CX78+, 7800 carts delayed

[THX-1138]

All of my Amazon UK order has had the delivery dates pushed back until June 7th.  Has this happened to anyone else?

[+Atari2600PAL]

2 minutes ago, THX-1138 said:

All of my Amazon UK order has had the delivery dates pushed back until June 7th.  Has this happened to anyone else?

June 8th for me

[JetmanUK]

7th for the three carts, 8th for the joypad. 

[THX-1138]

Well....       feck!

[Sean_1970]

Standalone paddles are still on-time!

[TrogdarRobusto]

We did get word that the US shipment of 7800 games and the 2-button joystick were running a few weeks behind what we expected. Looking into why ... unless the Amazon stock is coming on a different boat I think those dates are a little optimistic. 

[John Stamos Mullet]

I haven’t seen anything change with my direct order from Atari direct. 

[UnRedeemed]

Maybe I am missing something, but I for one am tired of this business of getting charged at the time of order placement and then having to hope -- beyond the period one is ordinarily even permitted to dispute a charge on a credit card -- that the goods will finally arrive.  Waited over a year for an Analogue order and now it has been several months for Atari.  What the h** happened to the days when it was understood a customer should not be charged (except at most a modest deposit) until the items were actually being shipped??

[Sean_1970]

2 hours ago, Sean_1970 said:

Standalone paddles are still on-time!

And just got notification those are also delayed 🤷‍♂️

[John Stamos Mullet]

3 hours ago, UnRedeemed said:

Maybe I am missing something, but I for one am tired of this business of getting charged at the time of order placement and then having to hope -- beyond the period one is ordinarily even permitted to dispute a charge on a credit card -- that the goods will finally arrive.  Waited over a year for an Analogue order and now it has been several months for Atari.  What the h** happened to the days when it was understood a customer should not be charged (except at most a modest deposit) until the items were actually being shipped??

What happened was ultra niche products that only appeal to a microscopic segment of the video game buying audience found a way to fund their runs of products without having to incur losses and waste production. 
 

and I for one, applaud the ability to hone their very specific audience, appeal to their wants, and deliver product when you can actually afford to do so, while not putting yourself out of business, just to appease a few outsized loudmouths who would ruin your business over their impatience. 

Edited May 16 by John Stamos Mullet

[UnRedeemed]

This is the first time I've ever expressed an opinion on this, let alone complained, but if that makes me an outsized loudmouth so be it.  My point is simply that it seems unreasonable to require a customer pay in full for fairly expensive products and then leave them wondering month after month if they will end up with nothing for the money they paid, when the original stated timeframe comes and goes.  Maybe the company is going out of business, etc.  All of the risk has been put on the customer, and this just does not strike me as a fair apportionment of risk, objectively speaking.  So the issue, for me at least, is hardly one of impatience.  

 

 

[SuperZapperRecharge]

1 hour ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

and I for one, applaud the ability to hone their very specific audience, appeal to their wants, and deliver product when you can actually afford to do so, while not putting yourself out of business, just to appease a few outsized loudmouths who would ruin your business over their impatience. 

I agree with the credit card dispute period flying by. That is not a way to run a business. Take all the orders. You know your production run within 10%. Charge for the product on departure from the product from the warehouse. Atari is big enough to front the cost of 500 - 5000 carts.

 

When the Atari 2600+ is selling, as of April,  300+ on Amazon a month currently it is not ultra niche. Might be a little niche.

Atari needs to better its production and supply chain. At least have the manufacturer lined up before selling cartridges. I'm looking at you "XP" games.

 

I don't think people being disappointed about a broken promise is complaining. It's hold the company responsible.

Edited May 16 by SuperZapperRecharge

[SuperZapperRecharge]

6 minutes ago, UnRedeemed said:

This is the first time I've ever expressed an opinion on this, let alone complained, but if that makes me an outsized loudmouth so be it.

Don't worry it's a loudmouth calling a noob a loudmouth. These forums need to be more understanding to new members.

 

I get that some new members here are frustrated at the bumbling of Atari. This is one of the few places on the internet that they can state their opinion and I gladly welcome everyone as long as we are all reasonable. 

 

By the way I'm a noob too, posting a lot since the 2600+ was released. Glad there is such a great community here.

[SparkleFork]

I got the Food Fight delay email yesterday and was hoping that the rest would be okay - but those emails came in this morning. Still we have to tell ourselves that it's pretty amazing that these things are going to exist at all in 2024.

[mastic_man]

17 hours ago, THX-1138 said:

All of my Amazon UK order has had the delivery dates pushed back until June 7th.  Has this happened to anyone else?

Same here, 7th for the games and 8th for the stick. 

[+Intellivision Master]

14 hours ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

I haven’t seen anything change with my direct order from Atari direct. 

Me neither.  Hopefully it's still on time. 

[+Intellivision Master]

13 hours ago, UnRedeemed said:

What the h** happened to the days when it was understood a customer should not be charged (except at most a modest deposit) until the items were actually being shipped??

That's what is nice about Amazon, if you preorder something, they don't charge until it ships.  Which is good.  Maybe one day Atari will do the same. 

[John Stamos Mullet]

9 hours ago, SuperZapperRecharge said:

I agree with the credit card dispute period flying by. That is not a way to run a business. Take all the orders. You know your production run within 10%. Charge for the product on departure from the product from the warehouse. Atari is big enough to front the cost of 500 - 5000 carts.

 

When the Atari 2600+ is selling, as of April,  300+ on Amazon a month currently it is not ultra niche. Might be a little niche.

Atari needs to better its production and supply chain. At least have the manufacturer lined up before selling cartridges. I'm looking at you "XP" games.

 

I don't think people being disappointed about a broken promise is complaining. It's hold the company responsible.

You knew the timeframe of the shipping when you made the pre-order would be beyond the credit card dispute time. I’ll be honest, even mentioning that as if it was some kind of intentional workaround to take people’s money in order to rip them off is a terrible assumption.

 

Ben has already confirmed that the product all left Atari’s hands last week. It is now in the hands of the distributors. That means this delay is on Amazon, not Atari. You’re complaining in the wrong place. 
 

This kind of post is the internet equivalent of yelling at the cashier at the supermarket because they didn’t get a new shipment of Steaks you wanted.

Edited May 16 by John Stamos Mullet

[John Stamos Mullet]

9 hours ago, SuperZapperRecharge said:

Don't worry it's a loudmouth calling a noob a loudmouth. These forums need to be more understanding to new members.

 

I get that some new members here are frustrated at the bumbling of Atari. This is one of the few places on the internet that they can state their opinion and I gladly welcome everyone as long as we are all reasonable. 

 

By the way I'm a noob too, posting a lot since the 2600+ was released. Glad there is such a great community here.

These forums have existed since 2001. It wasn’t until late last year when Atari announced the 2600+ that it started to resemble an anonymous Yelp reviews site with an influx of new users who came here specifically to gripe about the 2600+ not being everything they wanted. 
 

maybe the new users should take a bit to actually read the board and participate here in good faith as an Atari Fan and a member of the community before blasting off on some kind of agenda driven crusade against pre-orders getting slightly delayed.

[UnRedeemed]

1 hour ago, Intellivision Master said:

 

Personally, I will be happy so long as I receive items ordered within any sort of reasonable time even if it is after the period that was expected at the time of order placement.  My concern was not with the current Atari situation in particular but was more generally aimed at the trend of businesses requiring immediate payment from us for items whose future stocking date is remote or ultimately unknown.  In my experience there has been an unfortunate move toward the prepayment scenario, along with many other less than customer-friendly policies, since the ‘08 crisis.  Every crisis since seems to accelerate the process.  As someone who attended law school back in the day with a keen interest in consumer affairs, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that this trend, along with the somewhat paradoxical growth in the ranks of anti-customer sycophants, is quite the departure from where we were.    

 

A couple of years ago, I was surprised when I was charged in full for a bicycle that turned out to be on backorder with no shipping date planned.  And since then this sort of thing has happened several times among family members.  The problem is that many businesses these days have been emboldened to shift the risk of a failed transaction onto their customers.  The fact that in some cases even the original expected delivery date is beyond the period for contesting a charge is thus part of the problem, not a justification of it.  Sorry if my generally pro-consumer viewpoint based on an objective fairness evaluation has ruffled a feather.  

[John Stamos Mullet]

48 minutes ago, UnRedeemed said:

Personally, I will be happy so long as I receive items ordered within any sort of reasonable time even if it is after the period that was expected at the time of order placement.  My concern was not with the current Atari situation in particular but was more generally aimed at the trend of businesses requiring immediate payment from us for items whose future stocking date is remote or ultimately unknown.  In my experience there has been an unfortunate move toward the prepayment scenario, along with many other less than customer-friendly policies, since the ‘08 crisis.  Every crisis since seems to accelerate the process.  As someone who attended law school back in the day with a keen interest in consumer affairs, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that this trend, along with the somewhat paradoxical growth in the ranks of anti-customer sycophants, is quite the departure from where we were.    

 

A couple of years ago, I was surprised when I was charged in full for a bicycle that turned out to be on backorder with no shipping date planned.  And since then this sort of thing has happened several times among family members.  The problem is that many businesses these days have been emboldened to shift the risk of a failed transaction onto their customers.  The fact that in some cases even the original expected delivery date is beyond the period for contesting a charge is thus part of the problem, not a justification of it.  Sorry if my generally pro-consumer viewpoint based on an objective fairness evaluation has ruffled a feather.  

I understand your points, and there is validity to them. I think what you’re missing is that before the days of internet ordering, and the expectation of instant gratification - you simply couldn’t get most of these short run, niche, specialty products, full stop. These kinds of things simply didn’t exist. 
 

Essentially what has happened is that services like kickstarter and gofundme have provided small entrepreneurs an avenue to fund a new product without needing to obtain bank loans, or apply for business lines of credit to fund the upfront costs. We could argue either way whether that is good or bad for consumers, but the reality is, the overwhelming majority of these scenarios deliver products relatively on time and to customer satisfaction - and more importantly they deliver a product that most companies would never take a financial gamble on.

 

someone earlier pointed out that Atari was selling “300 units a month on Amazon”. That’s tiny. Microscopic. Non-existent, really compared to the overall current gen video game market. My wife sells more than 300 items a month on Etsy, and nobody would ever consider that “large quantities”.

 

So now we all have access to preorder extremely niche, enthusiast targeted products, but have to wait a bit for them to arrive. Whereas before, we never had anything remotely close to this. 
 

Atari in 2024 is very small operation. Acting like they should have the resources to mass produce large quantities of physical product without preorders for a product that only appeal to an extremely small market is foolhardy.

Edited May 16 by John Stamos Mullet

[+Intellivision Master]

16 minutes ago, UnRedeemed said:

Sorry if my generally pro-consumer viewpoint based on an objective fairness evaluation has ruffled a feather.  

Not at all.  I understand what you mean.

[John Stamos Mullet]

59 minutes ago, UnRedeemed said:

In my experience there has been an unfortunate move toward the prepayment scenario, along with many other less than customer-friendly policies, since the ‘08 crisis.  Every crisis since seems to accelerate the process.  As someone who attended law school back in the day with a keen interest in consumer affairs, I can say with a fair degree of confidence that this trend, along with the somewhat paradoxical growth in the ranks of anti-customer sycophants, is quite the departure from where we were.    

To speak directly to this point - this is happening more often out of necessity, because while lots of startups and small business can easily demonstrate they have a market demand for the products they are trying to introduce, banks won’t touch them. 
 

Between the Dot Com bubble, the ‘80 financial crisis, and now the global pandemic, Banks are not really loaning anyone money for these kinds of ventures. They are simply denying loans because they don’t want to take the risk. To be honest, in the wake of that with things like kickstarter and go fund me filling the void, and now small businesses taking preorders for products so they can accurately gauge market demand and interest - cutting banks out of the equation saving the small business  all that interest is a win for everyone as far as I’m concerned. 

[UnRedeemed]

17 minutes ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

Atari in 2024 is very small operation. Acting like they should have the resources to mass produce large quantities of physical product without preorders for a product that only appeal to an extremely small market is foolhardy.

It appears we actually tread a fair amount of common ground, which is nice to see.  I guess to some extent the disagreement is a difference in perception when it comes to where the line ought to be for making a special exception for companies that are so small they should expect subsidization in the form of full-payment preorders passing the aforementioned risks to us customers.  In the case of Atari, I keep hearing about how they have been on an acquisition spree (including of course Atariage itself), which perhaps suggests they have wielded fairly significant capital and are not like a gofundme startup.  But maybe even if we were both privy to all the financial choices open to various companies, we would reach different conclusions... could be an interesting discussion at that point.

 

 

           

[UnRedeemed]

2 minutes ago, John Stamos Mullet said:

To speak directly to this point - this is happening more often out of necessity, because while lots of startups and small business can easily demonstrate they have a market demand for the products they are trying to introduce, banks won’t touch them. 
 

Between the Dot Com bubble, the ‘80 financial crisis, and now the global pandemic, Banks are not really loaning anyone money for these kinds of ventures. They are simply denying loans because they don’t want to take the risk. To be honest, in the wake of that with things like kickstarter and go fund me filling the void, and now small businesses taking preorders for products so they can accurately gauge market demand and interest - cutting banks out of the equation saving the small business  all that interest is a win for everyone as far as I’m concerned. 

I appreciate what you are saying and will continue to ponder it, even if from my perspective it may underestimate the downsides and undervalue the customer's legitimate interest in not being expected to take on excessive risk (such as by having to serve as the bank, when companies can and do at times suddenly go out of business).  I truly wonder what percentage of preorders requiring full payment up front are justified by unavoidable business necessity.  What I noticed since '08 is that many businesses essentially used that crisis as an excuse to become much less customer-friendly.  My credit card issuer specifically told me they changed all their fee-waiving policies (indefinitely/permanently) in response to the crisis.  This was in the context of my calling in relation to an error they committed.  So while previously they were maybe too accommodating and would waive fees even if the situation was the customer's fault, now they were unwilling to waive them even where the cause was their own error!  Just one of many examples, but suffice it to say I am wary of crises being harnessed to justify permanent shifts that may work to the detriment of customers.