Atari's corpse just bought Atariage.com

[Dark Jaguar]

I have no clue who currently owns the Atari hot potato, but whoever they are went and bought AtariAge.com .  That means it's dead.  The forums will likely be deleted very soon, so if there's important legacy information there, get it now.

Whenever a big company buys a fan community site, that means the fan site is dead.  Every single time...  Every... single... time... no exceptions... ever.

[A Black Falcon]

I can't imagine they would buy the site only to delete the forum, at least not anytime soon; it's one of the main features the site has.  But this sure explains why AtariAge removed all unlicensed releases based on games from publishers other than Atari earlier this summer!  Huh.  I hope that Atari runs AtariAge well, it is an important retro-gaming site.

The current Atari started out as Infogrames, the French game studio.  They bought Atari from Hasbro in the early '00s or so, then changed their name to Atari.  Then they fell apart as an actual game studio and shut down, and spent some years as just a licensing company lending out Atari's name and logo. 

But then, they decided to get back into games in a small way, focusing on retro.  They released their computer console thing the Atari VCS, and also they've re-released some 2600 games on real carts.  There's also Atari 50, of course, which is a very impressive collection.  It's the most interested in their history Atari we've had in a long time.  That they'd want to buy out AtariAge, the best known Atari fan community and homebrew game store for Atari consoles, makes sense when you think about it.  I'd imagine they would mostly want to use it for what it is but more official now, not shut it down.

And on that point, apparently Al, the guy who runs AtariAge, will be an Atari employee now.  I imagine that AtariAge could well get shut down eventually, but I don't think it will be now.

Despite that, do I think this is good, probably not; fansites usually do go downhill once they go corporate.  But maybe it'll be okay.

https://forums.atariage.com/topic/354609...age-atari/

[Dark Jaguar]

ABF, I'm sorry but you're being hopelessly naive here.

The forum was the main draw of Nintendoage too.  I used it regularly.  It's gone now.  In that case a scam of an "auction company" bought it to delete all the info on current actual game prices so they could drastically inflate the prices of a number of old Nintendo games.

[A Black Falcon]

I really don't think that's the same situation at all to this one.  That was indeed pretty seriously messed up, but Atari buying AtariAge, while sad, for now isn't that kind of thing at all... they would gain nothing from shutting it down, it'd only be making their primary core audience -- since remember, the current owners of Atari are heavily leaning on Atari console nostalgia -- angry.  I don't think this Atari is a scam auction house or crypto company or something.

[A Black Falcon]

The internet has reminded me that Atari bought Mobygames in 2021.  They haven't done anything bad to it so far.