After several delays, it’s official: the Atari VCS is about to end its pre-production phase.

The Ataribox was announced in late 2017, then when it got to the crowdfunding website Indiegogo in the summer of 2018, it got renamed to Atari VCS. The console got 2.3 million GBP, but its March 2019 launch has been pushed back to March 2020. Earlier in October, Rob Wyatt, the architect of the Atari VCS, has left, citing that he and his company, Tin Giant, is owed six months of invoices by Atari.

To clear the situation, a new blog post was published to clarify things. It was written by Michael Arzt, the COO of Atari VCS: „Atari will always prioritise delivering a high-quality product over a self-imposed deadline. That was true at the project’s start, it was true in March 2019, and it is true today. The Atari VCS was designed with digital delivery as part of the plan from conception. Digital delivery is the current and future state of the games and entertainment industry and how many customers increasingly prefer to discover and purchase new content… The Atari VCS is designed to be able to embrace any compatible game streaming platform, like [Google] Stadia and others still to come down the road,” quoting the post.

Arzt says the March delay was to improve the console’s performance and lifespan, make it cooler and quieter, and adjust the gamepad and joystick following extensive testing. Atari is working with some big brands to bring some big game and app developers to the platform, which will run a Linux-based Atari OS, offering 4K/60FPS content. Some third-party apps will be available via the web browser, but in Spring 2020, they will be added to the console proper.

So the Atari VCS, which will launch in March (but Indiegogo backers will get it before), will try to focus on streaming, so aside from Google Stadia, probably we can see the Project xCloud and the PlayStation Now services on it shortly.

Source: Gamesindustry

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