Today my inbox had an email from Atari in it, announcing that they are now ready for developers to start making games for the system. Which is supposed to be released to retail in March. Lol.
OK, so this might be slightly less ridiculous than it seems. Let’s recall that the real Atari gave Howard Scott Warshaw a whole 5 weeks to crank out E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Which he did. Because HSW is a beast.
But mainly, it’s not unreasonable because millions of game developers already have projects that they’re developing in Unity3D, and it’s probably trivial in most cases to create a build that will run on Linux, which is what AtariBox’s OS will be based on.
The announcement reads as follows:
Hello Backers, Fans, and Followers!
In light of our recent confirmation of Unity compatibility with the Atari VCS, it’s time to start unlocking access and giving game and app developers the green light to start developing new games and making plans for porting existing content to the platform. We have recently contacted interested developers with our initial plans and are happy to now share more with our broader audiences.
Getting content onto the Atari VCS will be straightforward and easy for both large professional studios and independents alike. Most developers already have all the tools they need to develop for our Linux Debian-based OS and can start right away.
Atari will also have a path to get your games and apps into the Atari VCS store and make real money!
You can find all the previous Atari VCS developer blog posts here.
A couple hundred BackerKit survey remain incomplete. If you have not completed one, go to https://atari-vcs.backerkit.com now and request your survey. It only takes a few minutes and will make your Atari VCS shipment(s) run smoother and faster.
Ongoing thanks again to every backer, fan, and developer. We can’t wait to see what you create!
— The Atari VCS Team
So, great. Potentially, tens of thousands of already-existing games built with Unity can be easily ported to the AtariBox, which if for some reason you wanted to play games on that platform instead of one of the half dozen or so platforms that you already own that has been capable of playing Unity games since forever, then hooray — you can!!
Let’s be clear, announcing “Unity compatible” is neither shocking, nor impressive. Your smart phone, your web browser, and your generic PC can all run Unity games. So can your Macintosh PC, and your iPad.
It’s rather difficult to imagine what hurdles Atari might have needed to leap over in order for their AMD x64 linux PC in a fancy case might have had to overcome in order to verify that it could run Unity games. Because, frankly, it is stupid easy to do. Which is one of the really nice things about Unity.
It’s yet another underwhelming announcement in a series of underwhelming announcements from Atari about the “progress” that they’ve managed to “achieve” with their New VCS project.
But let’s be clear: you or I could assemble a PC capable of running Unity games in about an hour with components that I ordered from NewEgg, probably for around the same cost as what Atari is selling the VCS for, and it wouldn’t take me 3 years to develop it.
Atari’s latest Medium blog update mentions that they are now working on establishing compatibility with other game development engines. But this should also be a trivial exercise as well, given that the Atari VCS is a generic linux PC under the hood. From what they’ve said, they’re only really developing a graphical shell environment (and even then, very likely all they’re doing is creating a “skin” for some existing graphical shell, with minimum customization, plus an app store and a launcher. But I expect that we’ll be hearing that Atari VCS will support Godot engine, GameMaker Studio 2, Unreal Engine, the Gnu C Compiler, and pretty much anything else that already has the means to build executable binaries for Linux.
But if you know what that means, it’s not even slightly impressive, because literally everything in the world can run linux, and can run software compiled for linux.
The one nice thing that I see in Atari’s announcement today is that they are taking only a 12% cut of your sales if you produce exclusive content for the Atari VCS, and just 20% for non-exclusive content sold through their app store. Which is a lot better than the 30% cut that is taken by Valve, Apple, and Google for selling apps through their stores. Of course, considering that Atari has only had about 10,000 units in pre-sale that we know of (based on their initial Indiegogo crowdfunding) it seems that limiting your game’s audience to AtariBox customers is going to cost you a lot more in sales revenue than that 8% could ever hope to make up for.
So… meh. It doesn’t look, then, like there will be a whole lot of exclusive titles for this system, which means that there won’t be any reason to buy this system, which means that there won’t be any reason to target this system for exclusive game titles, which means that this whole thing is unlikely to catch on. Pretty much as I’ve said all along.
If you’re a developer and interested in more information, they say to write to dev@atari.com. Which, maybe, hopefully, finally won’t bounce messages sent to it, as they have the last two times I tried to write to them over the past year.