Cryptic to Discontinue Operations for Atari

Atari seems to be ready to sell Cryptic and has listed it as "discontinued operations." What does this mean for our favorite Star Trek and Champions MMOs? Not much presently. Support and operations for the games will continue. Also, their Neverwinter title will continue development so don’t fret.

But it seems that Atari is more interested in external development and this will be a step to put them into a role as just a publisher. This was mentioned some time ago when they were struggling financially and it seems like they’re ready to take some final steps to only be a publisher of externally developed titles.

We hope that our friends over at Cryptic will weather the storm and come out the other side in a much better place. Perhaps they will have a chance to take control of their own destinies instead of being bounced from company to company. You might remember that NCSoft was the previous owner of the great MMO-making studio.

Atari purchased the developer in 2008 for around $27.5 million. If Atari is looking to turn a profit on the purchase they might not get it as the developer showed a loss of $7.5M for the previous 12 months according to recent Atari financial statements. That is a $10M improvement on the previous year and with multiple strong titles already up and running, they are a veteran studio that can certainly make games that gamers want to play.

If we had $27M laying around, we’d make a bid for them.