Call me crazy.... I think I know Atari's plan...

[Warboss Gegguz]

1 minute ago, MrTrust said:

You're not being accused of being a blind hater.  You're being accused of being a dick.

I give back what I receive.

I was level headed when I initially responded to you and everyone else. I have since been directly insulted and treated like I know nothing and I'm here just to stir shit or have main character syndrome. And were this any other topic I'd probably just move on with my life, but this is concerning a field I literally dedicated my life to and a company I enjoy, so I'm still here.  All I'm trying to say is that the VCS failing isn't an opinion or question.

It is a FACT.

 

Saying the assessment of the market is wrong because you're an outlier changes nothing in an aggregate assessment... so please stop citing YOURSELVES as to why there is totally a profitable market for the VCS. Because all of you have one, and guess what? IT STILL FAILED.

Personal anecdotes are fucking pointless in this discussion. I used myself, but I also talked about the greater whole of the market which is supported by the fact this "console" made more of a dent in Atari than the actual console scene, reviewed like shit, and has effectively collected dust in warehouses post-launch if not just straight up becoming e-waste.

[+Stephen]

3 hours ago, PowerDubs said:

Did I read?

 

Yea dummy...

 

It's not the same... nowhere near.  Smaller storage drive, older USB, ... waaay slower cpu...

 

I'll stick to my VCS- in it's well built pretty package....w/ my dual bank 32GB 2666MHz DDR4 CL15 RAM and 1TB SSD drive- from 3 years ago...

 

 

Of course - you're an "investor" in Atari, and constantly shill every single news post or fart whiff involving Atari.  That's fine - we get you are a mega rabid fan.  But don't discount other arguments or products just because of this.

[Warboss Gegguz]

41 minutes ago, Stephen said:

Of course - you're an "investor" in Atari, and constantly shill every single news post or fart whiff involving Atari.  That's fine - we get you are a mega rabid fan.  But don't discount other arguments or products just because of this.

I'm like done posting in this, but thank you for the final laugh.

The dude literally comes off like a crypto bro with how much he constantly acts like Atari is making amazing financial decisions and is the absolute game-changer in the industry atm.

Ya know, the company that went bankrupt not even 10 years ago and has had more leadership changes than a south american dictatorship? TOTALLY know what they're doing, 100%.

 

Nobody told him that when you buy penny-stocks it's supposed to be a small company/start-up that looks promising, not a major industry player going through a rough patch.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Warboss Gegguz

[MrTrust]

1 hour ago, Warboss Gegguz said:

IT STILL FAILED.

 

Wow.  This is literally But I Did Have Breakfast This Morning.

 

Are you seriously not able to understand what a counterfactual is?

[+jeremiahjt]

The VCS lost money for Atari, but most of those losses are in the past. We have no idea how much money it makes (or loses) currently. To say Atari should drop support for the VCS right now without that knowledge is ridiculous. Considering they still have stock to sell, I think it could be entirely possible that continuing support for the VCS might be the smartest move for Atari.

[Warboss Gegguz]

[Lord Mushroom]

4 hours ago, 82-T/A said:

To be clear, I literally have this. I have Ubuntu running on it so that my daughter can write programs for her Arduino board. It really sucks... completely forget about the VCS right now... I expected so much more from this little Intel device. It's almost unusable. If you have more than two firefox windows open, it lags so bad that it basically hangs.

Have you tried a more lightweight OS? How about Q4OS?

[Lord Mushroom]

4 hours ago, 82-T/A said:

the question is what validation do you have to say what is and isn't a good business decision. Sometimes bad decisions are obvious... I don't really see this as a bad decision.

Atari has had huge losses in the last year or two, and a lot of it was tied to the VCS. Warboss Gegguz is correct when he says that it is too weak in power and (therefore) game lineup to compete with the most powerful consoles, and too expensive to be attractive to a large audience of casual gamers.

 

It only appeals to die hard Atari fans. Because it was expensive to develop, and they made too many of them, they lost money. 

[MrTrust]

50 minutes ago, jeremiahjt said:

To say Atari should drop support for the VCS right now without that knowledge is ridiculous. Considering they still have stock to sell, I think it could be entirely possible that continuing support for the VCS might be the smartest move for Atari.

 

Dude.  They probably haven't even broken 60k in game sales total on the system.  Just rough back-of-envelope, that's maybe $350k?  We know they split 80/20 with the dev, so that's around $70k in revenue from game sales.  That's if we assume an average of $7 a game.  Atari published a lot of those games themselves, let's say half, so we'll only split the other have 80/20.  That's $210k in revenue from games sales

 

Not this year.  Total.

 

I don't know what the real numbers are, but that is the neighborhood at least.  You've got to pay to warehouse your stock.  You've got to pay to keep your servers on.  They would need a substantial increase in sales volume for this to become a money maker.

 

Which, duh, is obviously going to happen because we like it.  I'm not even talking about "we" as in the VCS user base.  I mean me and you, specifically.

 

 

[Warboss Gegguz]

When your system is outsold by the Virtual Boy and Ouya but you have stans who will defend it to the death.

[PowerDubs]

5 hours ago, Stephen said:

Of course - you're an "investor" in Atari, and constantly shill every single news post or fart whiff involving Atari.  That's fine - we get you are a mega rabid fan.  But don't discount other arguments or products just because of this.

 

I share Atari news to share Atari news.

 

I argued with this guy not because of anything other than him being wrong.

 

[82-T/A]

17 hours ago, Warboss Gegguz said:

We are LITERALLY talking about business, management, and marketing. If I was showing a degree for mechanical engineering it would be a different story. Also, It was hypothetical and a joke, holy shit. You asked if I had bonafedes relevant to the topic. I said I do. I didn't say my IQ was higher than yours, I said I literally studied this topic for over 4 years of my life + honors classes in econ in high school, so even if I can't code or build a car from the ground up I think I at the very least gasp this topic more than a casual consumer.

Also, you literally asked me what my experience was and said "if you were Warren Buffet your opinion would matter". I didn't bring it up to 1-up you... WTF is wrong with you people?

 

You seem a little bit aggressive here. I think your exasperation is much higher than it is for anyone else on this thread... so probably just take a chill. If you're interested in economics... you'll like this video. This was a video that I enjoyed watching as part of my ethics class required for my law degree: https://www.learner.org/series/ethics-in-america/anatomy-of-a-hostile-takeover/

 

It has all the great investors from back in the day... including Sir James Goldsmith. Everything else aside... if you've never seen this series, I highly recommend you watch this video for the economy / economic value it brings to your educational background. Just to be clear, I'm not pushing any agenda here. I'm very pro-Capitalist, and about half the people on this panel are pro-capitalist while others range from Keynesian to whatever the hell. Everyone had the better sense than to be MMT back then... but anyway, it was made during a time when people could actually have conversations about things like this. It's a fantastic video... a little long, but I think you'd enjoy it.

 

 

17 hours ago, Warboss Gegguz said:

Yes, because we're on a forum literally made for fans of Atari. That's not a lot of people. If carts are barely turning a profit how the fuck is a console supposed to? NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE IF THE GOAL IS TO MAKE MONEY! Why is this impossible to understand?!

 

Look... you will not find a bigger Capitalist on this message board than me... I get a lot of shit for it, just go to the General section of this forum.

 

But making money is not always the goal of every company. Sometimes... it's also to have fun WHILE making money, yes. If Atari wanted to JUST make money, they could start up an Atari-themed p0rn conglomerate, or God knows what else. But they're making products that are what the fan-base wants. Like, I don't really get why that's a problem. If you're thinking about just the bottom line, all the time... you won't succeed any more than you will if you were ONLY thinking about the fan base. The VCS came out during a bad time, and I do think it's fair to say that the VCS suffered as a result. But I bought the VCS because I knew it was going to be Atari themed, it would going to have an emphasis on Atari products, AND I'd be able to play other cool Atari games that would be offered on it with Atari-designed controllers. These other Ali Express systems just didn't really interest me... never enough to spend money on them. I bought it because it had the support of Atari.

 

 

14 hours ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Have you tried a more lightweight OS? How about Q4OS?

 

Not even worth it. I think if I was going to put any more effort into it, I'd probably toss it. I bought it for the sole purpose of providing a platform for my daughter to do Arduino programming on. As long as we ONLY use it for that, it's fine. But open up a web window, and OMG... it starts lagging. I literally can't have more than one thing running on it at a time or it just really, really falls flat ... and hard. But when I only have the Arduino IDE running, it's actually quite OK.

 

Not sure if this offends anyone, but all this talk has made me consider maybe even buying another Atari VCS that I can use as a smallish computer. I generally don't like to do "this" stuff (going on forums, etc...) with the same computer that I trade stocks and manage my accounts on. So I'd imagine a cool Atari VCS setup with Opera GX... and that might be kind of cool.

[Lord Mushroom]

20 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

Not even worth it. I think if I was going to put any more effort into it, I'd probably toss it.

Ok, but if you change your mind, I think Q4OS can be downloaded online just like any other program. And then you can easily switch back and forth between it and Ubuntu. So I think it is less work to try it out, than if you install an OS the usual way. That is part of the reason why I recommended it, although I know very little about these things.

[82-T/A]

21 minutes ago, Lord Mushroom said:

Ok, but if you change your mind, I think Q4OS can be downloaded online just like any other program. And then you can easily switch back and forth between it and Ubuntu. So I think it is less work to try it out, than if you install an OS the usual way. That is part of the reason why I recommended it, although I know very little about these things.

 

Hmm... it's actually pretty cool looking: https://www.q4os.org/

 

I mean, at least the GUI is... and it's Debian-based like Ubuntu. I liked Ubuntu primarily because it was so well supported. I still think it is and it's a great system, but it feels like it's achieving Windows Vista Pro bloatware lately. I'm going to have to give it a try, but as I said... for this little guy, it's honestly not even worth the effort. But I'm definitely going to think about it for perhaps something else.

 

Do you remember GeoWorks? I loved GeoWorks. I wish someone would create a front-end for Debian that looks exactly like GeoWorks did... haha...

[Nall3k]

If I were Wade Rosen, I'd...

 

• Have Digital Eclipse take over reimagined games. Vctr Sctr, Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout were all much better in my opinion than what the external studios have done.
• Nightdive continue doing what they're doing and focus on releasing games like that.
• Continue their relationship with Graphite Lab as Kombinera and Mr. Run & Jump are excellent -- very promising development studio.
• Unfortunately, I'd agree to drop the VCS and focus on the 2600+.
• Have @Albert take over the XP program, ensure quality control.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Nall3k

[Lord Mushroom]

47 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

Do you remember GeoWorks? 

No, you are grossly overestimating my computer knowledge.

[82-T/A]

1 hour ago, Lord Mushroom said:

No, you are grossly overestimating my computer knowledge.

 

Hah... well, it's an older OS. It was really popular in the early 1990s. Basically, when Windows 3.0 came out, it already looked like Windows 95. Microsoft basically destroyed it by going to all the computer manufacturers and signing deals with them for 2+ years.

 

 

 

[MrTrust]

3 hours ago, Nall3k said:

If I were Wade Rosen, I'd...

 

• Have Digital Eclipse take over reimagined games. Vctr Sctr, Haunted Houses, Neo Breakout were all much better in my opinion than what the external studios have done.
• Nightdive continue doing what they're doing and focus on releasing games like that.
• Continue their relationship with Graphite Lab as Kombinera and Mr. Run & Jump are excellent -- very promising development studio.
• Unfortunately, I'd agree to drop the VCS and focus on the 2600+.
• Have @Albert take over the XP program, ensure quality control.

 

 

1. Tough call.  Karateka certainly isn't going to be the hit A50 was, but if the Jeff Minter doc does well, I might just want them to stick to what they're doing.

2. Definitely.

3. They should also invest in Cuirass Entertainment and bring that dude in as a 2nd party dev.  Guy made the best game on their console, a 3D Metrovania, by himself.  That guy with money behind him is the kind of talent they need.

4.  Update the OS so the Polymega app is built-in and optimized for the machine, bundle the remaining VCS stock with the new modules, include a free year of Antstream or a Linux stick and re-market it as the on-steroids 2600+.  Plays all your old console and PC collections up to ~2015.  Get what you can get out of the old stock, get a little bump in your store sales, and eventually, fold it all into their Wonder/OS thing.

5.  Discontinue the XP program because it's a crooked swindle.  Give Al more money and support the 2600+ with a steady slate of new top-tier homebrew releases.  Bump up the price of new ROMs on VCS and launch them day and date with cartridge versions.  

 

[Razzie.P]

23 hours ago, Stephen said:

Of course - you're an "investor" in Atari, and constantly shill every single news post or fart whiff involving Atari.  That's fine - we get you are a mega rabid fan.  But don't discount other arguments or products just because of this.

The "investor" thing explains a lot.  Although I figured he was an Atari employee whose sole job was to debunk any and all "less than 100% positive" comments related to Atari, based on the annoying replies I've seen.

 

I was looking at an Atari hat a short time ago. I put it back and picked up a Sega hat.  By coincidence, I saw a dude lurking across from me giving me the stink eye.  My first thought was "Holy shit!  Wonder if that's that powerdubs guy!"

 

I'm safe though, so I clearly bought the Atari hat instead of the Sega one.  

 

[Matt_B]

There are a few Atari employees who are on the forum and they're generally upfront about it.

 

Say something that's factually incorrect about Atari or one of their products and you might get quietly corrected, but they seem more than happy for people to have their own opinions about things.

 

 

[82-T/A]

2 hours ago, Razzie.P said:

The "investor" thing explains a lot.  Although I figured he was an Atari employee whose sole job was to debunk any and all "less than 100% positive" comments related to Atari, based on the annoying replies I've seen.

 

I was looking at an Atari hat a short time ago. I put it back and picked up a Sega hat.  By coincidence, I saw a dude lurking across from me giving me the stink eye.  My first thought was "Holy shit!  Wonder if that's that powerdubs guy!"

 

I'm safe though, so I clearly bought the Atari hat instead of the Sega one. 

 

Just a little bit of complaining here... why do people only sell baseball caps?

 

I'm from South Florida... we wear visors... no one wears a baseball cap unless they have to.

 

Why no visors Atari? Make an Atari visor!

[Razzie.P]

8 minutes ago, 82-T/A said:

 no one wears a baseball cap unless they have to.

 

 

Curious... What's a scenario where someone would "have to" wear a baseball cap?  Other than baseball players I guess 😂. I'm not even sure if they're required to wear them.

[82-T/A]

1 minute ago, Razzie.P said:

Curious... What's a scenario where someone would "have to" wear a baseball cap?  Other than baseball players I guess 😂. I'm not even sure if they're required to wear them.

 

Well, years ago... I worked for the Miami Dolphins as a computer programmer. NFL corporate said they needed someone to take pictures of all the players during every game for the GSIS (Game Statistics Information System) at each stadium. Bill Parcells (at the time) said that because the cameras were digital, that he'd get the IT guys to do it... (I was actually a computer programmer, but my desk was in that same office, so whatever). So after that, on game day, I worked for the NFL as an NFL Photographer (separate paycheck, etc.). I was required to wear a blue NFL official hat, along with the crazy outfit and the bright red NFL Photographer vest. Canon had just given us new cameras, and they were sponsoring it, so instead of my crazy blue NFL uniform, they let me wear a Canon visor... which was way better.

 

Also, when I worked at McDonalds in the early 1990s, they made me wear a purple 90s-style baseball cap.

 

But either way, it's sunny here in Florida, and when I go to the beach, the last thing I want to do is wear a baseball cap. I'd much rather wear a visor... and I would totally wear an Atari visor.

[Razzie.P]

2 hours ago, 82-T/A said:

Also, when I worked at McDonalds in the early 1990s, they made me wear a purple 90s-style baseball cap.

 

 

At least they didn't stick you with this bad boy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

.... I hope.

 

 

 

 

[Lord Mushroom]

Other things you could do to make the Intel stick work better, @82-T/A, is to lower the resolution to 720p, switch to a faster browser (I like Opera, if you don´t mind sharing your information with China ) and start using Adblock Plus if your daughter isn´t using an ad-blocker. There are probably other things one could do. But it sounds like you would just rather get some faster equipment.