Monday, December 19th 2022
Atari Calls it Quits on the Atari VCS
What can only be summed up as one of the biggest failures when it comes to gaming consoles, the Atari VCS, is coming to an end, as Atari has decided to pull the plug. The company is said to have cancelled all of its "existing VCS manufacturing contracts", which means that after its current stock is sold out, it's unlikely that the company will make any more VCS consoles. The company is offering its current stock at a 20 percent discount, to anyone that would be interested in throwing away their money.
Atari's revenue from sales of the VCS and its accessories dropped from €2.3 million last year, to an abysmal €0.2 million this year, or a drop in revenue of 92 percent based on Atari's latest earnings report. This suggests that the company went from selling around a million units to selling around 10,000 units, based on the retail pricing of the VCS. Atari is apparently planning on launching new games based on its intellectual property, as well as getting into NFTs in the future, in addition to potentially licensing its brand to third parties for new hardware products. It would appear that history is repeating itself when it comes to Atari's success and not in a good way, as the company had a net loss of €5.4 million this year.
Sources:
Atari, via liliputing
Atari's revenue from sales of the VCS and its accessories dropped from €2.3 million last year, to an abysmal €0.2 million this year, or a drop in revenue of 92 percent based on Atari's latest earnings report. This suggests that the company went from selling around a million units to selling around 10,000 units, based on the retail pricing of the VCS. Atari is apparently planning on launching new games based on its intellectual property, as well as getting into NFTs in the future, in addition to potentially licensing its brand to third parties for new hardware products. It would appear that history is repeating itself when it comes to Atari's success and not in a good way, as the company had a net loss of €5.4 million this year.
54 Comments on Atari Calls it Quits on the Atari VCS
Panther was canceled because the Jaguar project was moving faster and better than expected.
Jaguar was way superior to the consoles that it was competing with (Genesis and SNES) but thanks to delays from IBM (whom was the manufacturer elected), it came out late and ended competing with the PS1, Saturn, N64 and 3DO. Funny enough, Aliens vs Predator had superior 3d video quality than many if not all PS1 games due to having proper z buffering capabilities
Atari didnt release proper documentation to devs and also, lazy devs abused the platform flexibility by releasing games using only the Motorola 6800 cpu instead of the custom chips (Tom and Jerry).
Sadly, Atari corp from the 90s had a string of unlucky events that simply were too much and the current atari only shares the name.
In conclusion, no, the Jaguar wasnt a bad system as you describe it. I honestly wasnt aware that they were selling or making games, because i havent seen not even one ad or article or nothing to make me even aware that it was alive.
If you were buying it for a media center of sorts like I sugested for example, you'd not be getting a good value. Given the type of games they needed to run/emulate they could have been better off really doing what many were expecting - slapping a cheap "raspberry pi" like board inside a nice chassis like the ps classic and appealing to a bigger market by being cheap (i know several people that bought the ps classic just because of how cheap it was, heck I was almost one of them until I was told it only had the 10 "classics" that were not even the most relevant ones)
Another DEC fan. Did you actually use any VAX-VMS systems back in the day?
Practically the only reason DEC hung on at my work (Cedars Sinai Medical System) was email -- IBM mainframes and mainframers were the gods of computing, email was beneath their pay scale.
Atari has been dead for decades it should've been allowed to die with dignity rather than kept on life support as not much more than a brand name.
Now it's like..."Wait, I can see ALIASING on my 4K monitor! THIS GAME IS SH*T! TAKE IT AWAY AND DO IT PROPERLY!" :D
fyi- it’s not just a gaming platform… it’s a gaming PC designed around the Ryzen chips. My Atari runs a 500GB m.2 SATA with Windows Pro 11, 32 GB of RAM, and boots into AtariOS Linux, SteamOS, MacOS and pretty much everything else.
It runs GTA V better than most Consoles on the market… and it cost less than half of what my gaming laptop cost me. A perfect solution to get my wife playing games together.
Atari is a video game company and they wanted to bring back a console in PC form for gamers. They recently announced the end of the manufacturing contracts with their current provider and are looking for another partner to produce the next gen of Atari consoles.
Seriously, “LostSwede”, are you that desperate for clickbait that you want to pass on misinformation that you don’t even have the backbone to make up yourself? You’ve lost your credibility. I used VAX-VMS systems back in 1989… SUNYMORVA was my VAX, and I had 1200baud dialup in my dormitory to do my COBOL and Turbo Pascal work remotely. I used to telnet into University@Buffalo at home and play Galtrader in my free time and do IRC with friends at home on FREENET.
I didn’t have an Atari, growing up, I had an Apple //e, one disk drive, color monitor and ImageWriter2. I sold it to my friend at work, got a LASER386 and 486 consecutively and switched to learning DOS and Windows.
Why is any of this important?
because people have gotten it into their heads that if they can’t game on their cell phones, iPads or Laptops, there’s no sense to gaming on anything but an XBox, PlayStation or Nintendo.
Atari is basically an AndroidOS driven XBOX.
Atari is only dead if no gamers want to code games for it. And those games can be played on any platform.
But above all, they need to work on availability. A mini-PC with Mendocino and this casing/environment for $399, delivering worldwide... sign me up my good man.