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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.
The first one they have in the works for The Phantom is Duke Nuk'em Forever.
dunno if someone with uid of 3800 can be comment about other people "not having a life" ;)
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.