Infogrames/Atari in trouble?

[Falconer]

When I read news about Infogrames being in trouble, it took a while to sink in. I thought the Infogrames name had totally disappeared but they're actually still the parent company of Atari, the publisher of Sid's Pirates! and many other Firaxis games.

I have no idea how interwoven Atari and Infogrames are, but if Infogrames falls, you've got to wonder if the Atari name isn't cursed or something. Infogrames is a long time player in the game industry. They acquired the rights to use the world famous Atari brand name (a bit more about that here) and I must admit that after the donned that name, I had the idea they were doing pretty good.

Pirates! will not be their biggest release this year. Lets face it, there are some 160 registered forum users here and we're the oldest site for the Pirates! remake. It will sell, but it won't appear in any charts. That doesn't mean that the rest of their lineup doesn't have some huge potential though. Has anyone taken a look at [url="http://www.atari.com/dragonshard/"]Dragonshard[/url]? This title will rock the pillars that support the world of RTS gaming. If the product delivers what it promises, it will sell like hotcakes.

Obviously hugely popular games like Civilization must rake in some serious cash too, so it can't be that they don't have any decent titles.

So the question is, how bad are things for Atari? Will it topple? Will next Firaxis games come from Ubisoft? Electronic Arts? Activision? (Please God, not EA. Not as long as they have their heads still stuck up their arses overthere)

I'd hate to see Atari go down. The industry *needs* to have a decent pool of competition and if Atari would sink.. well, it's getting pretty thin.

[Falconer]

Oh and lets not forget about RollerCoaster Tycoon. That series must have brought in so much money that they could keep the company afloat for a year.

[cgfb]

I worry far more about developers than publishers. In a perfect world, developers would sell the game directly without publishers intervention. It is classical stuff the fact that ususally are the publishers who impose design decision on the developers that in the end nerf the games, making them bland and almost clones of each other.

Some of the best games I lately played were independent ventures, later sold through Matrixgames or Shrapnelgames from their online store.

Maybe with internet selling catching up, publishers start to get in a tight spot... I don't give a cent for them...

[defubar]

Atari published UT2004 as well. I also agree with the post above. While I do have a cool Atari sticker on the front of my PC, there are always other publishers. Though I would like to continue to see the Atari name in the furture.

[Falconer]

Without a big publisher backing them up, very few developers can survive very long in the world of gaming, and it's getting harder and harder. When companies like Microprose started, one man could make a game. Almost no one can do it on their own or in a very small team anymore these days. (with the noteable exception of Chris Sawyer perhaps, he's not 100% on his own, but a huge chunk of his games comes from his hands alone).

Many independents can make their first game, get it out into the world, and then go bankrupt on their 2nd venture. Sequels or just a new game from the same hands, always have to be bigger and better than the previous thing they worked on. Ambition is a great thing, but many developers start off with their new project, hoping that a big publisher will notice their work and help pay for the development cost. This is where many go under, because more often than not, they *don't* get that publisher to be able to continue developing at the ambitious level that they started their project with.

Like them or not, the publishers help get the good games on the shelves. Publishing through the internet is almost never enough to keep a company afloat (mmog's excluded) even if you have a huge base of fans. Magazines don't pay as much attention to online offerings and websites alone don't have a lot of reach.

I doubt Matrix or Shrapnel ever sold more than 200.000 copies of any of their games, while I estimate that most will never reach 50.000. I'm not saying they're bad games, but they can't provide the same amount of exposure that most of the big publishers can. For a game to be successful enough so that the developer can grow and mature, they'll need to sell quite a bit more than that.

And yes, there are publishers that are influencing their developers in a negative way. EA for instance kills off almost all of the independent developers who get involved with them, locking them into all sorts of contracts that seem gold when they sign 'm, but strangle them a few years later. But not all publishers are that way, and not all developers fall to their tricks.

Still, the publishers (most of the time) serve the gaming public more than they hurt them.

[El Diablo]

speaking about EA (Sports), bringing each year on the shelves an update of their soccermanager for 50,-€. Slight changes, some features taken out, some put in.
The only thing they do rely on are their official licenses and a grafic engine - of course their advertisment power in the mags is not a bad thing either...

There are still creative devs on the market, but it gets harder and harder, as most important point in the reviews has become the grafics, without a good own engine (which takes a long time) or high licensing-costs not doable.
_________________
Don't consider a creation to beeing perfect, unless you sat on it from dusk till dawn

[Pilo T]

If Atari went out, wouldn't Firaxis be able to buy all their older games back that Sid talked about in the interview on GameSpot? Then they could make all the remakes without tap dancing around Atari. Course, I don't know a whole lot about how all that works...

[Falconer]

They don't need to anymore. Firaxis acquired the rights to most of the old Microprose titles already. They probably just have to offer them to Atari first for publishing. I doubt Firaxis tapdances around Atari much at all. Atari isn't that hard on their developers I think, and Firaxis seems quite independent to me.

[Guest]

[cgfb]

Hummm... forgot to register... the previous message is mine!