By Frank Ling, GN Senior Writer
Nique Fajors, marketing VP for Atari, did some reverse marketing by openly slamming Atari’s third installment of its Driver game series, DRIV3R, as a "half-baked product that was pushed out the door for revenue reasons."
This sudden need to come clean with the game’s troubles was too late and too little for Ubisoft–they purchased the rights to the Driver franchise from Atari only several weeks before. Ubisoft also bought the entire game library assets of Reflections, the developer of the Driver games for $24 million. Interestingly enough, while DRIV3R received terrible reviews for its Xbox and PS2 versions, the mobile phone version of the game did remarkably well.
The once proud and successful game company of the 80’s has fallen on hard times of late with dismal quarterly earnings figures, and Atari is restructuring in order to turn their business around. Fajors commented that Atari was concentrating on quality by saying they are hiring new development personnel who feel “disgust with losing and disgust with being mediocre.”
Fajors’ lucid evaluation of Atari’s woes hits close to home for several game publishers who struggle to keep their heads above water. With the Xbox 360, the Wii, and the PS3 coming on the scene, many in the game industry are hoping that the next gen machines will spawn a new wave of fresh video games for the gaming public to buy.
