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Atari Profits Down, Closing Two Studios
Gamespot has the word that Atari has reported a drop in profits for the third quarter. Earnings were down roughly $30 million compared to the same period last year. As a result, they are closing the company's Santa Monica and Beverly, MA studios. From the article: "In an e-mail sent to employees shortly before today's earnings call with analysts, new Atari CEO and president Jim Capparro outlined his plan to 'move Marketing and the coordination of Product Development and Production to New York, where those functions will be in close proximity to our center of operations.'"
Are they still alive? I thought they shared the fate of Commodore. Have they released any computer since Atari ST? It was an amazing machine, I loved that baby! Rock solid windowing environment, graphical editors and everything in the times of MS-DOS. Some say it was even better than Mac at that time.
We made 30 mil less in income, but we only lost 4 mil in profits, we're still well in the black, so we half to close two whole offices since we lost income. Sounds like a great plan. *cough*
Apple had three quarters of negative profit once, and they have risen again.
Of course, they better have pretty good plans to get back to the scene. Let's see.
...before EA tries to buy Atari?
They really need to do what Sega did and stop making hardware and focus specifically on software. What? They already did that? Man, I guess they are screwed.
-Dipster
Ubi Soft, a French and French-Canadian company is preventing EA in America from closing their child companies for budget reasons.
Infogrames, the old name for the French company that bought ATARI (and adopted its name) is now closing down their child companies for budget reasons.
I'm not completely sure, but I think "la bouilloire est noire."
I hope it doesnt affect the release of any of their titles. Dragonshard ive been waiting on for a while.
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
It's sad to see what is going on with Atari (fond memories of playing the Atari 5200...) but seriously, what games have they put out recently that constitutes them to be able to do well? The games they list as their top sellers is not like any of them were anything close to the best thing ever. The classic games, while great to have, where's the new stuff? Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was the only name that I really recognized as something that I know people enjoy.
Their profits are going to continue dropping as long as they keep putting out mediocre games. I don't see how closing 2 studios will help them make better games. Hopefully whatever projects those two offices were working on are not going to be something that is missed.
The revenue and profit decrease was a result of delaying one game, until its ready and not rushing it to market as happened in the past. It seems to be a sign of the new management trying a new way and build the brand name, instead of just trying to maximaze short term profits.
Besides, the profits for this quarter, although being slightly down year over year, have still beat the average analyst estimates.
The conference call yesterday has been by many characterized as a breath of fresh air, because after years of shady business, there seems to be open and honest management at top of the company, that is forward and plays it straight with the investors.
Despite the fact I have more confidence in the new management, the short term outlook for the company is not any good, at least for a quarter or two. Long term, they will hopefully turn it around.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
...that they localized and published Ikaruga, by far the best hard-core shumup in recent memory.
Ha! and their customer support laughed at me when I said my boycott would hurt them. They just didn't realize how many games I buy a quarter!
Seriously though, I really hope good game makers like bioware stop distributing via atari. They use sub standard disks, paper sleeves, and their support sucks. Not to mention their use of very crappy copy protection that doesn't work on a lot of dvd/cd rom drives (like sony drives). Or my favorite "You must uninstall disk emulation software to play this game". Yea right, I'll get right on that.
I hope the big guys do so bad that more small studios start showing up, with online distribution models. These mega companys are going to kill pc gaming.
I bought Pirates! recently (published by Atari), and discovered that they make it assume that anyone using a CD emulator (in my case Daemon Tools) is an unsound person and refuse to let the game run. A few minutes on the Internet and the workaround is to change permissions on one registry key. (Note you just have to have a CD emulator installed, not even trying to run the software via it.)
Since they think so lowly of me, I decided to return the favour and never buy another Atari product. I even emailed them and told them why. What goes around comes around. And it isn't like there aren't enough games from other publishers to spend my money on.
And of course the game has been extensively cracked and copied anyway.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. They've taken the Atari name and dragged it through the muck more than Atari itself did (and with the Tramiels, that took some serious work).
They are also losing Epic Games as a major studio that they were publishing for. With Unreal Championship 2 on the horizon, that can't help the situation.
Insert Sig Here
First, it would really help if their center of operations WASN'T in New York. The rent there alone (and salary requirements for employees due to the high rents) makes it hard to run a company in the black!
Hey, I used to work at the Beverly office. Quality assurance tester. It was my dream job. Even on the bad days it was good. I helped test Terminator 3: War of the Machines (and trust me when I say that despite its crappiness, it was a lot worse when we had it... not that it would have been released had the choice been up to us) among other things.
Yeah, and 12/19/03, 6 days before Xmas, without warning they let all the temps go, which made up about 40 of the 60 or so testers there. They fired the rest a couple weeks later.
Burn in hell, Atari, burn in hell.
I guess not! (I'm also guessing that nobody gets this post...)
Could it just be that the name Atari is just a curse? I'm sure Infogrames must be wondering if the purchase of the Atari name was a smart business decision :).
www.lonseidman.com
I hope that Driv3r PC and potentially Driv4r don't get effected by this.
:|
I simply loved D1 & 2 and it would be a shame to see those games disapear. If I had to depend on driving with Need for speed or similar games, I'd rather take up full contact basket weaving
I told management that releasing that ET game was a mistake. But would they listen? Nooooooooo. Now see where it's got them!
Once they announce they are firing Nolan Bushnell, the circle will be complete.
And yet on the other other hand, we have all these studio closures. It's only a few days since I heard of the demise of the Ion Storm studio in Austin, TX. I'm not sure who the future looks bright for, but it certainly doesn't appear to be game developers. My condolences to all those families who are affected by these closures.
This is just some new company that had the name Atari stuck on it after the trademarks were bought (and the logo stuck randomly on games this new company had nothing to do with creating or distributing).
This is basically an abuse of consumer trust and loyalty. They're hoping to appeal to people familiar with the Atari brand name but ignorant of the original company's demise, or its million successors. Because it was the first video game company, the name still has resonance -- despite being used for this tactic repeatedly. But if this keeps up, the name Atari won't mean anything soon.