Atari and I have never been on the best of terms.
I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
Turns out John Smedley wasn’t the only creator desiring free to play, cut back by an unseen foe. In an interview, Cryptic’s Executive Producer on Star Trek Online Stephen D’Angelo stated that, “We’ve always wanted the game to be free-to-play,” he says, “in fact we tried to make it free-to-play at the original launch, but our publisher [Atari] didn’t want us doing that so we didn’t do that.” You mean to tell me I could have obtained the entire Original Series cosmetic series without buying multiple copies of the game? What a kick in the teeth.
Of course Cryptic shares no blame in this, after all they were an owned subsidiary of Atari at the time and what Atari said was law. The article goes on to talk a bit about how Cryptic is handling the free to play switch, drastically different than the Champions Online conversion which was met with “mixed results,” according to the article.
Atari publicly dumped Cryptic Studios earlier this year, selling the studio to Perfect World Entertainment. The game is set to switch to free to play in January 2012.
MMO Fallout 