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The Atari VCS Controversies Thread


Mockduck

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I did some research on the Codebreaker show and put it in the taco thread ages ago, but yeah, it wasn't that surprising that they found ways to screw people. That was Fred's MO. 

 

There's a lot more bad things to be said about Atari that aren't made public, primarily from the game development community of partners that were regularly screwed out of money owed to them per contracts. I personally know one person who worked for Human Head Studios that detailed a lot of the crap they pulled, which pretty much ended up bankrupting HHS; You can also be sure that those "behind-the-scenes" factors that people can't talk about due to NDAs are also reasons for why a number of announced games never came to fruition, like Asteroids Outpost, or the first iteration of the VCS. 

 

Fred may have led the company to solvency for the moment, but the road he took to get there burned a lot of bridges in the process. That's where I don't envy Mr. Wade in trying to repair that damage, but that's the job that he wanted so we'll see.

 

5 minutes ago, leech said:

Wonder how long royalties for such things last.  Like if a show is in re-runs, do they get some cash every time it pops on screen?  They should show more Bud Bundy then, as he almost always had an Atari in the background!

That likely depends on the contract, so it could be timed or indefinite, depending on what they hammered out. Timed royalties are much more common though (usually they are paid until a certain metric is reached, like the licensee only pays royalties to the licensor until their initially agreed upon investment is paid back in full. This may take a few years, depending on how successful the initial product was, and failure could also lead to other issues). 

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3 hours ago, Mockduck said:

That $40 is worth almost $120 today; how many people would kill for a 200% profit in three years on an investment?!? What if I'd actually say invested $50k, I'd be sitting on $100k in profit today.

But you didn't invest $50K.  You invested $40, and it took three years to make $80 on top of that.

 

What-if means nothing when the end result is still equivalent to pissing into the ocean.

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7 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

The Atari name, and a video game theme, would separate it from the crowd. Thus attracting customers.

You don't need Atari for a video game theme.

 

It's been associated with literally nothing of note in video games for at least five years and precious little for the previous twenty. You're going back more like forty years to get to the actual glory days.

7 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I figure the Sega and Nintendo names would be too expensive to aquire. And Playstation and Xbox doesn´t sound like good names for a hotel to me.

Have you any idea how much it costs to build a skyscraper resort hotel like the one in the renders? We'd be talking billions of dollars. Anyone who can afford that, can also afford Sega and Nintendo.

 

And like it or lump it, but PlayStation and Xbox are the biggest brands in gaming in the West at the moment. If you couldn't pull it off with them on board, you're probably not going to be able to turn enough heads with merely Atari.

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Here's where I struggle with the "video games will bring people to the hotels" train of thought:

 

What video games?  
 

Because not only are all of l'Atari's properties dated, but by making that their theme, other companies with actually recognizable IPs like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo won't touch it with a 10-foot-pole.  And their absence will be glaringly conspicuous.  I'd even think smaller players like Capcom, Sega, and Konami will think it against their best interests to get involved.

 

So when you say "video game themed" do you really mean video game themed, or themed around a handful of games that have been run into the ground.... and nothing else?

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5 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

That likely depends on the contract, so it could be timed or indefinite, depending on what they hammered out. Timed royalties are much more common though (usually they are paid until a certain metric is reached, like the licensee only pays royalties to the licensor until their initially agreed upon investment is paid back in full. This may take a few years, depending on how successful the initial product was, and failure could also lead to other issues).

Oh, I'm sure.  Was mostly just wondering about that particular one, as it seemed either the producers of the show, or David Faustino was a fan.  Wonder if he hangs out on this forum, that'd be hilarious.  I believe it was shown throughout the years that he had at least a 5200, XEGS and either a 520 or 1040ST(e?)

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48 minutes ago, godslabrat said:

Here's where I struggle with the "video games will bring people to the hotels" train of thought:

 

What video games?  
 

Because not only are all of l'Atari's properties dated, but by making that their theme, other companies with actually recognizable IPs like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo won't touch it with a 10-foot-pole.  And their absence will be glaringly conspicuous.  I'd even think smaller players like Capcom, Sega, and Konami will think it against their best interests to get involved.

 

So when you say "video game themed" do you really mean video game themed, or themed around a handful of games that have been run into the ground.... and nothing else?

VR Pong!

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9 hours ago, godslabrat said:

 

T-shirts, flashbacks, keychains, and LCD games seem to be evergreen products for them.  I don't see those ever going out of style.  I do see them being a point of diminishing returns, though, and l'Atari would be smart to try and build something relateable to people born after Watergate.  Slapping their logo on anything and hoping for the best, however, isn't going to work.  Even if they occasionally get a winner*, the losers they end up picking will decreaase the overall value of their brand.  

 

 

 

*Let's call the VCS a "winner" for the sake of argument.  It at least had positive cash flow.  Yeah, I'm keeping my standards insanely low here.

Won't be long and they can start marketing walkers and wheelchair accessories. I know - how about Atari branded colostomy bags for the few people that are old enough to remember when Atari was relevant and not owned by a patent troll license whore?

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17 hours ago, godslabrat said:

*Let's call the VCS a "winner" for the sake of argument.  It at least had positive cash flow.  

Are you sure about that? According to Atari, they had invested $9.5 million in it by September 30th 2020. And so far, I don´t think they have received much more than the $3 million from the backers.

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12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

You don't need Atari for a video game theme.

True, but the Atari brand goes very well with that theme. I think the brand is worth well over the 5% of revenue they have to pay. I would guess it is worth somewhere between 10% and 15% compared to calling them Gaming Hotels or something like that.

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

It's been associated with literally nothing of note in video games for at least five years and precious little for the previous twenty. You're going back more like forty years to get to the actual glory days.

True, but the brand is still strong. That is why a lot of people want it on their clothes. If Atari produced something worth having, people would be all over it because of the brand.

 

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

Have you any idea how much it costs to build a skyscraper resort hotel like the one in the renders? We'd be talking billions of dollars. Anyone who can afford that, can also afford Sega and Nintendo.

One of companies behind the hotels estimated the cost of the first hotel to cost $55 million to build. It is not just a matter of affording other brands, but rather what the most profitable option is. Nintendo are control freaks with their brand, and would probably have demanded 20+%. Sega is a more realistic alternative, and for all we know, they may even have been contacted.

 

But in the end I think Atari was chosen for several reasons:

1) Strong brand.

2) Logo lends itself very well to hotel design (unlike SEGA).

3) They could get it cheap.

4) The first hotels were to be made in the US, and Atari is/was an american brand.

5) Atari has very actively sought partners to license their name to.

6) The people in charge of the hotel companies are probably a little old, thus having an extra high opinion of Atari, and lesser opinion of newer brands.

12 hours ago, Matt_B said:

And like it or lump it, but PlayStation and Xbox are the biggest brands in gaming in the West at the moment. If you couldn't pull it off with them on board, you're probably not going to be able to turn enough heads with merely Atari.

Nintendo is doing better than Xbox, but sure, both Playstation and Xbox are big.

 

I am not even sure you could call Playstation and Xbox brands. They are a series of products. But I guess they are a brand of products. There is just something that feels off by naming a hotel after a product. Nintendo, on the other hand, would have been a wonderful name.

 

An even more successful platform for games is Android. But that doesn´t mean that Android would be a good name for a hotel. Not unless the staff was mostly androids. Even then I am not convinced.

 

It is also here a matter of price. Even though I think Playstation and Xbox would make inferior brands for hotels, I think they also would have been more expensive.

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12 hours ago, godslabrat said:

Here's where I struggle with the "video games will bring people to the hotels" train of thought:

 

What video games?  
 

Because not only are all of l'Atari's properties dated, but by making that their theme, other companies with actually recognizable IPs like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo won't touch it with a 10-foot-pole.  And their absence will be glaringly conspicuous.  I'd even think smaller players like Capcom, Sega, and Konami will think it against their best interests to get involved.

If they wanted to make a Nintendo room and a Playstation room, or something like that, that might be difficult to aquire the rights to. But filling a game room with lots of games from a wide variety of IP holders should be easier.

 

Even if the console makers refused to play ball, they would still be able to offer computer games, arcade games and games from 20+ year old consoles. Assuming they get the right to offer those games, if they even need to.   

 

I don´t see why IP holders would refuse to take part in this, especially the ones besides the big three. There are hundreds or thousands of arcades in the world, which offer games without problems.

 

I would imagine that there already are quite a few Playstations, Xboxes and Nintendo consoles in public places like youth clubs. And that there is an established streamlined way of aquiring the right to offer those consoles.

 

I doubt the hotel builders would have committed to paying $4.1 million to Atari unless they were sure they could offer the wide variety of games they have said they will.

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19 hours ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Yeah, when the bar is already low to begin with, it's not terribly impressive when the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" strategy does get a bump from a couple of things doing the sticking. Still, good for them. I wouldn't mind being a few million dollars richer either, from the low bar I'm at right now.

 

Hardware & clothes yes, but I've not seen any evidence that they have even managed to produce any kind of income generating film or TV show. They've got some licensing to throw stuff like Centipede into Pixels some years ago, but the game show they did was barely shown in Europe (and they were sued by contestants who never received the cash they won). The Nolan Bushnell movie, as well as the Asteroids and Missile Command movies never happened. Even if an old Atari game was turned into a big Hollywood film, expecting any Atari IP to have the same success as Sonic The Hedgehog or Mortal Kombat though would be prime Rose-Colored Glasses. That's likely why they didn't happen - who wants to take the multi-million dollar risk on turning a game that only old dudes like us remember, into a big movie? A few people around here might go and see a movie about the Atari logo, but that would probably make as much as any recent Shia LaBeouf film.  

 

On hardware though, manufacturing & supporting hardware is a very expensive endeavor and it can easily bankrupt the company depending on how it's handled. They've already burned through their IGG beggar's potdonations, so they'll need sales to keep the VCS - and the company - going. Yes, Atari has momentary advantages in the licensing stuff, but without anything truly successful in raising or reinvigorating the brand, that stuff will eventually peter out while mediocre hardware endeavors that the general public doesn't care about will drag things down further. It also doesn't help that this current bunch has done plenty to ruin their brand among many of us that should be their strongest supporters too.

 

Could the new guy figure things out and keep the expansion going? Sure. He has his work cut out for him though. 

They should make Pong: The Movie.  If they could make the Battleship and Emoji movies they could make it, lol.  (Albeit those were flops.)

 

EDIT: In all seriousness, Asteroids: The Movie might do better.  Might fill a void in the market now that everyone's hating what Star Wars has turned into, lol.

Edited by MASTER260
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7 minutes ago, MASTER260 said:

I really wish they kept the name Ataribox.  Now when people say, "Atari VCS," they'll be like, "Which one?"  It's like calling the third Xbox the Xbox One, lol.

I wouldn't worry.

 

Give it a few years and there'll be no confusion because everyone will have forgotten that there even was a new one by then. ?

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1 hour ago, MASTER260 said:

I really wish they kept the name Ataribox.  Now when people say, "Atari VCS," they'll be like, "Which one?"  It's like calling the third Xbox the Xbox One, lol.

You really have to admire the incompetence required to call the third Xbox the Xbox One. At least Atari´s decision was a calculated move to pull on nostalgic strings. When Microsoft noticed the Xbox-series was doing well, they decided to get more hands on, so then stuff like that will happen.

 

Atari puts lipstick on pigs and calls them beautiful women, but Microsoft takes beautiful women and turns them into pigs.

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14 hours ago, Stephen said:

Won't be long and they can start marketing walkers and wheelchair accessories. I know - how about Atari branded colostomy bags for the few people that are old enough to remember when Atari was relevant and not owned by a patent troll license whore?

I mean, I'd totally buy a wheelchair with a cool Atari logo on the wheels, especially if it looked like wood grain and black, when the time comes. Can it play Pong? I bet it can play Pong.  

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5 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

True, but the Atari brand goes very well with that theme. I think the brand is worth well over the 5% of revenue they have to pay. I would guess it is worth somewhere between 10% and 15% compared to calling them Gaming Hotels or something like that.

True, but the brand is still strong. That is why a lot of people want it on their clothes. If Atari produced something worth having, people would be all over it because of the brand.

But in the end I think Atari was chosen for several reasons:

1) Strong brand.

[...]

 

 

It is also here a matter of price. Even though I think Playstation and Xbox would make inferior brands for hotels, I think they also would have been more expensive.

If the metric of "strong brand" is that it shows up on a lot of T-shirts, then Nintendo/Sega/Sony/Microsoft still blow Atari out of the water. I'm wearing a Nintendo-themed shirt as I write this (Legend of Zelda). :P This is just as anecdotal, but in working at a mall arcade all day, I don't see many people with Atari shirts these days. Once in a while, but not as much as other gaming properties. I also rarely hear people ask for Atari-made games anymore...I used to, but even then most requests were for Atari Games stuff like Area 51 (at one point I had as many as 8 Atari arcade classics from the 80s & 90s, but they all performed pretty poorly in today's environment, so I've slowly been selling them off ? )

 

There was a time when people saying "I'm playing Atari" meant they could be playing any video game, but the last time that was relevant was 1984. As Matt B said, Atari has done nothing recent that influenced gaming in any way, shape or form. The company that used to be pioneers are now just a small conglomerate of licensing and patent trolls that see what others are doing and tries to figure out how they can milk that from the licenses they have left. They're riding the coat tails of what smarter, vastly more creative people did 40 years ago. This is why they can't reinvigorate any of the old licenses like Nintendo or even Sega can (most of the classic IP remakes have been total flops, such as the three recent Haunted House's, Night Driver, Ninja Golf...they couldn't even get an Asteroids remake off the ground). On the flipside, companies like Nintendo and Sega still have some of their strongest creative game designers still working for them and still finding ways to refresh old IP. 

 

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I am not even sure you could call Playstation and Xbox brands. They are a series of products. But I guess they are a brand of products.

Definition of a brand: "A brand is an identifying symbol, mark, logo, name, word, and/or sentence that companies use to distinguish their product from others. "

 

Given how you just used the words, they're brands ;) Sony and Microsoft also consider them as such, which is why they aren't creative in the naming of new editions and always make sure to keep the word "PlayStation" or "Xbox" in the naming convention (I wholly agree that how MS names their consoles has to be the dumbest & most confusing way you could go about it).

 

Also from that article: " In fact, the company is often referred to by its brand, and they become one and the same." Notice that almost no one talks about Sony - they say PlayStation. The PS brand is literally one of the few things keeping that company afloat, since they've had multiple products (phones, computers, movies, even TVs, etc.) bomb hard enough that it drained the company of that sweet cash money. 

 

If Sony did ever become desperate enough to milk their brand by using a hotel like Atari is, they'd make it look like a giant PS logo, guaranteed. 

 

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There is just something that feels off by naming a hotel after a product. Nintendo, on the other hand, would have been a wonderful name.

Maybe not an entire hotel, but there are many rooms/suites out there which are themed after products - cartoon characters (which are really products that eventually evolved into brands) are the most common, but there are even Ramen-themed rooms out there.

 

Given that some hotels are mini-theme parks, it can work if you have strong enough themes/IP to work with. If someone built a Super Mario hotel or a Sonic The Hedgehog hotel, that'd make some buzz. Asteroids...not so much. In regards to Nintendo, just look at the international reaction of people in regards to Super Nintendo World - it's enough that Universal is working with Nintendo to bring the concept to the States, which will likely include themed hotels nearby. Atari could do some cool themed rooms based on various games, at least.

 

4 hours ago, MASTER260 said:

They should make Pong: The Movie.  If they could make the Battleship and Emoji movies they could make it, lol.  (Albeit those were flops.)

 

EDIT: In all seriousness, Asteroids: The Movie might do better.  Might fill a void in the market now that everyone's hating what Star Wars has turned into, lol.

If you had a competent writer & screenwriter tackle it, then maybe it could work. 

 

Video game movies need strong, recognizable characters to draw audiences in, or if they lack that naturally (like Asteroids does), then you need at least one really big name actor who is in need of a vanity project (like the Rampage movie). But given how much schlock that Hollywood churns out these days, I wouldn't count on it.

 

That said, I'm surprised that Fred didn't license Asteroids out for a Sharknado Vs. Asteroids movie :P 

 

 

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41 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

If the metric of "strong brand" is that it shows up on a lot of T-shirts, then Nintendo/Sega/Sony/Microsoft still blow Atari out of the water. I'm wearing a Nintendo-themed shirt as I write this (Legend of Zelda). :P

Like I said, Nintendo is too expensive, but SEGA would have been an alternative. Although I think they too would be more expensive than Atari. 

 

Sony and Microsoft are too wide brands to be used as a brand for video game hotels, but I assume you weren´t suggesting to use those brands. Microsoft is also a horrible brand. Being well known does not equal good.

 

Playstation and Xbox are bigger names than Atari, at least for gamers, but that doesn´t necessarily make them better suited for a hotel franchise (see the other points on my list). Also, the customers of the hotel are likely to be older than the average gamer, favouring the old Atari brand. 

 

1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

There was a time when people saying "I'm playing Atari" meant they could be playing any video game, but the last time that was relevant was 1984. As Matt B said, Atari has done nothing recent that influenced gaming in any way, shape or form.

Atari was of course a much much stronger brand back in the day. But the fact that a lot of people still buy Atari clothes despite being irrelevant for decades speaks of a brand much stronger than recent accomplishments suggest. From an Atari investor presentation:

80% consumer logo recognition

500,000,000 internet searches / year

30,000,000 unique Atari.com visits

1 out 3 Americans has bought an Atari game

2 out 5 Americans have played an Atari game

 

1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

The company that used to be pioneers are now just a small conglomerate of licensing and patent trolls that see what others are doing and tries to figure out how they can milk that from the licenses they have left.

True, but that doesn´t mean that the brand isn´t strong. It just means they don´t know how to develop the brand.

 

1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

If someone built a Super Mario hotel or a Sonic The Hedgehog hotel, that'd make some buzz. Asteroids...not so much.

The hotels are to be named Atari, but they are not to be all about Atari. They are going to be about video games in general. Obviously, Atari will play a much more prominent role than they would if the hotel wasn´t using their brand, but still.

 

1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Atari could do some cool themed rooms based on various games, at least.

Sounds like a good idea, especially if they can get permission from famous franchises.

 

1 hour ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

That said, I'm surprised that Fred didn't license Asteroids out for a Sharknado Vs. Asteroids movie :P 

Pixels 2? :)

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1 hour ago, Mockduck said:

I remember the Star Trek hotel in Vegas, I sorta figure the Atari hotel will be a similar sort of branding pop up stunt that lasts a few years then probably fades. 

Could be, but a difference is that in an Atari hotel you could play video games, whereas in a Star Trek hotel you couldn´t visit alien worlds. 

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9 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Playstation and Xbox are bigger names than Atari, at least for gamers, but that doesn´t necessarily make them better suited for a hotel franchise (see the other points on my list). Also, the customers of the hotel are likely to be older than the average gamer, favouring the old Atari brand. 

In terms of which themed rooms a hotel chain could design & rent out, you know that anything recent from a major franchise - Minecraft, Super Mario, Sonic, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc. - would be far more valuable to offer than anything Atari has. Those franchises are relevant to people of all ages right now as opposed to decades ago. Sure, you could more easily afford to do a Yars Revenge themed room over a Fortnite themed one, but that said, the investment in the Fortnite one would pay itself off a lot faster and thus be worth the extra cost.

 

Of course if Atari had anyone on board over the past 10 years with a strong creative vision to make their classics relevant again, then it'd be a different story, but nostalgia only takes you so far. 

 

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Atari was of course a much much stronger brand back in the day. But the fact that a lot of people still buy Atari clothes despite being irrelevant for decades speaks of a brand much stronger than recent accomplishments suggest. From an Atari investor presentation:

80% consumer logo recognition

500,000,000 internet searches / year

30,000,000 unique Atari.com visits

1 out 3 Americans has bought an Atari game

2 out 5 Americans have played an Atari game

Some of these metrics are deceiving, particularly the last two. It plays well to investors who don't bother to research, but dig into that and you'd find that they had to use data from the 1980s to come up with those numbers/claims. I also wouldn't be surprised if they got it wrong - several times over the years, including recently, they've claimed on their social media that games like Joust or River Raid are Atari games. Someone over there seems to think that no one except Atari existed until Nintendo came along.  

 

I haven't seen the latest numbers on how much they're raking in on clothing sales, but last I checked a few years ago, I recall that it was only a million or two (I could be mis-remembering, but still it wasn't that great. Compare them to the sales of any real clothing brand and they become a joke). 

 

As for website visits, Nintendo probably gets that alone on a single product page in a month...website visits also don't translate directly into product sales (otherwise all the mobile games they've been churning out would be performing better).

 

They probably didn't mention this on the presentation, but their official YouTube channel only has a paltry 6.3k subscribers. I'm a nobody that talks about arcades and I have almost 3,000 more subs than that ;) The Atari VCS channel fares better at 13.2k, but that's still nothing in terms of interest reach when you look at other companies. Granted, they do fare much better on other social media platforms like Facebook (269k) and Twitter (82.3k)...but it doesn't help the brand when the people running their messaging on those platforms are constantly putting out bad or embarrassing information and not correcting it.

 

Overall, they're decent thanks to nostalgia, but I wouldn't use the word "strong"...particularly for a company that used to be the 800lb. gorilla of the game industry. 

 

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Pixels 2? :)

Breathe GIF - Breathe PeterDinklage PixelsMovie GIFs

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30 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

In terms of which themed rooms a hotel chain could design & rent out, you know that anything recent from a major franchise - Minecraft, Super Mario, Sonic, Call of Duty, The Last of Us, Overwatch, Fortnite, etc. - would be far more valuable to offer than anything Atari has.

Yes, and you can have such rooms even if the hotels are called Atari.

 

33 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

I haven't seen the latest numbers on how much they're raking in on clothing sales, but last I checked a few years ago, I recall that it was only a million or two (I could be mis-remembering, but still it wasn't that great. Compare them to the sales of any real clothing brand and they become a joke).

It is not fair to compare their revenue with companies like Nike or Adidas, whose business is to make clothes and shoes. For a video game company which hasn´t done much for at least 20 years, they are doing well in the clothing industry, and the only reason is a strong brand.

 

37 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

As for website visits, Nintendo probably gets that alone on a single product page in a month...website visits also don't translate directly into product sales (otherwise all the mobile games they've been churning out would be performing better).

Nintendo, Playstation and Xbox should be getting a lot more searches and visits than Atari because they unlike Atari have a lot to offer. The fact that Atari is getting a lot of attention (but less than the big three) in searches and visits despite having very little to offer, illustrates the interest in the brand.

 

46 minutes ago, Shaggy the Atarian said:

Overall, they're decent thanks to nostalgia, but I wouldn't use the word "strong"...particularly for a company that used to be the 800lb. gorilla of the game industry. 

I see them as a sleeping giant. Think about Apple. They had their day in the sun, and then was fading into obscurity. Then Steve Jobs returned with new ideas, which became wildly successful largely due to the strong brand of the near dead company Apple. Atari just needs a Steve Jobs, that´s all. :)

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12 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

It is not fair to compare their revenue with companies like Nike or Adidas, whose business is to make clothes and shoes. For a video game company which hasn´t done much for at least 20 years, they are doing well in the clothing industry, and the only reason is a strong brand.

 

Nintendo, Playstation and Xbox should be getting a lot more searches and visits than Atari because they unlike Atari have a lot to offer. The fact that Atari is getting a lot of attention (but less than the big three) in searches and visits despite having very little to offer, illustrates the interest in the brand.

It is fair because Atari doesn't exist in a vacuum. In both video games and clothing, they're literally a drop in the ocean, where they're lucky to still be remembered by old fogies like us. If they are what you consider to be a "strong" brand, then what on earth does that make multi-billion dollar brands Apple, Sony, Supreme, Nike, etc., etc.? Every other major video game company that licenses out their stuff for clothing does better than Atari does.

 

Is it a dead brand? No. Is it strong though? Nope. I've never heard anyone call a company a strong brand when their stock price sits well below a $1 for several years. When Atari put themselves up for bankruptcy in 2012 and were selling off the logo and most of the 70s IP as a bundle, they were only asking for $2 million. That's about how much it takes to open a single Chuck E. Cheeses building. Later on, it was reported that Fred was trying to inflate the value of the company and was asking $200 million for it. Quite a difference, but the potential buyer balked, because they saw that when Infogrames had purchased it, as well as Hasbro, everything was purchased for somewhere between $5-10m. In the business world, this is all peanuts. A truly strong brand would be worth billions.

 

Also if it were a strong brand, then that logo, which is really the only thing unique that the VCS has going for it, would've moved a heck of a lot more than 10k~ units. Moving T-Shirts and game consoles are two very different things, but again, your brand only takes you so far. 

 

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I see them as a sleeping giant. Think about Apple. They had their day in the sun, and then was fading into obscurity. Then Steve Jobs returned with new ideas, which became wildly successful largely due to the strong brand of the near dead company Apple. Atari just needs a Steve Jobs, that´s all. :)

Sorry, but this makes me laugh every time I see it. They are not even in the same galaxy as Apple, which generates enough money to start being considered a trillion dollar company at this point. Odd that Atari has gone through owner after owner, and gone through CEOs like frat house goes through kegs, and yet that wild new success still seems to elude them.

 

As has been argued on these forums for a few years now, the VCS was supposed to be the Next Big Thing, and some faithful even claimed it would be a PS5 killer. Fred thought the answer was mobile gaming, then crowdfunding, then cryptocurrency and now it's NFTs. The common thread there is that Atari isn't leading, they're just following the crowd. 

 

Does the company need a strong creative vision, sure, but Nolan Bushnell or Al Alcorn or this new CEO isn't going to swoop in with some grand new vision of making the company relevant again. They'd need to come up with a whole slew of new and innovative games and tech to do that, which is easy to say, near impossible to do unless you've somehow managed to hire a bunch of geniuses that will turn it into the New Giant of Gaming & Tech. Those geniuses don't want to be part of a has-been brand that has been poorly run and just relies on 3rd parties to develop everything for them...they make their own start-ups and become billionaires in the process. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Yes, and you can have such rooms even if the hotels are called Atari.:)

No, you couldn't. 

 

Each of those would be a separate license, and everything Atari is done as cheaply as possible. 

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