Article:
Cryptic Studios - A Pre Post-Mortem Part 2

At the end of part 1 of this article, Cryptic Studios - A Pre Post-Mortem, I promised to look at the reception of Champions Online and Star Trek Online, and how they have affected or will affect Cryptic's long term fiscal health.

Let's start with Champions, as it's been out for nearly five months now compared to Star Trek's five days, and as such will have a far greater bearing in the here and now.

Champions Online was a complete, unmitigated, financial disaster for Atari/Cryptic; or in the internet vernacular, Epic Fail. I expect this will be one of the precious few times I will be justified in stating something so sensationalistic throughout my journalistic career - so forgive me if I take a moment to relish it....

All right, moment's over.

Here are the facts:

• These positive effects were partially offset by €14.2 million of research and development write-offs recorded on numerous properties, including Champions Online and TDU2.

That snippet is taken directly from Atari Corporate's latest H1 (Half) FY2009 earnings which may be perused in full here. Keep in mind, a Fiscal Year (FY) is not the same as a Calendar Year. Atari's 2009 Fiscal Year started on April 1st 2009 and will end on March 31st 2010. If you read the report and neglect that fact you will be thoroughly confused.

For those of you that aren't going to bother with the report, don't worry, there are only three lines that relate to this article, and I've already bulleted one above. Speaking of the bullet point above, it's stating that CO has cost the company close to 20M USD in R&D losses. It mentions TDU2 as well though why I can't fathom. TDU2 is Test Drive Unlimited 2 (racing game), a sequel to 2007's TDU1, and as such very little R&D funding would have gone into a turn-around sequel like that. Considering TDU2 already had the engine, assets, and infrastructure from the original, I believe its influence is something of a non-factor.