Midway's Revival Plans

This wasn't a great year for Midway, which entered the holiday shopping season with delayed releases and lowered revenue forecasts. The company, which hasn't posted an annual profit since 1999, had to cut third quarter revenue forecasts because these delays. But Midway people are optimistic and they think things will turn around pretty soon.

The first thing they made was to name Shari Redstone as a chairwoman. She is the daughter of Sumner Redstone, who owns 90 percent of Midway and she was the company's vice chair. Even here things might not be working exactly as they should, since Shari declared earlier this year that she is disappointed with her father's decision to buy the Midway shares through a movie theater operator.

However, she says that Midway plans to release in 2008 "an impressive slate of games". Midway's CEO David Zucker thinks that the key to succeed in 2008 is to release "fewer, bigger, better" games. It remains to see if their strategy (which includes releases of Hollywood tie-ins like the racing video game called Wheelman) is a good one or not.

As the analysts like to say, 2008 will be a critical year for Midway and this year's history repeating would not be a good thing at all. Because in 2007 they had problems with their releases, with the PS3 version of Stranglehold being shipped late in October, or Unreal Tournament 3 having similar shipping problems in North America and some European countries.

Together with Wheelman, Midway plans to release other movie-related project next year, as well as a streetball title NBA Ballers and wrestling game, TNA Impact. Also, another iteration of Mortal Kombat is planned for a 2008 release. Midway is also trying to develop more casual games for Nintendo's DS and Wii consoles. So, since the next year is waiting round the corner, we won't have to wait long until we will find the outcome of this story.