Phil Harrison leaving? Is Atari changing strategy again?

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The rebirth of Atari seems to be very painful, if the latest corporate shenanigans are anything to go by.

Today’s announcement by Atari sets out a change of senior management. Phil Harrison becomes a non-executive and Jeff Lapin (former CEO of Take-Two and representative of investors Blue Bay) becomes COO. The new executive board is:

• David Gardner, Chief Executive Office and Director
• Jeff Lapin, Chief Operating Officer and Director
• Fabrice Hamaide, Chief Financial Officer
• Jim Wilson, Chief Executive Officer at Atari, Inc.
• John Needham, Chief Executive Officer at Cryptic

This looks like a “boxed-product” board, not a “new online business” board. Even Cryptic, which is a successful MMO developer, tends to focus on the World of Warcraft-style model of a paid-for game plus a subscription, rather than the radical new world of browser- and Unity-based games that Atari previously seemed to be espousing.

The release also appears to confirm my suspicions that the delay in receiving regulatory clearance – and hence the cash payment of more than €30 million – for the disposal of Atari’s remaining stake in Distribution Partners to Namco Bandai meant that Atari did not have the cash resources to publish Ghostbusters, and had to sub-contract the game to Sony in Europe instead:

My conclusion is that David and Phil had originally thought that Atari would be a great launch pad for a new kind of online games destination, complete with a powerful and historic brand. Unfortunately, Atari may have turned to be much more dysfunctional than anyone realised and needed huge management attention to fix. As a result, Phil has not had the cash or management resources to build “a leading 21st century online gaming company”.

So he has moved on. But I suspect that the ambition to build that new 21st century games company remains as strong as ever.

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