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Businesses Entertainment Games

Atari Profits Down, Closing Two Studios 59

Posted by Zonk from the that's-got-to-sting dept.
Gamespot has the word that Atari has reported a drop in profits for the third quarter. Earnings were down roughly $30 million compared to the same period last year. As a result, they are closing the company's Santa Monica and Beverly, MA studios. From the article: "In an e-mail sent to employees shortly before today's earnings call with analysts, new Atari CEO and president Jim Capparro outlined his plan to 'move Marketing and the coordination of Product Development and Production to New York, where those functions will be in close proximity to our center of operations.'"
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Atari Profits Down, Closing Two Studios More

Atari Profits Down, Closing Two Studios

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  • Apple had three quarters of negative profit once, and they have risen again.

    Of course, they better have pretty good plans to get back to the scene. Let's see.
  • They really need to do what Sega did and stop making hardware and focus specifically on software. What? They already did that? Man, I guess they are screwed.
  • Ubi Soft, a French and French-Canadian company is preventing EA in America from closing their child companies for budget reasons.

    Infogrames, the old name for the French company that bought ATARI (and adopted its name) is now closing down their child companies for budget reasons.

    I'm not completely sure, but I think "la bouilloire est noire."

  • Geeze (Score:2, Funny)

    by KingBahamut ( 615285 )
    I hope it doesnt affect the release of any of their titles. Dragonshard ive been waiting on for a while.

  • Where are the games? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stpitner ( 164196 )
    It's sad to see what is going on with Atari (fond memories of playing the Atari 5200...) but seriously, what games have they put out recently that constitutes them to be able to do well? The games they list as their top sellers is not like any of them were anything close to the best thing ever. The classic games, while great to have, where's the new stuff? Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was the only name that I really recognized as something that I know people enjoy.

    Their profits are going to continue droppin

  • Restructuring not result of revenue decrease (Score:5, Informative)

    by aralin ( 107264 ) on Thursday February 10, 2005 @12:33PM (#11631261)
    The blurb is a little wrong here, the restructuring and closing of two studios is a result of new, more responsible management that took reins this quarter. Atari used to have some pretty hopeless projects, its only good if the management will concentrate on the good and cut the bad.

    The revenue and profit decrease was a result of delaying one game, until its ready and not rushing it to market as happened in the past. It seems to be a sign of the new management trying a new way and build the brand name, instead of just trying to maximaze short term profits.

    Besides, the profits for this quarter, although being slightly down year over year, have still beat the average analyst estimates.

    The conference call yesterday has been by many characterized as a breath of fresh air, because after years of shady business, there seems to be open and honest management at top of the company, that is forward and plays it straight with the investors.

    Despite the fact I have more confidence in the new management, the short term outlook for the company is not any good, at least for a quarter or two. Long term, they will hopefully turn it around.

  • Told you so (Score:3, Informative)

    by FictionPimp ( 712802 ) on Thursday February 10, 2005 @12:46PM (#11631424) Homepage
    Ha! and their customer support laughed at me when I said my boycott would hurt them. They just didn't realize how many games I buy a quarter!

    Seriously though, I really hope good game makers like bioware stop distributing via atari. They use sub standard disks, paper sleeves, and their support sucks. Not to mention their use of very crappy copy protection that doesn't work on a lot of dvd/cd rom drives (like sony drives). Or my favorite "You must uninstall disk emulation software to play this game". Yea right, I'll get right on that.

    I hope the big guys do so bad that more small studios start showing up, with online distribution models. These mega companys are going to kill pc gaming.

    • Re:Told you so (Score:2, Interesting)

      by landopowered ( 855472 )
      If you boycott Atari, you are in effect boycotting the small guys. Very few video game developers have the resources to pay employees for a 2+ year game cycle and then self publish their game using an online distribution model. Valve has enough clout to pursue such methods but they are in the minority. Atari pays small independant developers to develop games. Otherwise those small independant developers would have to turn to another publisher or stop making games altogether. If Atari goes down you're
      • Thats why I hope game studio's start looking into online distrubtion. Bittorrent comes to mind as a perfect way to distrubute software. But yes, it does suck that their is no way to support the little guy without enforcing the horrible business practices of atari. I've taken to buying most of my games second hand, that way if i'm gonna take it in the butt, at least i'll have some vasaline.
      • Why should I care about supporting the little guy when the little guy is an asshole?

  • No more of my money (Score:4, Interesting)

    by grotgrot ( 451123 ) on Thursday February 10, 2005 @12:48PM (#11631458)
    I bought Pirates! recently (published by Atari), and discovered that they make it assume that anyone using a CD emulator (in my case Daemon Tools) is an unsound person and refuse to let the game run. A few minutes on the Internet and the workaround is to change permissions on one registry key. (Note you just have to have a CD emulator installed, not even trying to run the software via it.)

    Since they think so lowly of me, I decided to return the favour and never buy another Atari product. I even emailed them and told them why. What goes around comes around. And it isn't like there aren't enough games from other publishers to spend my money on.

    And of course the game has been extensively cracked and copied anyway.
    • Since they think so lowly of me, I decided to return the favour and never buy another Atari product. I even emailed them and told them why.

      While I agree with you, I'm also pretty sure you enjoyed playing Sid Meier's Pirates. I just played it for the first time 3 days ago and I absolutely loved it, a very good treatment of the original imo.

      So I guess my point is, instead of sending letters to Atari...maybe send one to Sid asking him to change publishers?
      • Yes, I enjoy the game. Sid gets the whatever tiny percentage of the $50 it cost me at the store. The only feedback mechanism I could find was at Atari's website and I provided them that feedback. Ultimately Sid bears responsibility for the publisher he picked and that publisher bears responsibility to consider feedback and tell the developer. I have done way more than most to tell them what is going on. The ball is in their court now.
    • Odd, I downloaded it and both installed and played it using d-tools.

      Another example of a superior product going to the "pirates"

  • Cool. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mrseigen ( 518390 ) on Thursday February 10, 2005 @12:49PM (#11631465) Homepage Journal
    Good riddance to bad rubbish. They've taken the Atari name and dragged it through the muck more than Atari itself did (and with the Tramiels, that took some serious work).
  • They are also losing Epic Games as a major studio that they were publishing for. With Unreal Championship 2 on the horizon, that can't help the situation.

  • New York??! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First, it would really help if their center of operations WASN'T in New York. The rent there alone (and salary requirements for employees due to the high rents) makes it hard to run a company in the black!

  • Hey, I used to work at the Beverly office. Quality assurance tester. It was my dream job. Even on the bad days it was good. I helped test Terminator 3: War of the Machines (and trust me when I say that despite its crappiness, it was a lot worse when we had it... not that it would have been released had the choice been up to us) among other things.

    Yeah, and 12/19/03, 6 days before Xmas, without warning they let all the temps go, which made up about 40 of the 60 or so testers there. They fired the rest a cou
    • I heard that the Beverly offices were only a QA center and no software actually got developed there? I know someone who's father worked there about a year ago and that's what he implied.

      Not sure I'd call a QA location a "studio" per se. Unless they mean studio in the sense of studio apartment.

      So it's just been an administrative shell for a year? Makes sense to close it down if nothing at all happens there.

  • Have you played Atari today? (Score:3, Funny)

    by JavaLord ( 680960 ) on Thursday February 10, 2005 @04:34PM (#11634435) Journal
    I guess not! (I'm also guessing that nobody gets this post...)
  • Could it just be that the name Atari is just a curse? I'm sure Infogrames must be wondering if the purchase of the Atari name was a smart business decision :).
  • I hope that Driv3r PC and potentially Driv4r don't get effected by this.

    I simply loved D1 & 2 and it would be a shame to see those games disapear. If I had to depend on driving with Need for speed or similar games, I'd rather take up full contact basket weaving :|
    • Driv3r IS one of the biggest reason why atari is in such a shit hole. It spanned something like 4 years in development. The play time is said to last a total of 12 short hours. It costed a budget of $$$millions.

      Another major budget flop was Enter the Matrix. How about the poor selling Terminator 3. The list goes on.

      Atari is literally being carried by UT2004, Dragonball Z series, Backyard game series.

      • The only reason Driv3r was so expensive is that the developers are pushing the xbox and PS2 to the raw limits of what they can do.

        The physics from Driver 1 and 2 were brilliant. I hope that the main developers continue along their physics purist vain.

        Sure it's expensive, but sure beats denting up my honda in toronto traffic :]
    • Unlikely. IIRC, the driver series is developed by Reflections in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. Despite Driv3r being a bit of a let-down and linked to all kinds of controversy over paid-for reviews, it's still a strong brand and I'd be surprised if there wasn't a D4 already well into development.
  • Here [slashdot.org], we read:

    [The games] industry remains strong and poised for renewed double digit growth over the next five years as we enter a new cycle of video game console launches. The future could not be brighter.

    And yet on the other other hand, we have all these studio closures. It's only a few days since I heard of the demise of the Ion Storm studio in Austin, TX. I'm not sure who the future looks bright for, but it certainly doesn't appear to be game developers. My condolences to all those families who are

  • Not Atari (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is just some new company that had the name Atari stuck on it after the trademarks were bought (and the logo stuck randomly on games this new company had nothing to do with creating or distributing).

    This is basically an abuse of consumer trust and loyalty. They're hoping to appeal to people familiar with the Atari brand name but ignorant of the original company's demise, or its million successors. Because it was the first video game company, the name still has resonance -- despite being used for this t

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