In the buying spree of 1999-2000 when Infogrames grabbed up Ocean, Gremlin, Accolade, GTI, and Hasbro Interactive, fueled by a $300 million interest-free loan from the French Government, a third-rate European game company headed up by a charismatic self-proclaimed "visionary" with a degree in chemical engineering, thought they could take on EA. They made quite a few very expensive mistakes. One was dictated by the times -- in the dot com bubble, everything was more expensive, including IP. The second was in their purchase of GTI, the executive staff there negotiated 5-year continuing employment contracts. Anyone familiar with the history of the industry knows that, at the time, GTI was being driven into the ground by those executives. Infogrames saddled themselves with patently unsuccessful managers who then proceeded to grind Atari into nothing, lining their pockets along the way. The final round of mistakes happened after the former GTI crew left and Atari hired former Acclaim execs to run the company. Acclaim, for the unitiated, went bankrupt a few years ago.
Atari died of mismanagement, plain and simple. I'm just surprised it took so damn long.
No. Infogrames SA is the parent company in France. Its US face was called Infogrames. In December of 1999, they bought Hasbro Interactive which owned the Atari name and logo. In FY2003, Infogrames fully adopted the Atari name and logo as there was more brand recognition associated with "Atari" and the figure of Mt. Fuji than there was with the name "Infogrames" and the armadillo logo.
But what you have is management left over from the bad old days of GT Interactive (remember their very shady finances that saw the light of day when they bought Microprose?) who have managed to stick around, probably because no one else would dare or bother to employ them, and a handful of French guys who have only ever worked for one company.
Landover Baptist has been sticking it to the conservative Christians for years. It has some of the best ongoing gags and indepth satire on the internet. I'm surprised any thinking person would consider the articles on their site seriously.
I used to produce game docs -- mostly console docs. Each of the major console manufacturers had in their docs specs specific instructions to include a specifically-worded epilepsy/seizure warning at the beginning of the manual. If the manual did not include the warning when it was submitted to the first party (the console manufacturer) for their ok, production of the game for which that manual had been produced would not go forward until the warning was included in the documentation.
Besides all the points Mike Hawk brings up, there are also the issues of end-user documentation and licensing. First the documentation. A lot of developers I've dealt with in seven years of being in the industry, have an incomplete understanding of end-user psychology, user interfaces and cognitive sciences. Usually, a developer's idea of "intuitive" works great if one is a programmer or an artist. Most people, however, are not. The docs -- user manual, read me file, whatever, is usually composed by someone not dedicated to the development cycle, but who understands the demographic from the marketing standpoint and the needs of that consumer. The American consumer, Joe Gameplayer in middle America is not as bright as most people would like to think. Make it easy for him to get the game, but someone has to make it easy for him to play it, too.
The second issue is that of licensing. In this racing game, or any other sports sim, the players who'll be interested in playing are usually also interested in some connection to reality. They want to race the cars they see on the streets, in the showrooms or on the NASCAR tracks. Are the developers also going to track the bureaucratic hassle of getting the images and names of all the licensors correct? My experience says not, but I am willing to be surprised.
Unless the developer groups want to take on these two issues, as well as the other ancillary bureaucratic ugliness that publishers take care of, don't count on the publishers disappearing anytime soon.
It's less about the history of what has been produced under the Atari name & logo than it is about the relative recognize-ability of the logo and name. Yes, the Infogrames Armadillo (or "floating potato" as one of its incarnations was known) is reasonably well known amongst gamers, but the Atari name and logo are burned into the collective American consciousness as a video game brand.
Infogrames has been spending huge buckets of dollars to get people to recognize and accept their branding (as well as spelling) for several years. Economically-speaking, it's a better dollar investment for them to adopt the Atari brand as their corporate identity -- people already know the name, know the logo and know how to pronounce it. (Four years ago, the Infogrames internal newsletter had a pronunciation guide of the corporate name so all the employees would know the "proper" way to say it -- "'info-GRAHAM', like the cracker!")
There is a difficulty of semantics between what was asked and what is being answered. The "production" costs being discussed here are the costs associated with recording, mixing and replication.
The "production" costs that a record label cites also involve marketing and advertising costs. These costs cover online & print ads, costs to induce airplay (payola? No, but close), product placement in movies, etc. The music may be good on its own, but the label and publishing company will drive to create a market for the album as well.
Check the good-reviews-to-advertising ratio in any game pub -- you'll see that the more advertising dollars spent = better reviews on average. The only gaming pub that at least pretended to have any integrity about such things was CGW -- and now that Ziff-Davis is facing bankruptcy and is selling off their publishing assets, the integrity of CGW may be a thing of nostalgia.
Slashdot Mirror
Less than 3x the cost of a Gulfstream G-650, for comparison. http://www.gizmag.com/business-travel-at-800-mph--the-gulfstream-g650/9000/
1) Start with a large fortune
2) Develop an MMO
In the buying spree of 1999-2000 when Infogrames grabbed up Ocean, Gremlin, Accolade, GTI, and Hasbro Interactive, fueled by a $300 million interest-free loan from the French Government, a third-rate European game company headed up by a charismatic self-proclaimed "visionary" with a degree in chemical engineering, thought they could take on EA. They made quite a few very expensive mistakes. One was dictated by the times -- in the dot com bubble, everything was more expensive, including IP. The second was in their purchase of GTI, the executive staff there negotiated 5-year continuing employment contracts. Anyone familiar with the history of the industry knows that, at the time, GTI was being driven into the ground by those executives. Infogrames saddled themselves with patently unsuccessful managers who then proceeded to grind Atari into nothing, lining their pockets along the way. The final round of mistakes happened after the former GTI crew left and Atari hired former Acclaim execs to run the company. Acclaim, for the unitiated, went bankrupt a few years ago.
Atari died of mismanagement, plain and simple. I'm just surprised it took so damn long.
Does this mean they've redefined "evil" too?
No. Infogrames SA is the parent company in France. Its US face was called Infogrames. In December of 1999, they bought Hasbro Interactive which owned the Atari name and logo. In FY2003, Infogrames fully adopted the Atari name and logo as there was more brand recognition associated with "Atari" and the figure of Mt. Fuji than there was with the name "Infogrames" and the armadillo logo.
But what you have is management left over from the bad old days of GT Interactive (remember their very shady finances that saw the light of day when they bought Microprose?) who have managed to stick around, probably because no one else would dare or bother to employ them, and a handful of French guys who have only ever worked for one company.
Landover Baptist has been sticking it to the conservative Christians for years. It has some of the best ongoing gags and indepth satire on the internet. I'm surprised any thinking person would consider the articles on their site seriously.
I used to produce game docs -- mostly console docs. Each of the major console manufacturers had in their docs specs specific instructions to include a specifically-worded epilepsy/seizure warning at the beginning of the manual. If the manual did not include the warning when it was submitted to the first party (the console manufacturer) for their ok, production of the game for which that manual had been produced would not go forward until the warning was included in the documentation.
Besides all the points Mike Hawk brings up, there are also the issues of end-user documentation and licensing. First the documentation. A lot of developers I've dealt with in seven years of being in the industry, have an incomplete understanding of end-user psychology, user interfaces and cognitive sciences. Usually, a developer's idea of "intuitive" works great if one is a programmer or an artist. Most people, however, are not. The docs -- user manual, read me file, whatever, is usually composed by someone not dedicated to the development cycle, but who understands the demographic from the marketing standpoint and the needs of that consumer. The American consumer, Joe Gameplayer in middle America is not as bright as most people would like to think. Make it easy for him to get the game, but someone has to make it easy for him to play it, too.
The second issue is that of licensing. In this racing game, or any other sports sim, the players who'll be interested in playing are usually also interested in some connection to reality. They want to race the cars they see on the streets, in the showrooms or on the NASCAR tracks. Are the developers also going to track the bureaucratic hassle of getting the images and names of all the licensors correct? My experience says not, but I am willing to be surprised.
Unless the developer groups want to take on these two issues, as well as the other ancillary bureaucratic ugliness that publishers take care of, don't count on the publishers disappearing anytime soon.
It's less about the history of what has been produced under the Atari name & logo than it is about the relative recognize-ability of the logo and name. Yes, the Infogrames Armadillo (or "floating potato" as one of its incarnations was known) is reasonably well known amongst gamers, but the Atari name and logo are burned into the collective American consciousness as a video game brand. Infogrames has been spending huge buckets of dollars to get people to recognize and accept their branding (as well as spelling) for several years. Economically-speaking, it's a better dollar investment for them to adopt the Atari brand as their corporate identity -- people already know the name, know the logo and know how to pronounce it. (Four years ago, the Infogrames internal newsletter had a pronunciation guide of the corporate name so all the employees would know the "proper" way to say it -- "'info-GRAHAM', like the cracker!")
There is a difficulty of semantics between what was asked and what is being answered. The "production" costs being discussed here are the costs associated with recording, mixing and replication.
The "production" costs that a record label cites also involve marketing and advertising costs. These costs cover online & print ads, costs to induce airplay (payola? No, but close), product placement in movies, etc. The music may be good on its own, but the label and publishing company will drive to create a market for the album as well.
Check the good-reviews-to-advertising ratio in any game pub -- you'll see that the more advertising dollars spent = better reviews on average. The only gaming pub that at least pretended to have any integrity about such things was CGW -- and now that Ziff-Davis is facing bankruptcy and is selling off their publishing assets, the integrity of CGW may be a thing of nostalgia.