Atari Gaming moving away from free-to-play and mobile games

Armenius

Armenius

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New CEO of Atari Wade J. Rosen recently announced that Atari is going to start focusing on "premium" PC and console games going forward.

Atari is shaking up its business strategy once again. Today the company announced that its board of directors has signed off on a new approach centered around making premium games for PCs and consoles, with reduced emphasis on mobile and free-to-play games.​
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"Our intent with any gaming experience is to provide accessible and joyful moments of meaningful play," said Atari's recently appointed CEO Wade J. Rosen.​
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"That's the core of Atari and what binds our history with our future. To that end, we feel that premium gaming is better representative of this type of gaming experience and the Atari DNA."​
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The company said "the competitive and marketing environment is weighing on the free-to-play business model," but it will continue to operate successful free-to-play titles with a continuing user base.​
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However, free-to-play games like Roller Coaster Tycoon Stories, Crystal Castles, Castles & Catapults, Ninja Golf, and Atari Combat: Tank Fury will either be shut down or sold off.​

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...oving-away-from-free-to-play-and-mobile-games

Wade Rosen replaced former CEO Frédéric Chesnais back in April and he seems to really want to leverage classic Atari intellectual property going forward. The business is now split into two divisions: Atari Gaming and Atari Blockchain, with Frédéric Chesnais heading up the latter.

Gaming brand Atari has split its company in two, with one division to focus on gaming and the other on blockchain.​
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Atari Gaming will focus on the firm's retro gaming business with licensing and its VCS console. The firm also plans to 'revitalise' classic Atari IP with new releases that have 'meaningful' single-player, local multiplayer and online play. It will also continue to operate its free-to-play mobile games, the company stated in its release.​
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The firm has also announced that Wade J. Rosen, who has been acting as chairman of the Board, will become the company's new CEO. Meanwhile, current CEO Frédéric Chesnais will focus on licensing and the new Atari Blockchain division.​
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The blockchain division will develop the Atari Token cryptocurrency to use in Atari products and third-party partner applications. The new area will also look at opportunities around blockchain gaming, NFTs and 'blockchain-based online worlds'.​

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...s-up-separate-gaming-and-blockchain-divisions
 
Micro-transaction models which is basically the free-to-play model is failing all over. There's limited success in the beginning because people are slow to catch on how this effects gameplay. What gameplay, this is for mobile devices which means they're all just bejeweled clones. Not all games last forever and eventually players realize that they don't want to play with whales. The whales get upset because who else are they gonna dominate or show off their skins they spent hundreds of dollars on. It's a failed business model. But instead of making new IP is seems Atari wants to milk their old games from decades ago. Stuff that should be free due to limitations of copyright, that is until Disney got involved and extended it.
 
I'm a guy who never gamed mobile........in looking at what is out and available in the stores it seemed like big-name games like Call of Duty or what have you made a stab at the mobile/tablet market but then, even though the phone market continued to explode, all of those big name games just were abandoned, isn't the call of duty game out for mobile like 8 years old or something crazy like that? (Ignorance here).
ALso other bigger titles that seemed to be making fanfare (that swipey game where you did swordfighting or something with monsters).....gone....?

Last time I looked it was more of the same indy type games, seems like just as the phones were getting powerful enough to run legit PC/Console style apps........all the development stopped and the games that appear in my app store (Apple) all look like time wasters.......?? Or am I just looking int he wrong place.

I missing something or....?
 
Does today's Atari even have any of the rights of any of the older versions of Atari?

Everytime an entity named Atari goes bankrupt (which is more regular than airlines), it sells the name to someone new and any IP or licenses to whoever has a dollar.
 
Way way back when Hasbro Interactive was bought up by Microprose, which got bought up by Infogrammes, which dropped a huge turd of a Master of Orion sequel, then acquired Atari and changed their name to Atari to rid themselves of the old stench of Infogrammes, so assuming this is the same Atari (or even bought up by other companies) they have a number of IP they could work off of.... or yanno just make something new.
 
There have been many games made under the Atari label, not just the classics from the 80's. Since most games are just repeats of old IP anyway, no one will really fault them for bringing updated iterations of old IP. I can see a successful approach by bringing up some of the nostalgic classics for "fun to play" games (I can only imagine what could be done with Centipede given modern computing hardware), and tapping into some of their more serious games for the intense gamers.

If nothing else, it would be nice if they could leverage their IP to break the stranglehold that EA, Epic, and Activision/Blizzard has on the gaming industry.
 
My first gaming experience was on the original Atari 2600. I had a few good times playing with my father. However, I don’t have any real nostalgia for the games. Growing up, we were always looking for the next system to give us something other than colored blocks and whatever passes for the 2600s sound.

If Atari wants to push their VCS, they should have given it a better APU. As it stands, there is no way I would pay that much to play games I can easily get on a compilation disk.

Atari…such a disappointment.
 
jardows said:
There have been many games made under the Atari label, not just the classics from the 80's. Since most games are just repeats of old IP anyway, no one will really fault them for bringing updated iterations of old IP. I can see a successful approach by bringing up some of the nostalgic classics for "fun to play" games (I can only imagine what could be done with Centipede given modern computing hardware), and tapping into some of their more serious games for the intense gamers.

If nothing else, it would be nice if they could leverage their IP to break the stranglehold that EA, Epic, and Activision/Blizzard has on the gaming industry.
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Imagine no more as a remake of Centipede was made for the Dreamcast.

 
Who has goddamned time to worry about add-ons, microtransactions, and to a lessor extent DLCs? When I play a game, I want to buy it, then I want it to start and play it; I'm not spending a single second considering on whether a $2 stats buff is worth my money. If it has a single ad, or suggested purchasable content, that app gets uninstalled faster than cat lapping chain lightning.
 
harmattan said:
Who has goddamned time to worry about add-ons, microtransactions, and to a lessor extent DLCs? When I play a game, I want to buy it, then I want it to start and play it; I'm not spending a single second considering on whether a $2 stats buff is worth my money. If it has a single ad, or suggested purchasable content, that app gets uninstalled faster than cat lapping chain lightning.
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Who? Tons.

Fortnite is free, but makes its money in-game by selling items. These items don't even help you! Just skins, new gliders, stupid shit. Yet here they are making 2.5 BILLION in 2020, on a free game. I think you are underestimating people's willingness to spend money on absolutely worthless things.
 
auntjemima said:
I think you are underestimating people's willingness to spend money on absolutely worthless things.
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Mine was a rhetorical question, I suppose.

But those things aren't "worthless" to those people. That digital hat/sunglasses/horse armor is the most pathetic, trite form of ego caressing and validation possible. It's the Emporia Armani belt buckle, the neon running lights on a 10 year-old Mazda, the hot-topic metal band patch etc. of gaming. And for a lot of people, it effectively says: "I can't succeed and/or be unique in real life, but at least I can have a pink rabbit outfit in Fortnite."
 
Hold up - whoever's passing as Atari now was even dealing in free-to-play games, as opposed to getting the new-age Atari VCS out to market?

sfsuphysics said:
Way way back when Hasbro Interactive was bought up by Microprose, which got bought up by Infogrammes, which dropped a huge turd of a Master of Orion sequel, then acquired Atari and changed their name to Atari to rid themselves of the old stench of Infogrammes, so assuming this is the same Atari (or even bought up by other companies) they have a number of IP they could work off of.... or yanno just make something new.
Click to expand...
If that doesn't make your brain hurt enough, let's go even farther back and touch on how Jack Tramiel and a bunch of engineers left Commodore, wound up taking over Atari and firing pretty much everyone, then using the brand to promote their new Atari ST computer line and sticking it to their old company.

That Atari is somehow unrelated as a business venture to Atari Games, which would produce several arcade games and remakes of their older arcade hits, and then there's everything you brought up. Makes my head spin as to who actually owns any Atari IPs.

As for MicroProse, I'm surprised to see that brand's back, too. Used to be one of the big names in computer sim gaming, got bought out by Spectrum Holobyte only for the MicroProse branding to be adopted instead (hence why Falcon 4.0 is a MicroProse release), and now some rich dude got the rights to the brand and is publishing indie games they thought the MicroProse of old would have published back in the day, like Carrier Command 2 (I'm guessing Gaea Mission didn't count) and Tiny Combat Arena.

Beats ownership by a corporation simply looking to cash in on nostalgia, I suppose - which is what usually happens with whoever happens to hold the Atari or Commodore IP rights at the time.
 
Really forcing the shambling fiasco currently called Atari to keep living is just being cruel to the brand at this point.
 
auntjemima said:
Who? Tons.

Fortnite is free, but makes its money in-game by selling items. These items don't even help you! Just skins, new gliders, stupid shit. Yet here they are making 2.5 BILLION in 2020, on a free game. I think you are underestimating people's willingness to spend money on absolutely worthless things.
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For every Free-to-play game that's as successful as Fortnite you have hundreds of failed F2P games. The problem with this business model is that you trick people into playing the game and then suddenly ramp up the difficulty until you get the person to buy crap from the store in order to progress. It doesn't even have to be things like more power or an "I WIN" button, but like more tries or more turns. Also, for every one person who enjoys spending money in a F2P game, there's hundreds who don't. If your game has multiplayer then those whales enjoy showing off to people the crap they bought in a game. The people who don't spend money eventually leave the game leaving whales to show off to other whales and that doesn't go down too well. The game dies and you're quickly reminded how much value your digital crap is worth when a game is dead and no updates are done.

There's a reason PC and console gamers laugh at mobile because F2P games make up the overwhelming majority of games and they're 99.9999% crap. Most are just bejeweled clones that have advertisements that have nothing to do with the gameplay what so ever. There's a reason why mobile gaming isn't being take serious by the gaming community and that's because no developer has seriously considered spending millions on a game you can buy and play. Even if one does then who's going to buy it and how will they play it? A touch screen? With what amount of storage the 32GB or 64GB that comes with most phones and tablets?

Atari saw the mobile market being not only difficult to penetrate but also super saturated did the right move. Instead of making new games they decided to use stuff from the 70's and resell it. Seems to be a popular move.
 
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