Infogrames has added another new executive, with Fabrice Hamaide having just been appointed Chief Financial Officer. GameDaily has Hamaide's full resume, but that's not as important as pointing out that this is just another change in the new Infogrames/Atari that CEO David Gardner and Directeur Général Délégué Phil Harrison are building.

The installation of a new CFO comes only days after Infogrames announced it would be buying Atari outright for $11 million dollars. We now wait to see if Infogrames changes its name to Atari and whatever else Gardner et al. have in store for Atari v2.0.

Infogrames announced that it will buy the remaining stock of Atari in an $11 million merger and will immediately lend $20 million to the company before the deal closes. Although it's been hard to distinguish the two companies, Infogrames only had a 51.4% controlling interest in Atari, which will now become a wholly owned subsidiary of Infogrames by the third (calendar) quarter.

Former Sony executive Phil Harrison, who is now Directeur Général Délégué at Infogrames, said a little while ago that we should think of Atari/Infogrames as a start-up ... and we're slowly getting there. With this merger opening up the full-on name change, along with the slew of new executives the company is collecting, the Atari/Infogrames we know now doesn't seem to be the Atari we'll know in a year. Whether any of this fixes the grim financial situation of the publisher, however? That's a story for another time.

Infogrames CEO, David Gardner, tells GI.biz that the company may drop its name (which rocks our world) completely for the Atari marquee brand. He wants the company thought of as a "start-up" and the name change to represent the "final mark" of transformation. Directeur Général Délégué Phil Harrison chimes in that the company, as it stands now with a new management team less than a year old, is "absolutely a start-up" -- it's just a start-up with 25 years of history (and some serious financial drama).

Harrison and Gardner had apparently been talking about doing their own company for a long time. Harrison explains that the two had made significant plans and then the Atari opportunity came along. It was a company that had global infrastructure, offices, branding and was exactly the type of company the two were looking for. It'll probably become much easier to think of Atari as a "new" company once it announces some new IPs and gets the "old" company's games out the door, like the oft-delayed Alone in the Dark.

The new Atari keeps building steam (literally, in some cases) with the appointment of Jim Wilson as CEO. GameDaily reports Wilson has 15 years experience as an entertainment executive and a few of those were spent managing known franchises. As president of Universal Interactive he handled Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and helped launch The Chronicles of Riddick, one of the very few good licensed movie games.

Atari continues putting on a good show and adding (apparently) competent executives even as it's threatened to be delisted by Nasdaq. Now we just wait to see when Directeur Général Délégué Phil Harrison and his Infogrames army end up owning Atari outright to move their master plan forward ... whatever that might be.

With all its fancy new executives, everything appears to be sunshine at the moment for Infogrames/Atari; but for the third time in less than a year Atari has been threatened with delisting by the Nasdaq stock exchange. The company admits it received a letter from Nasdaq's Listing Qualifications Department stating that it had not gained compliance with the last warning requiring the company obtain $15 million in market capitalization for 10 consecutive days before March 20.

Atari has asked Nasdaq for a hearing which will put a stay on the stock's execution. Meanwhile, Infogrames is looking to buy the "outstanding common stock" of the company, which may put this whole issue to rest. If Infogrames does not succeed, Atari admits there's no assurance it won't be delisted.

Gametrailers has a video of Phil Harrison's Infogrames/Atari coming out party from earlier this week, depicting the former Sony exec really entrenching himself into the current fixer-upper situation. He quite confidently says to the press in attendance, "The Atari opportunity, is the best opportunity that exists in the industry today to redefine, refocus and re-energize an incredible brand."

This week has seen numerous moments where Infogrames' new CEO David Gardner and Harrison, as the new Directeur Général Délégué, have said all the right things. Giving the appearance that Atari is a salvageable brand is great, but showing some profit is always a good first step.

As Sony über-executive Phil Harrison prepares to leave the company this Friday after 15 years, GameDaily wondered what this would mean for PlayStation's Home. Harrison is credited as a leading proponent of the Home experience going back to its beginnings on the PS2. An SCEA spokesperson said that it's "business as usual for Home."

At GDC '08 some new screens and tools were shown for Home, but there is still no announcement about release. The last major progress report from late '07 showed the program is coming along, but still faces some challenges.

At yesterday's "Lunch with the Luminaries" panel at GDC, five of the planet's most prestigious gaming industry figures had the opportunity to sit down for light snacks, civil discourse, and, of course, to flame their competitor's consoles. At least, that's what Sony exec Phil Harrison had in mind, as he warned EA Blueprint's Neil Young that the Wii is unfriendly territory for third-party developers -- due to Nintendo's overwhelmingly successful games on their own home console, everyone else can only hope to market their games to "only 40% of the installed base."

Young didn't deny this claim, but retorted that the development of their most recent game for the Wii, Smarty Pants, was "very easy to build very quickly" and "fundamentally much more fun" to create -- apparently, more fun than it was to actually play. Have third-party developers resigned themselves to living in Nintendo's shadow, prompting them to fire out "easy to build," mediocre titles? We don't think they quite understand -- if only 40 percent of Wii owners are buying your games, it's because the other 60 percent know better.

For those who haven't caught on yet, there seem to be some issues with the Unreal Engine 3 and the PS3, resulting in delays for some games and cancellations postponements for others. Sony's Phil Harrison says in a Game Informer interview they didn't do enough initially to support Epic in making the UE3 -- which runs the timed exclusive Unreal Tournament 3 -- run properly with the PlayStation 3. He says Epic "isn't a huge company" and that they've "parachuted in some our [their] SWAT team of super engineers to help them." Harrison says this will increase the performance of the engine on the PS3 and gamers will take notice.

Although not a red flag for casual observers, when Sony announced during their press conference that they would be putting more support behind the Unreal Engine 3, it showed a passive acknowledgment of an issue. What that issue is -- well, that's up to the lawyers to decide at this point. The lawsuit by Silicon Knights against Epic showed that the UE3 problems weren't just PS3 based, but Xbox developers are having similar issues too. Microsoft currently has "no comment" on the situation. The UE3 problem issue is something nobody wants to talk about, but could be one deep rabbit hole.

[Via GI.biz]

Nintendo is looking to best the PS2's 38.2 million consoles sold and expects to hit the Wii-markable 35 million goal by 2012. Speaking with Bloomberg.com, Nintendo's American marketing chief George Harrison says that production has increased to meet the consistent demand for the console. Nintendo previously stated it expects to sell 14 million Wiis between April and the end of next March.

Harrison says that the company will continue to focus on the non-typical video game player market, which means don't expect to see any Wii upgrades in the near future. He says, "We're starting to see in the performance of the PS3 and Xbox 360 that that's not necessarily motivating the market the way it used to ... So we're going to start work on future technology only when we believe it's necessary.''

"Necessary" meaning profitable. Sure, the Wii may be two duct-taped Gamecubes, but it's selling strong and raising Nintendo's stock price. In other words, it knows how to print money.

[Via Gamasutra]

Marketing is all about knowing your audience -- what they'll respond to and what will turn them off. Going by that metric, it seems Sony's Phil Harrison wasn't quite a marketing genius at a recent rock concert.

Paul Rose, a.k.a Edge magazine's "Mr. Biffo," recounts on his blog the somewhat embarrassing tale of a Harrison-led PS3 charity auction in the middle of a Marillion festival in Holland. Harrison, who's apparently a friend of the British rock band, reportedly took over the auctioneering duties from the band's keyboardist, raising the bidding price from just above €100 to the €600 retail price as he did.

What followed was a debacle that Rose calls "one of the most awful things I have ever witnessed." According to Rose, Harrison was only able to get one bid out of the awkwardly silent two-thousand-plus strong crowd. What's more, Harrison reportedly "became increasingly desperate as it grew clear that everyone just wanted him to go away, and nobody was going to indulge his tasteless attempt at publicity."

It'd be easy to spin this as an example of the PS3's high price hurting it's saleability, but really it's just another example of marketing tone-deafness of Sony's part. These people were there to hear a rock concert, not to hear a marketing pitch from a Sony executive who wants them to throw down €600+ for a game system on an impulse. Sometimes, you just have to know when people don't want to be sold to.

MTV News' Stephen Totilo has managed to glean new details from Sony's Phil Harrison on their megaton PlayStation 3 announcement, Home, in a video interview (after the break) and accompanying Multiplayer post (scroll down to yesterday's entry).

The initial plan with Home is to start with apartments for users, then go on to outdoors, houses, gardens, neighborhoods. Currently, 16 people will be allowed in one apartment at any given time, although that limit is being tweaked. As for lobbies, which will be "infinitely spawned by the number of users online," 64 will be the limit. A search function will be included to help users find their friends online.

As to concerns whether the social aspect of Home will take away from time spent gaming, Harrison sees that as a non-issue. "I think that you shouldn't lose sight that home is all about games and creating social interaction between gamers ... [Home is] a springboard to a deeper gaming experience," he said.

Also mentioned was that no collision detection would be implemented, so users will likely just walk through one another. While that should eliminate problems associated with crowds, it also reduces the options for those who wish to use their avatars for naughtier means.

Stephen Totilo's recent hour-long interview with Sony Computer Entertainment Studio Head Phil Harrison focused mainly on the past, present and future of the PlayStation systems and brand. But possibly the most interesting quote in the whole piece came at a point where Harrison waxed philosophical about the branding of the industry as a whole.

"I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as 'video games,'" Harrison told Totilo, echoing concerns aired last month by former ESA head Doug Lowenstein about the image of the term. With two industry luminaries bringing up the same issue in such a short time, we had to wonder: Is our industry being held back by its name?

It's true that the word "game" in video game automatically makes some people think that our industry is devoted to nothing more than child's play, a claim that is pretty demonstrably false. Still, terms like "interactive entertainment" and "entertainment software" always struck us as a little too clunky and snobby-sounding for everyday use. Then again, terms like "graphic novel" and "cinema" probably sounded a little clunky before they came into common usage to describe the serious side of comics and movies, respectively.

So we put the question to you, dear readers. Do video games need to be re-branded to erase their childish image? If so, what new term would you use to describe the industry?