mgman Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 1 hour ago, MrBeefy said: No I think it is an alt account for Flo. Flojomojo? Were they banned or something? They haven't been on here in a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaybird3rd Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 1 minute ago, mgman said: Flojomojo? Were they banned or something? Nope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iron-Marine Soldier Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 11 minutes ago, flickertail said: I think $300-$400 is a big enough investment for people to not want to waste it. Before you bash me too hard. I have a VCS on pre-order. But I care enough about losing the money that I did the pre-order through Walmart. At least I know that if the console never gets produced, I won't be out $400. Everyone has their tolerance for spending money on things...what return they need for their money. There are people that smoke away that money so quickly or gamble away that amount of money so quickly...we are all different in that regard. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Loguidice Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Certainly no one should have to justify wanting something. If you want to spend $300+ on a brand name and what you think should be a product you'll like, more power to you. However, jokes aside - and I agree it gets to be rather much - this is a discussion forum and if you don't like counter arguments to your points you really shouldn't be participating in a discussion forum. Forums are rarely all kumbaya, and, if they were, would be rather boring. 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iron-Marine Soldier Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 14 minutes ago, joeatari1 said: My last day one was an Xbox as well. I've been slowly building my back catalog though. So many consoles, so little time. Me as well...and actually just playing the games I have to “more” of a completion...SEGA GT comes to mind. Eventually I want to get all the Star Wars games for Original Xbox & finish them. My most finishes on a system is for my ATARI Jaguar+CD...had the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iron-Marine Soldier Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 9 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said: Certainly no one should have to justify wanting something. If you want to spend $300+ on a brand name and what you think should be a product you'll like, more power to you. However, jokes aside - and I agree it gets to be rather much - this is a discussion forum and if you don't like counter arguments to your points you really shouldn't be participating in a discussion forum. Forums are rarely all kumbaya, and, if they were, would be rather boring. Hopefully you’ll be “ok” if I’m not interested in the least about that Mattel system...hopefully. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joeatari1 Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 3 minutes ago, Iron-Marine Soldier said: Me as well...and actually just playing the games I have to “more” of a completion...SEGA GT comes to mind. Eventually I want to get all the Star Wars games for Original Xbox & finish them. My most finishes on a system is for my ATARI Jaguar+CD...had the time. Don't have tons of time to play anymore. I have finished a few each on NES, Xbox, PS, Wii, Jag, Lynx... Hoping to dedicate some more play time when the VCS is delivered. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Loguidice Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 2 hours ago, Iron-Marine Soldier said: Thousands & thousands...more than whatever that Mattel system sells...for sure. Very few people had that system relative to all the ATARI systems that people owned or played in the arcade. Side by side...the one with the new modern ATARI joystick is going to sell...sorry...TT. That's not really a boatload and the Amico has already outsold the VCS in pre-orders. The VCS is sitting at maybe 10,000 or so backers (keeping in mind again we have to subtract a bit from the listed 11,597 Indiegogo backers because not all of those backed a system) and an untold number on a few retail sites. Knowing what I know about retail pre-orders, I would be surprised if they have more than a few thousand pre-orders at all retail sites. So, to be generous, let's say they're at least in the 12,000 system range so far. That's still under what the Amico has pre-sold. Now, no one, especially me, is thinking the Amico is going to do big numbers. Again, though, they have a clearly defined niche and have done a good job of going after that. I believe if their operations are lean enough, they can survive in the small niche that they've targeted. Atari, thus far - and again, this is nothing new - has yet to clearly define their own niche and has had waves of bad press driven by their own delays and missteps along the way. Hey, that stuff happens, of course, but that's still the reality. So, they're coming out of the gate when these do start to get out in the wild (whenever they can overcome the production delays, that is) with a poor start/image. Once out, they'll need to count on positive word of mouth from owners to spread and hope that some type of raison d'être emerges that they can build a marketing campaign around. Even then, in a world with mature Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch systems, and wildly popular mobile devices and established streaming boxes, etc., and the incoming PS5 and Xbox Series X and non-stop evolution of PCs, there's still no scenario where the VCS does the kinds of numbers that anyone will care about. If they manage to actually release this year, at best they'll have what, 15,000 units in the wild by early- to mid-2021? That's nothing. That kind of number is irrelevant. Now, let's say everything breaks right like I mentioned above. There's positive owner word of mouth, there's finally a good marketing message around that newly uncovered raison d'être, and they get those 15,000 units out by early- to mid-2021. What then? What's the most optimistic projection? 500 units sold a month? 1000? More? And then what percentage are buying games or subscribing to services on the VCS? The Ouya did far more right and sold far more than the VCS can realistically hope to for a very long time and they couldn't get anyone to buy games. On an "open" system like the VCS, what incentive is there to buy much of anything if - as stated on here - many are getting it to put Windows or something other OS on. How then does Atari make more money? How then does it become a viable target for developers? Again, I'm not making these statements or asking these questions to be antagonistic. I'm doing so to try and figure out where the path to success is. I think we can all agree that the logo/brand does not have the power it once had long ago, and certainly the last true console with the Atari name failed in a historic way for a major console. 9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill Loguidice Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 12 minutes ago, Iron-Marine Soldier said: Hopefully you’ll be “ok” if I’m not interested in the least about that Mattel system...hopefully. It's not a Mattel system, of course, but has ties to the Intellivision brand to be sure. Regardless, it's a useful short-hand for a small company doing a niche console product the right way so far versus Atari and the VCS. It doesn't mean one will succeed in their niche and the other will fail, but it is rather fascinating how they're both being released around the same time. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flickertail Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 10 minutes ago, Bill Loguidice said: How then does Atari make more money? How much does Atari Token/Coin... or whatever it's called play into all of this? I'm not familiar with the history of Atari Token. I have to believe the console launch has something to do with this goal. "We are building a Utility Token for the Gaming and Entertainment Industry" - From Atari Chain website. It seems that if you could become the "Utility Token for the Gaming and Entertainment Industry", you could make a lot of money. I signed up for the VCS mailing list a while back, and the only update I remember getting by email is the announcement about Atari Token, and using it at the Atari Casino. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 You could buy almost 1500 Atari shares for $400. 2 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flickertail Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Ok, I don't know if I killed the conversation or everyone just went to bed for the evening... but as someone who manages a supercomputer and a volunteer computing platform as part of his day job, think of this. Let's say they have 12,000 units sold. I have no idea what their Ryzen processor operates at... but conservatively, let's say the processor offers 256 GFLOPS. Maybe it's less, maybe it's much less... I don't know. But let's say it is, 1/4 of a Teraflop per console. That gives them access to 3,000 Teraflops of compute power to process Atari Tokens... a 3 Petaflop volunteer computing system... and they don't have to pay for any of that power. Do you know you for sure that when you're playing updated versions of classic Atari games on the VCS, that you are not also running a crypto miner or something similar in the background? Be sure to read your license agreement when you open up the box that your VCS arrives in. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Oh, and... 7 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Historian Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 33 minutes ago, flickertail said: It seems that if you could become the "Utility Token for the Gaming and Entertainment Industry", you could make a lot of money. I signed up for the VCS mailing list a while back, and the only update I remember getting by email is the announcement about Atari Token, and using it at the Atari Casino. Dude, don't even get me started.... Crypto brings absolutely nothing to the video game industry that doesn't already exist. So why add an extra layer of complexity to add it in? I can tell you why... amateur Investors with no knowledge of the industry who saw bitcoin go stupid, just see virtual currency and the multi-billion dollar Video Games in the same sentence and think they see easy profit. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flickertail Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Just now, The Historian said: Crypto brings absolutely nothing to the video game industry that doesn't already exist. So why add an extra layer of complexity to add it in? I'm not saying that it's a good thing, I'm just saying, that might be their plan for making money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agillig Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 3 hours ago, MrBeefy said: No I think it is an alt account for Flo. Either way. Welcome newbie! Whatever happened to Flo anyway? 1 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agillig Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 1 hour ago, joeatari1 said: According to Google there were 30 million "Flashback"units sold. If Atari can manage a good fraction of that number, I would call that a success. I think those are the casual players Atari would like to reel in. If they're relying on brand nostalgia, they're going to be competing with themselves. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flickertail Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 (edited) Conspiracy Theory Time: Q: How do you buy a 3 Petaflop supercomputer to process Atari Token transactions without spending any money on hardware, power, and cooling? A: Start an Indiegogo project that gets a bunch of backers to give you the startup funding to put volunteer computers (VCS consoles) in people's homes where they pay for power and cooling. Use off-the-shelf hardware so you can save money on R&D. Q: What about the backend servers you need to manage the volunteer network? A: It's a lot cheaper to run your volunteer computing management middleware in your data center (or Amazon Cloud) than it is to buy all of those volunteer computers. You guys wonder why they've done such a poor job of managing their marketing, why should they care? If they can get 12K people to purchase volunteer computing machines and pay to run them, they've accomplished their business goals. I'm NOT condoning this business model, I'm just saying that this could be what they are up to, and why none of what they do make sense for people expecting them to actually develop a game console for gaming purposes. Edited July 24, 2020 by flickertail added the NOT - also changed PB to Petaflop Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Anybody with a brain, would find that out real quick, no matter how much you try to hide it. My network monitor would show me immediately if it accesses the internet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flickertail Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 (edited) 15 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said: Anybody with a brain, would find that out real quick, no matter how much you try to hide it. My network monitor would show me immediately if it accesses the internet. I agree, but if the VCS is intended for the "normies" and it's in the license agreement, wouldn't it be legal even if it is a bit sketchy? Granted, the conspiracy theory is a bit out there. But you can't deny that they are trying to make money off of crypto. In Nov of 2018 I attended a conference in the bay area where the topics were Big Data, IoT, AI, and Blockchain. One of the invited speakers said the following (paraphrasing a bit): "Of all the known blockchain projects and ICOs in past year, 90% were frauds, and of the remaining 10%, 9 out of 10 were failures. I'm suspicious of a game company developing hardware also being so heavily into crypto. When they have their big console launch, what gets completed first? The Atari Token/Chain project, the one nobody cares about... that except for Atari... they care about it. Maybe they keep putting off releases because they don't have enough volunteer computers yet. Maybe they were expecting more. Anybody with a brain would see the additional traffic, but I'm sure most normies wouldn't care or understand the issue. IDK I'm sure the two are connected somehow. Maybe it's the Atari Casino. Maybe they are getting their partners to accept Atari Tokens as payment. It's money when people start using it as money. Edited July 24, 2020 by flickertail added ICOs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 Please round up all those people who say $400 isn't a lot of money. Remind them that my Amazon Wish List is current. Thank you. 1 4 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 1 minute ago, godslabrat said: Please round up all those people who say $400 isn't a lot of money. Remind them that my Amazon Wish List is current. Thank you. You could buy an iPad for that, which seems more useful. Where is the link to your Amazon wish list? 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 (edited) 400$ would buy me... A video card upgrade for my gaming pc (and the one I have now doesnt exactly suck, its just rather budget today) + A cheap electric power washer + a meat smoker + meat to put in it for a nice bbq with a couple bucks left over for a soda and a candy bar from work's vending machines Edited July 24, 2020 by Osgeld 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godslabrat Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 18 minutes ago, CPUWIZ said: You could buy an iPad for that, which seems more useful. Where is the link to your Amazon wish list? I thought actually posting it would be tacky and undermine the joke. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CPUWIZ Posted July 24, 2020 Share Posted July 24, 2020 8 minutes ago, godslabrat said: I thought actually posting it would be tacky and undermine the joke. I was gonna buy something for you, but it wants to ship to me. Oh well. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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