Atari will focus on ‘premium games’ and divest a number of 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 while focusing 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 become available on ‘all’ platforms, but also give Atari’s own VCS console a boost.

In concrete terms, this means that Atari will discontinue 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 free-to-play games from Atari, with “loyal users,” will continue. Presumably, the mentioned titles that the company wants to get rid of will yield little.

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

Atari owns arcade classics like Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command and Pong. In recent years, the company has 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 can’t compete with the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony, and the consoles of the previous generation are also faster than Atari’s alternative. If Atari mainly develops the games for its own console, then it will be graphically simple titles.

Atari VCS