Atari to focus on ‘premium games’ and divest some free-to-play titles

Atari will focus more on ‘premium games’ for consoles and PCs. The company wants to use its catalog of two hundred titles as a basis for this. Those games should be released for Atari’s own VCS console, among other things.

Atari says it is changing its strategy to focus less on free-to-play games and smartphone games. Instead, the company wants to invest more in full games for consoles and PCs. Those games should be available on ‘all’ platforms, but also give Atari’s own VCS console a boost.

Specifically, this means that Atari will stop RollerCoaster Tycoon Stories, Crystal Castles, Castles & Catapults, Ninja Golf and Atari Combat: Tank Fury. Atari says these free-to-play games will be discontinued or sold. Other Atari free-to-play games, with ‘loyal users’, will continue to exist. Presumably, the titles mentioned that the company wants to get rid of will yield little.

Atari says “premium games” are more brand-appropriate. The company says it will use its catalog of 200 titles to make such games. Games are already in development and the first of them should be released in the current financial year. That financial year will end at the end of March 2022. Atari does not yet say which titles will be released.

Atari owns arcade classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command and Pong. In recent years, the company made versions of such games for smartphones, such as Missile Command: Recharged.

In June, Atari started selling its VCS console. It runs on an AMD Ryzen soc with two Zen cores and a Vega 3 GPU. In terms of computing power, the console cannot compete with the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony and the previous generation consoles are also faster than Atari’s alternative. If Atari mainly develops the games for its own console, it will be graphically simple titles.

Atari VCS