Phantom Gets Insider Bonus, Ex-Xbox Bigshot

Thanks to loonyboi for pointing to a HeraldTribune.com article revealing new controversy and a surprising senior appointment for Phantom 'PC game console' makers Infinium. The article reveals: "Infinium Labs Inc. dished out a stealthy stock dividend to insiders as soon as it became a publicly traded company, and without bothering to tell the stock-trading public through traditional channels." Infinium executives "declined... to be interviewed about the four-for-one dividend", but it's also noted, by way of an SEC filing, that "...Infinium has hired Kevin Bachus, who helped Microsoft develop its XBox gaming system... Bachus, with nearly 20 years of experience in the game development industry, has assumed the role of president and chief operating officer."

Don't know if this has been posted before...

[samdu]

...but here is some interesting information about the CEO of Infinium:

HardOCP [hardocp.com]

Vaporware is in the air...

[imperator_mundi]

from Heraldtribune:

The shares were selling for $28.50 at the close of regular trading on Tuesday

...the company had 4,577,761 shares

$28.5/stock and 4.5M stocks, that means some 140M$ paper... not that bad, but still far away from something that make you believable if you want to go after sony, M$ and Big N... and the fact that we're talking about financial statement but so far no games's screenshot is available reminds me of the good ol' times.... I still waiting for the flare one [wanadoo.nl] ;-)

Re:Who Cares?

[bigman2003]

When a big stack of boxes is sitting at Toys R Us next to PS3 and Nextbox and the Gamehole, who is going to pick up a Phantom? And with only $140 million now, how much advertising will they need to run in order to get brand awareness out there?

There are 3 very good consoles out there now.

• Nintendo- long-time leader, has money, and an excellent name.
  
  
• Sony- broke into the market when Sega was falling apart, and had a lot of money for a push.
  
  
• Microsoft- had enough money to shove their way into the market, and keep things going until it finally got good.
  

With 3 huge players out there, the Phantom would need to spend billions of dollars to get some attention. I don't think they will get billions of dollars. The market is maturing, it would be much tougher to break in. The current consoles are good, and the next ones will be better. Running PC games in a simple manner is not the holy grail of gaming anymore- because console games are getting good on their own.

Maybe they are hiring former Microsoft employees, in the hope that they still have contacts at the home base. The best thing that could happen to them would be that Microsoft buys them out. Even if it is just to shut them up, and close the company down- that would be a better business plan than actually trying to compete with what is out there now, and even worse, the next generation from the big 3.