Atari Bets Big on Online Sales

Atari has reported an impressive fall of 65 percent in its sales for the first quarter of its fiscal year, with sales going to 25 million dollars. Despite the slow down the company has reported that it is no longer losing money and has even managed to make a small profit while continuing with its strategy of getting more and more of its revenue from its online offerings, like Champions Online and Star Trek Online, two of its most recent MMO launches.

The numbers for the first quarter of last year were buoyed by the launch of Ghostbusters: The Video Game and The Chronicles of Riddick, which included both old and new content. There was no flagship titles launched during this year although the company has some big titles planned for later in 2010. During this year the company also saw president Phil Harrison leave his position.

In its first quarter results sales for online products went up by no less than 320 percent, to reach 11 million dollars, which is close to half of the entire revenue of the publisher. Apparently subscription numbers are increasing for both the superhero themed Champions Online, the older title that has recently receiving some interesting expansions, and for the science fiction oriented Star Trek Online, a game that had issues when it originally came out but has since received significant updates. Both the MMOs have been created by Cryptic Studios, a development team which in addition to supporting both the titles is also rumored to be working on a new undisclosed project.

In the coming months Atari is getting ready to launch games like Backyard Sports and Haunted House, but the big releases are Test Drive Unlimited 2, a car focused game that will allow fans to collect a huge number of detailed vehicles, and The Witcher 2, the role playing action hybrid from CD Projekt RED.