Matt_B

It's time for that friendly reminder that you can buy a game from Steam and get a full refund if you've played it for less than two hours. Yeah, that's a scummy thing to do but let's remember who fired the first shots here and has his name plastered all over the credits of it. Not buying at all works just as well, of course.

I thought the family business was in agriculture. So long as it's not socks, it's all good though. 🙂

It's not just based on a Stephen King story but he got to direct it too, and allegedly prepared for that task by consuming vast quantities of cocaine. AC/DC did the soundtrack because they're his favorite band. It's a total vanity project. But yes, it's fun and it's very 80s.

Oh, I suppose it's possible that they made money on their blockchain activities overall, but you'd probably have to do some digging through the past reports to find out for sure. The speed at which it all came crashing down doesn't inspire confidence though. Whatever happened, that's a big hit to the balance sheet of a relatively small company and I'd hope that it's one that the new CEO had priced in when he took over. They've still got around €1 million in cryptocurrency (mostly in the aforementioned Atari tokens) on the books too, and that's surely going to have to be written off at some point as well.

I'm sure we'd have complained a lot less if they'd made it a free update. 🙂 Seriously, when Quake II Remastered (developed by new Atari acquisition Nightdive) just popped up for free in my Steam library but I'm expected to buy Missile Command: Rercharged again, it just underlines how far adrift of the mainstream they are when it comes to game publishing.

The hotel deal is already dead, and along with it their association with the company that created the Atari token. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/atari-announces-planned-creation-token-160500017.html This resulted in a €11 million write down. So much for the idea that any of this crap was free money for Atari. Like it or not, the Atari token will live on for the lifetime of the Etherium blockchain. Once you create something like that it's got a life of its own, beyond the reach of even trademark law, so that's yet more tarnish on the brand that's not going to come off. The VCS project also resulted in substantial writedowns. While I'd think that it's worthwhile to keep supporting it at the level it currently is for the sake of goodwill with the fans, it'll never be a profitable venture and any substantial investment in it now would just be throwing good money after bad. While I'm not particularly enamored with the 2600+, at least that looks like it'll be a launch-and-leave affair that doesn't leave them on the hook for much in the way of long-term support. On the whole, I'd think that Atari can respect their legacy far better by publishing indie games that respect their past, compilations of classics and remasters of selected titles. They're doing quite well at that so far, so I hope they stick at it. Getting back into AAA games or genuinely competitive console hardware is just pie in the sky stuff. Give them a chance to learn how to walk before expecting them to fly.

I'd think that Tommy Tallarico would be a firm subscriber to the old John Wayne quote: "Never apologize mister, it's a sign of weakness."

I'd think that Atari stock is like the proverbial dead cat. The only time it's ever going to show much upward movement is in response to a big drop. Still, don't just take my word for it, they're a publicly traded company and produce regular financial reports, the latest of which you can read here: https://atari-investisseurs.fr/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Atari-2023-Consolidated-and-Annual-Financial-Statements-F.pdf To cut to the chase, they made a net loss €9.5 million in FY23. That's something of an improvement from €25 million the previous year, although that's mostly down to writedowns for the overvalued projects of the Chesnais era. Their revenue also declined from €14.9 million to €10.1 over the same period, so the company overall is shrinking, not growing. Drilling down a bit deeper, the games business is growing, but only slowly. It's up from €5.7 million to €7.2 million. Licensing is roughly static, but the Web 3 (i.e. crypto) business and the VCS are basically dead. So, much though some of us might like to believe that they're a rejuvenated brand that's on the verge of blitzscaling their way back into competition with the Big Three, the reality is rather more sobering than that. On the plus side, they have made some pretty good games of late, so I'll wholeheartedly support buying those.

Yeah, to put it in its full context, the Speaker Hat came out in 2017, alongside the launch of Atari's crypto token and the crowdfunding for the Gameband, which ultimately never shipped. The only meaningful game release that year was the PC port of Rollercoaster Tycoon, a mobile game that had come out the previous year. They were definitely a merch company first and only an occasional publisher of games at the time. Had it come out last year, when they released ten games on Steam most of which were quite decent, I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid.

The Wario Land game for the Virtual Boy is superb. Proof, if any was needed, that you don't need much of a palette to make a great game.

Given the average age of Atari fans these days, maybe heated clothing isn't such bad idea. You might even get the Atari logo branded onto your backside if one of the elements shorts out. 🙂

There aren't any Recharged games directly developed by Atari. They're all made by Adamvision and SneakyBox. Atari, as publishers, will be bankrolling their development. There may be other sources of funding for some projects - I believe Atari 50 was partly financed by Digital Eclipse via funds raised on the Republic crowdfunding site - but it'll mostly be coming from Atari's R&D budget. Until Atari's recent acquisition of Nightdive studios, they haven't had any in house development since the bankruptcy; that's when their last remaining studios were shut down. Now that they've got one again, it'll be interesting to see how it goes but I'd suspect that they'll be inclined to play it relatively safe. They're not really in a position where they could afford a big budget flop right now.

That's metal for you. Whenever someone starts a new band, they're just not trying if they don't also invent a new genre at the same time.

If I had to say anything positive about speaker hats it'd be that they sound like a good way of enforcing a restraining order. 🙂

I'm pretty sure that they'll be selling it for $1.50 in time. They're just charging $15 now so they can claim it's a 90% discount when they do.

All Atari have of value is a brand that was a big deal in the 80s. Confusing people between the products from then and the ones they're offering now is basically the only marketing tool that they've got. 🙂

Why not? Most people keep a phone there and there are handhelds of comparable size going to considerably smaller. You're probably not keeping a Switch or a Steam Deck there unless your fashions tend to the baggy but a Miyoo Mini is only about the size of a folded GBA SP, so it's definitely an option.

Cyberpunk 2077 is obviously a huge success, but it was a very expensive game to develop, costing upwards of $300 million. In contrast, Atari's annual R&D spend across all their projects - as can be gleaned from their annual reports - is about one percent of that. They're a tiny indie game publisher with an old brand that used to be a big deal. Please try not to mistake them for anything else.

It's obviously going to be a bit of a compromise with the ergonomics but I'd think that the people who like to keep a handheld in their pocket at all times will take to it like they did with the Miyoo Mini.

Not that it's coming to Evercade any time soon, but why not both?

So, you'd agree that Morgan was the worst then? 🙂 I'd recommend having a read of Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel's Book sometime if you want the full story on the early history of Atari. Howard Warshaw's is also very good if you're interested in the Kassar era.

I think you'll find that it was Morgan who canceled the 5200 in May 1984. Kassar was sacked for insider trading in July 1983, so was not around when that decision was made. He made a lot of mistakes towards the end of his run as CEO that were ultimately catastrophic for the company, but that certainly wasn't one of them.

That's the thing though. Atari is a big deal in retro-futuristic fiction precisely because they were big in the 80s but are practically irrelevant now, and it's a similar deal with Sega, although they remain considerably more relevant than Atari. If they wanted to predict what the games market would actually be like in 2077 they'd have called it Microtendo.

I've have honestly never liked Duke Nukem that much, so they're actually a pass for me. Still, each to their own and if anyone wants to try and convince me, I'll keep an open mind.

No, they're not. I made a *JOKE* that even what is considered to be one of the best 8-bit games of all time can still be nitpicked over some minor graphical issues. In spite of me captioning it with a smiley, it still seems to have flown over your head. Oh, and if you think that niche platforms should just be ignored because they didn't sell ten million, I suggest that you add the Evercade to your list because it sure hasn't. That's a *JOKE* too, just in case you miss it as well.