AtariAge + Atari Q&A

[JPF997]

20 hours ago, jerseystyle said:

Pdubs is gonna be tearing up that speakerhat. 

Bro are you kidding, in 20 years some grading company like wata is gonna value that hat for like 1000 bucks, the speaker hat's will be the new ET cartridges from the New Mexico landfill, just you wait.

[JPF997]

22 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

This is precisely why I'm considering buying 1000 shares of Atari.  My expectations of ever seeing a return on it are zero.  If there is one, great; if not, I'll live.  But I, too, want to be able to be ignored 

 

As for the former, I'm cautiously-optimistic; on the latter, totally agreed.

 

I get that Atari has IP with some value in the retro marketspace, but without new games they're heading straight for the tunnel painted on the canyon wall.  Sure, base some new titles off of historical IP; there's no problem with that.  But without non-retro games, the portfolio doesn't really have anything in it with broad appeal.

One day were all going to enter Atari HQ going like

 

 

[Wildstar]

1 hour ago, JPF997 said:

There are a lot of companies in the retro market alone that Atari could probably buy for dirt cheap and greatly increase they're overall game and hardware development capabilities, for example Polymega, Anstream arcade and  Analogue, two of which Atari already owns big stakes in.

Again, adding them adds payroll expense but they need to increase revenue. I'm not opposed to Atari having a role in the retro community but they'll need to build on publishing and revenue from that has much more room to grow with a linear increase in cost. This is where the higher margins are to absorb some of these activities that have low margins. Hardware manufacturing is a high cost low margin type of business. The contribution margins per unit sold is relatively low but video game as with software, especially digital downloads have nearly zero per unit cost to manufacture and that large contribution margin can yield product profits. As publisher, your investment is in marketing and associated cost of getting the product delivered and such. They don't necessarily dump huge sums of money to develop the product so they can make bank. The developers themselves have the huge development expense. EA makes our like bandits, the individual studios might not as much. If the game doesn't sell as well... Atari may well profit but the developer didn't breakeven. The risk is borne more on the developer than necessarily the publisher. It's the reality of the video game industry.

 

 

[+KaeruYojimbo]

6 hours ago, Random Terrain said:

 

I nominate the Atari Logo.

I nominate Master Chief wearing a Speakerhat.

 

It combines a recognizable character with the publicity that comes with a lawsuit. Plus, when Atari eventually settles out of court by granting Microsoft controlling interest in the company, we'll get awesome crossover games like Haunted Halo House, Halo Crystal Castles and Halo Pong (I have no idea what gaming IPs Microsoft owns other than Halo).

[+D Train]

I nominate the speakerhat!

[roots.genoa]

6 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

I have no idea what gaming IPs Microsoft owns other than Halo

Forzasteroids!

[JPF997]

21 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

Forzasteroids!

 Microsoft ip's are stuff like Halo; Gears of War; Forza; Sea of Thieves; Rare's ip's; ABK ip's; Fable; Grounded; Bethesda and  ID software's ip's , flight simulator and Wasteland off the top of my head.

[+GoldLeader]

Never give stock advice.  That's my motto.

 

 

What's a motto?

 

Nothing.  What's a motto which you?

[Matt_B]

7 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

I have no idea what gaming IPs Microsoft owns other than Halo.

I don't think they know either.

 

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

[+GoldLeader]

 

Now to all but ignore my own advice (errr motto,  (heh))...

 

The sharp kid from Norway gets it,  but I think most are wearing blinders.

 

 

It's Very easy to lose money on penny stocks.  If you want to throw money away, go for it.  (Pre-Order an Amico while you're at it,  I kid. I kid).  I also get that for some it's not about money.  Or maybe I should explain that I'd love to be wrong (here's hoping it's like usual, eh?).  I actually want a successful version of Atari (something Chesnais-free please,  NO D-Bags allowed such language young man!).  ...But go in expecting to lose,  maybe that's the lesson.  Sometimes a penny stock will take off and shoot up like a rocket,  and if you're lucky and volume is high enough that day that you can actually sell without lowering your 'ask' too much.  I wish everyone the Best in All financial endeavors (Sincerely).

 

But,  Experiment A:  If you're gonna throw money in Atari's direction,  might I just suggest gently that you also consider Microsoft?  Buy one, the other or both,...Do what thou wilt.  In a year,  I'd like to check the results. 

 

 

PS:  I don't own a new XBOX, and never worried about Windows or Cloud services, or AI, ... but on paper at least I've done well with MSFT.

 

PPS:  Today's close of market prices:  MSFT  $321.80     PONGF  $.13   (10-2-2023)

 

PPSS:  Ya know,...If you make some money on Microsoft,  you can spend it on Atari stuff.  No one's stopping you.   

[+cvga]

21 hours ago, Wildstar said:

The retro market is not and never can be sustainable and would require downsizing staff by possibly 50% in order to bring cost down.

 

16 hours ago, Wildstar said:

... they can't sustain payroll of 24 or whatever their current number of employees...

 

 

They have 24 employees but only 3 of them are full-time (plus whatever Al is). There, they just cut the staff in half.

 

4 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

 

The sharp kid from Norway gets it,  but I think most are wearing blinders.

 

I feel bad asking but I can't tell from the comments. Who is the sharp kid from Norway?

 

[Giles N]

On 10/1/2023 at 8:06 PM, Arno1978 said:

On 10/1/2023 at 4:02 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

I get that Atari has IP with some value in the retro marketspace, but without new games they're heading straight for the tunnel painted on the canyon wall.  Sure, base some new titles off of historical IP; there's no problem with that.  But without non-retro games, the portfolio doesn't really have anything in it with broad appeal.

This is an absolute fact. It's an extremely difficult market now. While the bonus is that Atari is still a recognized name - the minute you mention Atari to anyone - the thought is "retro gaming".

I think perhaps, since Atari actually have bought AA, why not hang around here and ask us gamers what kind of games we would like see produced?

 

Not (just) asking which of their products we like more than others, or which ones we don’t like, but like reaching out to hear our opinions of what would make for solid new Atari game…

 

I’m mean, must be plenty of people around here with large gaming experience - perhaps all the way from the 2600 to the most recent in consoles and PC and smart-phone gaming…

 

Who here wouldn’t like to share our thoughts about what would be a solid Atari-title, and how maje it good, to more recent gaming platforms, even given limitations of money and production-means…?

 

 

[Lord Mushroom]

1 hour ago, cvga said:

I feel bad asking but I can't tell from the comments. Who is the sharp kid from Norway?

Touché

[+cvga]

29 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Touché

Lol - It wasn't meant to be a dig. I didn't notice you were from Norway, nor did I think you were a kid. Your posts are too logical.

[Lord Mushroom]

8 minutes ago, cvga said:

Lol - It wasn't meant to be a dig. I didn't notice you were from Norway, nor did I think you were a kid. Your posts are too logical.

I figured it wasn´t a dig, but I wasn´t 100% sure. But I can confirm that I am a 41 year old Norwegian kid.

[Wildstar]

1 hour ago, cvga said:

 

They have 24 employees but only 3 of them are full-time (plus whatever Al is). There, they just cut the staff in half.

 

I feel bad asking but I can't tell from the comments. Who is the sharp kid from Norway?

 

Here's the thing, they have to market themselves for more than just retro classic Atari consoles and computers. They may have to target Apple II and 68k and PPC macs, Commodore 8 bit & Amiga, and NES/SNES/N64, SEGA master and genesis, TI-99/4A, and others as well as those using emulators. Only then, you might yield enough customers from retro to pencil out. The Commodore 64 community shrunk to the point that Creative Micro Designs ended developing hardware for C64. You see, you never going to get 100% of the target market to purchase. A few hundred sales a year... even gamed, makes it undesirable for investing months of time for a project team of any size working diligently to deliver commercial quality games even by the standards of mid to late 80s and early 90s. You had 16 bit PCs at that time and 16 bit consoles in late 80s to mid-90s. We're going to be judged by the standards in the later end of 8 bit and 16 bit, respectively as well as 32/64 bit consoles of the 90s. New SNES titles would need to compare to titles like Chrono Trigger and other titles in the last 2-3 years of Snes on the global market. This isn't going to be weekend slap together work. C64 titles would need to be real effort. Games that uses one or more disks. Significant work. 

 

You can't use modern game engines. Nope. Machine Language. Most likely, you'll develop using an emulator. You can make it a download or provide using microSD and use the micro-SD to SD card adapter like a disk sleeve with a label on the card adapter. Then, you use stuff like SD2IEC as a low cost accessory that is easily obtained or made as traditional floppy disks are basically becoming rare. Most of your community will have some replacement accessory to that of original floppy drives. This would require knowing how to deliver with current available media to these platforms. If I was making a new commercial C64 game, I would likely be

 

using an SD solution. Some SD solution for hardware would support full size SD cards but also microSD so I would use microSD with card adapter. So it would work on SD2IEC, chameleon, and Ultimate Ii/II+, and similar devices using disk images stored on the card. 

 

Yeah, the card would be overkill in capacity but, I would use what I can for physical media at a low cost. Actual cartridge would cost a bit just for the enclosure and pcb to be made even if I used 8k to 32k rom chips. 

 

Amiga disks images on SD. Pretty normal. Floppy disks are not manufactured any more, IIRC, mostly NOS inventory until supply last. 

 

With consoles, it's cartridges. Part of why retro consoles are made so you can move over to the newer console that allows you to use newer media instead of the expensive to make cartridges. 

 

For SNES, I have a SD2SNES card. So I could make new games for SNES using SD cards instead of manufacturing compatible cartridges. Patents expired, Nintendo. I can make cosmetic changes that would mechanically fit and SNES/Super famicom without the Nintendo trademarks but SDs are a lot less hassle. Atari would face those issues. To sustain revenue of $25-$30M a year, Atari needs to sell enough games and collect publisher royalties. This is where you need to make enough to close the cost gap and have a operating profit not running in the red. How many games do we need to sell to generate $20M in contribution margin over cost. We are looking at close to 10-20 million units of sale from games. That is not just one title but a host of titles. In a given year, what is the average number of titles (or collections bundle) are bought each year per customer. Assume maybe that's 3. So, that needs about 3.5 to 8 million customers each year and market sector of at least 12 to 25 million. You need a community of 15 to 35 million world wide to market to, realistically. Is there that many? That's the hard part. That is why I think they should not have all their eggs in the retro market basket. Part of the figure is based roughly on Atari collecting ~20% of the sales revenue as publisher which is around industry norm these days. 

 

Atari needs to be able to reach out to a marketplace of a lot larger to publish games to. To pull enough revenue from their 20%. Publishing games should be the thing that generates the revenue to pay the bills, employees, etc. and even absorb losses from some of the retro hardware projects. The games published will need to subsidize the costs and still make a net profit after all expenses are taken out.

[+jgkspsx]

8 hours ago, Matt_B said:

I don't think they know either.

 

https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

This leaves out the mostly solid first party Nokia N-Gage game library, which was nuked from commercial existence by Microsoft as a tax writeoff. Microsoft can’t sell the games since it said they have no value, nor did it release them into the public domain.

[+GoldLeader]

3 hours ago, cvga said:

Lol - It wasn't meant to be a dig. I didn't notice you were from Norway, nor did I think you were a kid. Your posts are too logical.

 

I was about to say, Well technically there's 2!  But Yep!  Lord Mushroom posted some stuff earlier that I thought made total sense.

 

3 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

I figured it wasn´t a dig, but I wasn´t 100% sure. But I can confirm that I am a 41 year old Norwegian kid.

 

Are you 41 already?  Damn seems like just 4 years ago you were just 37...Boyee time flies!  I like hanging out with some of my older friends, because then they can call me "kid"...

[roots.genoa]

10 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

Never give stock advice.  That's my motto.

 

 

What's a motto?

 

Nothing.  What's a motto which you?

I don't have a driving license, so I won't ride any motto, sorry.

[Lord Mushroom]

2 hours ago, Wildstar said:

A few hundred sales a year... even gamed, makes it undesirable for investing months of time for a project team of any size working diligently to deliver commercial quality games even by the standards of mid to late 80s and early 90s.

It seems to me that Atari is currently focusing on games from the early 80s, and I would imagine they don´t require much work to put together. Later games would require more work, but would also sell better.

 

2 hours ago, Wildstar said:

You can't use modern game engines. Nope. Machine Language.

Why not? If you are making a Recharged game and selling it on Steam and modern platforms, I don´t see why you can´t. Perhaps you can´t develop games for old platforms like the 2600 that way, but I don´t think they plan to get much of their income from new games on cartridges for old platforms.

 

3 hours ago, Wildstar said:

How many games do we need to sell to generate $20M in contribution margin over cost. We are looking at close to 10-20 million units of sale from games. That is not just one title but a host of titles.

I think $10 million is more than enough, but of course it depends on how ambitious they are (how much they are investing in games). After a quick search on Steam, Recharged games seem to me to bring in very roughly $5 per game after the 30% cut to the platforms (not $1-2 as you are suggesting). And then there are bigger games and bundles, which bring in more.

 

They have released a lot of Recharged games now, and if making Recharged games was unprofitable, they would have stopped doing it. They have also made their original games available on new platforms for decades. We must assume they have crunched the numbers based on these experiences, and others, and come to the conclusion that buying IP and releasing games based on it is profitable.

[Giles N]

8 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

9 hours ago, cvga said:

I feel bad asking but I can't tell from the comments. Who is the sharp kid from Norway?

Touché

Hey kid… people tell me you’re really into the stocks these days… wouldn’t be into real estate as well…?

 

😉😁

Edited October 3, 2023 by Giles N

[Giles N]

On 10/2/2023 at 7:15 AM, Lord Mushroom said:

2) Atari doesn´t have any mascots or well known games that are suitable for a modern sequel.

3) Atari doesn´t have employees with a track record of making very popular games, like especially Nintendo does.

 

I think they should take a stab at new modern games, but I think they would fail, so it is a matter of how much risk they are willing to take.

Ok, not so much into the business-analysis as you, but have my ideas/opinions how they could make the most wellknown IPs be utilized as franchises for ‘sequels’ to come across as catering to modern gamers.

 

Atari don’t have expert game-designers.

I wonder if there’s anywhere they could turn for reliable evaluation of what would constitute quality games, or some sort of record or chronology of what worked for Atari in the past and what didn’t…

 

—

 

Mascots… Atari haven’t been good with building a world/catalogue of likeable figures with which gamers becomes familiar over time…

However, they have franchises, with looks and gameplay that are remembered today, even sometimes somewhat iconic.

But since it comes out of a decade that was stoked on technological new inventions, where the very concept of interacting with something on a screen still felt like an exotic novelty in itself, and space-travel and, well, space-everything felt new and exciting, these franchises may feel either impersonal or too commonplace these days.

 

Who wants a Missile Command missile lauch pod-teddy? Who want a Lunar Lander top-quality model…?

These franchises are remembered for gameplay particulars that stood out in those days, and which would need many layers of additional stuff-to-achieve, to make them become what Mario Wonder is now, compared to DK or Mario Bros.

 
Atari needs to make notes about game-design particulars as well as getting their market analysis correct.

 

[Lord Mushroom]

2 hours ago, Giles N said:

Hey kid… people tell me you’re really into the stocks these days… wouldn’t be into real estate as well…?

 

😉😁

I am interested in both stocks and real estate, but there is a slight problem: I have no money.

[Lord Mushroom]

1 hour ago, Giles N said:

Ok, not so much into the business-analysis as you,

I want to stress that while I am more interested in the business side of Atari than most, I am far from a business analyst. So no one should take what I say about those kinds of things as gospel. I am just an idiot looking at a screen like everybody else.

[zzip]

6 hours ago, GoldLeader said:

 

I was about to say, Well technically there's 2!  But Yep!  Lord Mushroom posted some stuff earlier that I thought made total sense.

 

 

Are you 41 already?  Damn seems like just 4 years ago you were just 37...Boyee time flies!  I like hanging out with some of my older friends, because then they can call me "kid"...

They sure grow up fast these days!    Four years ago I was 25 and today I'm still 25!