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Atari seeking to sell Cryptic Studios as another fiscal year ends in losses

by Alexander Sliwinski on May 17th 2011 5:30PM

In its 2010–11 fiscal year earnings report today, Atari announced it will be dropping, er, "divesting" MMO developer Cryptic Studios. The publisher accounted for the studio under its "discontinued operations" in the report. In other words, it's trying to sell Cryptic.

Overall, Atari reported a net loss of €6.2 million ($8.8 million) for this fiscal year that ended March 31, 2011 -- an admitted improvement over the €19.4 million lost in the previous fiscal year. Cryptic alone was responsible for €5.3 million ($7.5 million) in losses during fiscal 2010–11.

Representatives for Atari and Cryptic declined to offer any statements beyond those in today's financial report. Cryptic's Champions Online went free-to-play earlier this year, and the studio is currently working on a Neverwinter MMO and "Season 4" of Star Trek Online. Atari purchased the developer in 2008 during an optimistic period for the publisher.

Source: Atari

Tags: atari, cryptic-studios, divestment, earnings, financial, fy-2010-11, pc, q4

Reader Comments (13)

They should totally sell the studio to NCsoft.

@superfrick
The merging of Champions online and Cities of games would be cool.

It's a shame Champions online sucked.

Most people probably mixed up this game with City of Heroes... I know I sure did on occasion.

@Gaddes

I always got it mixed up with that other one, " The City of Heroic Champions Ultimate Online".

I'm curious about what the status of the Champions IP will be. Was the ownership transferred to Atari when Cryptic was bought, or did it stay with Cryptic?

I don't really care about the future of the MMO, just the long-standing PnP derived IP.

@NekoDaimyo

Would seem to me that they'd be selling it with Cryptic otherwise they'd be stuck with the maintaining them.

@NekoDaimyo

I'm pretty sure that Cryptic bought Champions, not Atari. They then re-licensed the IP back to Hero Games in order to maintain continuity for a new edition of the tabletop game. Which is as it should be 'cause most of the City of Heroes NPC cast started life as Champions tabletop characters (IIRC-- Statesman for sure, but others may have as well).

At this point, I'm wondering if it might not be possible for Cryptic to stand on its own as a publisher/dev. Worst case scenario is they go all-digital and rely on Steam for distribution, but if they're not beholden to a publisher like NCSoft or Atari, they have the freedom to work on projects they want to see done.

Unrelated: I still miss City of Heroes, but I've been out of it for too long to consider going back.

Its not news that Atari is having a bad year (in a long string of bad years). The bad thing is that, due their own mis management of resources, several games and devs will suffer from their incompetence.

I just hope the devs can find a good place to put their work on gear on the hands of more responsible publishers...

Champions wasn't terrible as it lacked content, then would rush out patches of content which weren't anything great. I think a continuing trend with a lot of MMOs, WoW included, is the lack of interesting content.

What Cryptic needs to do is sell their services to games that want o have custom character creation... Champions did it the best so far.

Atari should just make another console. If they're going to go out, they should at least go out with a bang. But I guess they're determined to stay alive, so that they can make those predicted futuristic web browser games. Oh hell, they should just re-release the Jaguar and soil themselves for good.

@TCJJ Its a different company than who put out the jaguar, or any system for that matter. Atari's name is a whore, always going with the one with the most money to fork out for its historic name. Atari has been cursed ever since Time Warner bought it in the late 70s.

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Atari seeking to sell Cryptic Studios as another fiscal year ends in losses

Reader Comments (13)

Posted: May 17th 2011 5:40PM superfrick said

Posted: May 17th 2011 5:43PM The Aquacharger said

Posted: May 17th 2011 5:41PM The Aquacharger said

Posted: May 17th 2011 6:06PM Gaddes said

Posted: May 17th 2011 6:18PM Dirty said

Posted: May 17th 2011 6:20PM NekoDaimyo said

Posted: May 17th 2011 6:21PM NekoDaimyo said

Posted: May 17th 2011 7:38PM SirUrza said

Posted: May 18th 2011 8:08AM John Z said

Posted: May 17th 2011 7:40PM organiczero said

Posted: May 18th 2011 2:10AM paddedcell said

Posted: May 18th 2011 6:02AM TCJJ said

Posted: May 18th 2011 10:44PM paddedcell said

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