After the new retro-focused Atari acquired Night Dive Studios for $10 million last year, the PC remastering specialist sought to reassure fans that the deal had worked. The new Atari is dedicated to the same principles of bringing back the classics and classic-style games that Night Dive has always pursued," Night Dive said." Then, in November, Atari acquired another retro-focused studio, Digital Eclipse, bringing under the same corporate roof the two game developers most committed to preserving and reviving gaming history.

This is a strong team, but it is also a consolidation that makes me nervous, in the midst of massive industry layoffs. What if one day a collapse like Embracer hits Atari? I'm not sure how many other studios are reviving games like [Dark Forces] or making playable documentaries around pioneering games like Karateka. At last week's Game Developers Conference, I asked Atari CEO Wade Rosen about what would happen if the company were in dire financial straits.

"We're really trying to strike a balance between organic growth, inorganic growth, both, and achieving profitability and being a sustainable place. (Inorganic growth refers to mergers and acquisitions such as Nightdive/Digital Eclipse.) ) "We feel like we are doing our best to reach one of these scenarios and get out on our skis and make sure that we can grow and rebuild our business, but not in an unsustainable way."

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, much of the industry's growth has indeed proved unsustainable, with developers commenting on the rising costs of big-budget games and the more than 16,000 layoffs that have affected industry employees over the past year. Rosen said the "over-expansion" in gaming and high-tech in 2020 and 2021 was based on a "false sense of what future demand will be," leading companies to chase soaring valuations.

"I think the thought process became, 'Well, this is worth so much more with this performance, so if we push the performance up even more, it will be worth this much more.' ' Being a publicly traded company, I can understand the appeal of that. The problem is that they fail to take into account that many of those prices are transitory and fundamentally nothing indicative of their value. Layoffs are painful, but layoffs are the result of hiring. Layoffs are painful, but layoffs are the result of hiring. The mistake was to over-expand and rush to hire and to take one point in time and extrapolate it infinitely into the future. In many cases, we should not have grown so fast in the first place, and I believe this suffering could have been avoided if we had done so."

I also asked Rosen about the benefits of Atari's new ownership for Night Dive and Digital Eclipse. While the rights to Night Dive's white whale "No One Lives Forever" are still up for grabs, Rosen said the partnership is already paying off.

"More doors and opportunities have opened," he said. There are a lot of exciting announcements coming up for both companies." Digital Eclipse for Nightdive, Nightdive for Digital Eclipse, and what Atari can do for both companies. [Atari, Night Dive, and Digital Eclipse are now meeting together as a group, and Rosen said that their combined contacts and connections benefit all three companies. He also confirmed that Digital Eclipse's "Gold Master series," which includes Karateka and the just-released Llamasoft: The Story of Jeff Minter, will continue.

"It's something we care deeply about. The first film is always the most expensive [to develop]. The (economic) value of the Goldmaster series is yet to be seen, but we are really confident and plan to release many more games in the future."