Phil Harrison steps down as president of troubled Atari

Atari president Phil Harrison, who joined the company last year, has taken a position as "non-executive director." According to Eurogamer, the move is a result of Atari's new focus on North American operations, following the sale of its European distribution to Namco Bandai.

Parent company Infogrames announced a loss of €226.1 million ($319.6m) for the last fiscal year, due in part to the loss of revenue that would have come in from the distribution business. As a result, Atari said it has canceled some of its projects to focus on "more cost-effective" games.

The identity of the canceled projects is unknown, but Atari released a hint of what some of the new, cost-effective, mass-market games would be: Cryptic Studios will create "a series of new games based on Atari's existing and historically successful IPs."