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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.'"
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.
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).
If you boycott Atari, you are in effect boycotting the small guys. Very few video game developers have the resources to pay employees for a 2+ year game cycle and then self publish their game using an online distribution model. Valve has enough clout to pursue such methods but they are in the minority. Atari pays small independant developers to develop games. Otherwise those small independant developers would have to turn to another publisher or stop making games altogether. If Atari goes down you're just making the other publishers even LARGER monopolies. And you'll have a whole truckload of movies to games like Harry Potter and the horrendous Lord of the Rings games by EA.