium off with that one.
All the comics before then were more or less harmless, the same kind of stuff that PA pulled on Microsoft.
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com