Company News Atari starts sinking

[Sol Invictus]

Atari is fucking up. For instance, they ruined their opportunity to recapture the RTS genre when they decided against letting Chris Taylor/GPG develop Total Annihilation 2 even after they offered to develop the game out of their own pockets, with Atari as publishers. Instead, they're holding onto the license like a bunch of idiots. Why?! I can't think of any reasons why, but that's what they're doing.

They more or less fucked up Boiling Point, TOEE and MOO3 by rushing the releases.

From a marketing standpoint, they're completely failing to advertise DDO as a contender to WOW and to a lesser extent, Guild Wars. It's just known as "that shitty game you can download for free from fileplanet if you have an account, because there's a stress test every Friday" these days.

Go Atari!

 

[Halenthal]

Rushing releases, I could *almost* live with.

It's how Atari pulls funding for patches after they force the early release that kills me.

It's like they've got a two patch limit. Two patches, that's all, screw it if it ain't fixed after that.

I still have hope that someday I'll see MOO IV that's well done, rather than the MOO III 'click end turn. repeat' crap.

 

[Crazy_Vasey]

Rushing MOO3? That game was like two years late on release and the problem was that the developers sucked on a scale previously thought impossible. It's hardly the publishers fault that the initial design would have took about fifty years to implement and the devs made a huge fucking mess when they hacked it down to a more manageable level.

That's not to say Atari don't suck but MOO3 is one turd I cannot bring myself to blame them for. I doubt any amount of extra dev time or number of patches could have made that piece of shit actually resemble a real game that anyone sane would want to play. It just needed to be trashed and started over and no publisher is going to toss millions of dollars down the drain like that if they can help it. Unless they're Interplay.

 

[Thrawn05]

Atari is fucking up. For instance, they ruined their opportunity to recapture the RTS genre when they decided against letting Chris Taylor/GPG develop Total Annihilation 2 even after they offered to develop the game out of their own pockets, with Atari as publishers. Instead, they're holding onto the license like a bunch of idiots. Why?! I can't think of any reasons why, but that's what they're doing.

Yeah, but at least we have Supreme Commander to look forward to. :D

 

[DarkSign]

Atari deserves everything its getting and more. Better put it doesnt deserve the money it's losing. I could reiterate everything that everyone has already said...but why waste the KCalories to type it.

Down with Atari!

 

[Stephen Amber]

Gauntlet

I think Atari made Gauntlet in '85. That was sorta cool at the time. And TOEE was a shambling mess out of the box. Thank gad for the Co8 and that other patch... Atari obviously did'nt care about the game post release, and their QA department must be inhabited by Sleestaks.

 

[Araanor]

These are glorious news, I've been waiting for this. Atari/Infogrames has been a pox on computer games for many years by squandering opportunities and destroying franchises and dev houses.

A little shame on NWN2 and Obsidian, hope this doesn't hurt them.

There's one large evil bastardhouse of a company left to sink: EA.

Maybe after this we could see a more sensible computer games industry rising from the ashes.

 

[damaged_drone]

'atari' can suck my balls. every time ive played a game with them involved they seem determined to fuck me over and ruin it. suck shit.

 

[Halenthal]

MOO 3 was rushed, even though it was in development forever. Around 8 months before release, the entire game was redesigned from scratch for some reason.

 

[Crazy_Vasey]

It wasn't so much a complete redesign as cutting down the ridiculously ambitious design that wasn't working out all that well anyway to something that could actually be finished as I recall. Not that it helped any. The game was awful and late and ended up being virtually given away by amazon.com after about two weeks so they could get rid of it.

 

[Volourn]

EA makes fuckin' great games. Don't fuck with 'em, and don't fuckin' compare 'em to fuckin' Atari, you fuckin' piece of fuckin' shit!!!

 

[kingcomrade]

 

[Sol Invictus]

Atari is fucking up. For instance, they ruined their opportunity to recapture the RTS genre when they decided against letting Chris Taylor/GPG develop Total Annihilation 2 even after they offered to develop the game out of their own pockets, with Atari as publishers. Instead, they're holding onto the license like a bunch of idiots. Why?! I can't think of any reasons why, but that's what they're doing.

Yeah, but at least we have Supreme Commander to look forward to. :D

Yup. GPG and THQ are doing a pretty damn good job with that.

 

[FireWolf]

There was an article in PCGamerUk this month on the state of the PC Market in the UK. While it's not true for the whole market it's an interesting analysis. In 1999 the PC accounted for 43.4% of the whole gaming market, in 2005 it has sunk to 28.8%. This could be attributed to the increased number of consoles offering competition, or the general increase in the gaming market. What is interesting to see is that the PC still accounts for almost a third of the total gaming market, while Xbox barely hits 10%. The PS2 is the new juggernaut with 43%. The market breakdown for publishers was quite interesting.

Unsurprisingly EAGames was at the top with 18% of the market, the next rivals were THQ, Activision and Ubisoft each with around 7% of the market. Sony has 6%, Vivendi 4.8%, Take2 4.5%, Sega 3.9%, Konami 3.4% and Atari 3.2%.

Atari's top selling pc game last year was RollerCoster Tycooon 3.

The most popular games sold in 2005 in the UK were dominated by non-combat titles: Football Manager 2006, The Sims 2, The Sims 2: University,World of Warcraft (noticably alone here) The Sims 2: nightlife, Championchip Manager 5, Football Manager 2005, then battlefield 2, half life 2 and call of duty 2.

So the PC market, if the UK sales charts are anything to go by, seems to be surviving on the merits of the system: versatility. PC gamers want games that a console can't provide to any decent degree. The sims doesn't work too well on consoles, the "Manager" games are effectively spreadsheets and an MMO in there. The best shooters of that year are all sequels to established series'.

2004's results were a bit more evenly spread with doom 3, rome total war and far cry in the mix, but it was still dominated by the sims and a couple of champ manager titles.

With market results like this, dictating that what PC gamers want is what consoles can't provide, why to publishers continue to dumb down, simplify, and ape (badly) the merits of consoles? Atari has a huge catalogue of titles. Is this a case of trying to do too many things at once? Attempting to be EA on a shoe-string budget?

The times of having a thumb in every pie are long gone. Games development is far too expensive for that kind of approach anymore for such a small publisher. Atari needs to look at it's best selling and most lucrative IPs such as the Tycoon games and the DnD licence and plough it's resources into making a few good games rather than lots of shitty one, committing to a project and seeing it through to completion, not to production targets. Way back when, it was reasonably okay to release a sub-par product, but now with the prevailence of the Internet and the general increase in the number of titles out there, people just wont buy crap anymore. Word of crappy titles spreads at a huge speed.

 

[Thrawn05]

The reason for why PC games continue to be dumb down is because it's cheaper to build a game for the xbox/playstation, and then port it to the PC. Publishers know they can make a lot of money with the game already on console, but the extra ~33% of the market with which the PC sits on just adds more clink to their coffers.

 

[FireWolf]

It just confuses the hell out of me. A lot of publishers proclaim the PC to be a dying games platform. Yet it still accounts (using the UK as a microcosm) for the second largest games market. The potential for profit on the PC is higher than developing for xbox. Just look at The Sims. People like iD are leaving PC development because of piracey being so rife. That'd be acceptable if there weren't systems like Steam that pretty effectively kill the threat of piracey. the PC market share is dropping not because gamers want console-like games, but because publishers are releasing sub-par games for the pc market. Spiraling games costs can't account for everything. The prevailence of 3rd party engines in an increasing number of games is one method of reducing costs by not having to go through the time and expense of producing an original engine. Another way to reduce the risk involved is to make a game that pc gamers actually want. Invisible War lost a huge number of sales on the PC because it was cross-platform, because by compromising to accomodate consoles they neglected the strengths of the PC and the devoted PC fanbase. Hell, I havent bought that game and yet I loved Deus Ex.

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

Deus Ex is the best game I ever played, and even though just about every change they made for IW seems to have been for the worse, I would have got it anyway if my computer could have handled it.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Dont get me started on the Mother of All fuckups that was DX.

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

Dont get me started on the Mother of All fuckups that was DX.

Are you referring to the first or second game?

 

[kingcomrade]

The first obviously. I couldn't stand that shit. I barely got halfway through the Statue of Liberty level before I got bored. BORING.

edit: Actually that's true, I've never played Deus Ex past halfway through the first level.

 

[aweigh]

DX is the fucking shizznit. Go play it. I make a convincing argument, don't I?

 

[kingcomrade]

It won't work on my computer for some reason, otherwise I would've.

 

[LlamaGod]

Deus Ex is a shitty knock-off of System Shock.

Anyways, some great Atari strategies:

Not letting Stardock use the Magic of Magic licence to do Master of Magic 2

Never ever releasing Gothic 2: Night of the Raven, despite it being totally and completely finished.

 

[bryce777]

Deus Ex is a shitty knock-off of System Shock.

Anyways, some great Atari strategies:

Not letting Stardock use the Magic of Magic licence to do Master of Magic 2

Never ever releasing Gothic 2: Night of the Raven, despite it being totally and completely finished.

I never understood atari. Even taking the most cynical and evil approach possible, you would never have any sound reason to do the strange and insane things they do.

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

I never understood atari. Even taking the most cynical and evil approach possible, you would never have any sound reason to do the strange and insane things they do.

Nobody thinks with the intention of being an utter bastard. They happen to be incompetent and wound up in a position where their incompentence screwed a lot of stuff up.