The Continuously-Broken Atari Store and the Blatant Fraud it is Reaching For

Okay, I clearly have a love/hate relationship with Atari. I love my old Atari games and gear (and, more probably, I like the memories they bring). I love that Atari continues to try after collapsing and being sold around a bunch. I hate, however, that they continue to fail to get a clue, and fail to learn from their past mistakes. And, yet, I keep rooting for Atari in spite of myself. And, yet, Atari keeps driving me to write critical posts about them and their products.

In this latest chapter of my saga with Atari (see the previous chapter on bait-and-switch), I am simply angry without any conflict about it. Since day one with the Atari VCS, the store for it has been broken in one way or another. They posted apologies and such about it on their Discord channels, etc. It fails to load. It fails to collect or process payments. It fails to deliver products. Etc. All this is well known.

A broken-ish store during early access was not great… but it was acceptable to me. It’s been a year and a half, however, since the console was released from early access and the Atari Store……………… is still broken! Aaaaaaaahh!

Atari VCS is Failing Fast Even Before Official Launch

How to kill a customer base.

Atari is asleep at the wheel again. Yet another junk title was released for the Atari VCS recently, Utopos, and it is pretty much the last straw for me in so many ways:

• No apparent quality assurance (QA) or curating from Atari for store entry
• A mini game priced at $10 instead of $1 (dev’s fault… but why?)
• Apparent favoritism towards those who already have another game in the store
• No communication from Atari to all signed-up developers
• No access to the VCS platform as promised

The new Atari what?

The new Atari… wait for it… VCS.  Atari VCS—for some reason of internet-searching confusion with the original Atari VCS product.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of Atari.  A big one.  (I still have our original 2600—repaired may times by my brother and I—which even became the center of some controversy over some retro tech.  Perspective enough of my fandom?)  But this new thing’s name… and place in the world… whaaat?  So, let’s dig deeper and see where some honest criticism leads.

Aside from the name—which I don’t really find to be all that terrible—just oddly risky—I’m more concerned about Atari’s apparent business model.