Atari has announced that it is exiting mobile and free-to-play games in favor of a "strong pipeline of premium games" for PCs and consoles. While most of the company's current mobile games, such as "Atari Combat: Tank Fury" and "Ninja Fury," will be discontinued or sold, "successful games with a loyal user base" will be kept alive.

According to an Atari statement, the first game along this model is already in development and will be released during the current fiscal year, which ends in April 2022. It is unclear what the game will be, but it will probably be a familiar game, as Atari "intends to leverage its catalog of 200 in-house developed games. Meanwhile, the company will exit the Atari Casino business, which specializes in gambling titles in Africa. It will also scale back its television business. [Atari CEO Wade J. Rosen said in a statement, "Whatever the gaming experience, our intention is to provide familiar and enjoyable moments of meaningful play. That is at the core of Atari, and it ties our history and our future together. As such, we feel that our premium games better represent this type of gaming experience and Atari's DNA. Despite this renewed focus on premium games, we remain committed to growing and expanding our successful free-to-play games in the market"

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Atari split the company into two divisions in April: Atari Gaming and Atari Blockchain, the latter focusing on "the enormous potential of crypto and blockchain enabled gaming" and "opportunities around NFT." There are also plans to build an Atari Hotel. Not so strange, the recently released Atari VCS, a Linux-based console/mini-PC, has generated its own controversy.

In 2021, a whole lot of work will be needed to revitalize the Atari brand, which is generally associated with crappy mobile games and reckless plans like the aforementioned. The company released new PC games Alone in the Dark and Haunted House in 2015, neither of which was particularly successful; Alone in the Dark was sold to THQ Nordic in 2018; and Haunted House was sold to Atari in 2015.