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New Atari CEO says he wants to give company focus

New Atari CEO says he wants to give company focus

The newly-appointed CEO of legacy games brand Atari, Wade Rosen, has said that the company is focusing on games as that's what people know it for.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, the exec admitted that the company had become slightly cluttered in focus in recent years, dipping its toes in a lot of different businesses outside of video games. Rosen says that this is part of the reason for focusing on premium PC and console titles moving forward, rather than mobile and free-to-play.

"The need for it is because the market really wasn't sure, or clear, on what we were doing," Rosen said.

"Atari had become synonymous with doing a lot of things, but not really providing a lot of clarity on why they were doing those things, what was their motivation, or where those reasons were coming from. So the intent of focusing back on games is because that's why people know us. Rather than trying to reinvent ourselves into a TV company, a casino operator, or all these other things that we're not, we're known as a video game company."

This follows Atari dividing into two separate entities earlier this year; Atari Gaming is focusing on the company's games business, while Atari Blockchain is working on cryptocurrency and NFTs. That division is led by former CEO Frédéric Chesnais, while the overall Atari brand falls under Rosen's lead.

During this shift, Atari Gaming dropped a few of these extra businesses that it had dipped into, such as internal TV production and casinos.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.