Massively^™

The surprising news this morning that Infogrames, the parent company of Atari, would be purchasing Cryptic Studios prompted us to get in touch with Jack Emmert over at Cryptic Studios in order to shine a little more light on the current situation. Here's what he had to say:

Massively: How will the Atari acquisition change or affect the 2k Games publishing agreement for Champions Online?

Jack Emmert: I'm afraid I can't comment on this. I can only say that I enjoy working with 2k games; they're a great company and even better people.

Can you give us a bit of background on Cryptic's relationship with Atari? Where did the idea for this collaboration emerge?

This evolved after numerous discussions. John Needham, our CEO extraordinaire, had been doing the rounds to look for funding opportunities. We crossed paths with David Gardiner and Phil Harrison of Atari; all of us really hit it off. One thing led to another...and here were are!

This is obviously a very positive step for Cryptic. Can you speak to what kind of benefits you see in your new relationship with Atari?

Atari has a great pool of resources – PR, marketing, distribution, etc. Atari also has a number of terrific IP's that would make great MMO's. Mostly, this acquisition allows Cryptic to focus solely on the business of making great MMO's.

Is this going to alter the beta and release schedules for any Cryptic projects?

Not at all. We're still moving ahead with Champions – Q2 next year, and STO later in the year. Development priorities are the only thing that can shift those dates.

If you can't beat em', join em', appears to be the logic used by Activision in the recently confirmed merger. The website for industry rag Variety is reporting that before the idea of a copacetic merger of two gaming giants was pitched, Activision was interested in just buying Blizzard outright from the Vivendi folks. Bobby Kotick was very interested in Vivendi's crown jewel and the possible revenues from the sparkle inside: World of Warcraft.

The article notes how different that tone was than just a few years ago, when Vivendi tried to sell their games business off to pay down debt. At the time no-one was willing to bite, a state of affairs the company is probably now very grateful for. Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillaume will apparently be one of the individuals quoted in an upcoming story on the site about the merger, and offered up this pithy insight about the deal.

Originally, Activision wanted to buy Blizzard. "'One game, World of Warcraft,' bought Activision."

As much fun as it is to seek out news from the intertubes, we always appreciate tips when they're submitted. Tonight we got a unique tip, from CEO of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley. This tip came along with a small wave of similar tips, all discussing the supposed purchase of SOE by the Zapak Digital group.

The article claims that SOE has been 'on the block' for two weeks, and that the group plans to purchase the Sony subsidiary for the sum of $300 million. The article further claims this is an ongoing strategic move by Zapak:

The major expenses in the gaming industry is on content and marketing, and Zapak aims to reduce the cost of publishing a game by buying out those studios and relocating them to India. "This will reduce the cost drastically from $30 mn to $10mn, which will give us the advantage to channelise our funds towards marketing and other activities," the official said.

Says Mr. Smedley, in response to the article:

It's got a bunch of people inside SOE emailing me asking me what's going on. This story is 100% false. We aren't for sale and never have been. Nothing like this has ever been discussed with the Zapak guys. The truth is we were talking to them about distribution rights to one of our games. And we have no idea how this story got started.

Thanks for clarifying things for us, John.