Infogrames Full Year Sales Down 17%

Officials from French publisher Infogrames, the parent company of the U.S. based Atari, have revealed that sales for the company’s full financial year have fallen 16.7 percent on the previous year, due to a drop in U.S. sales in the second half. Sales for the full twelve months fell to €304.5 million ($410.9m). However, sales during the final fourth quarter – from January to March – actually rose by 12 percent to €82.6 million ($111.5m). In keeping with standard French business practices, the company’s other profit-related results will be reported at a later date. The company has revealed, though, that Europe accounted for 62 percent of overall sales during the year, up from 48 percent the previous year. At the same time, U.S. sales fell from 43 percent of the company’s business to just 30 percent. U.S. sales in the fourth quarter made up just 21 percent, compared to 79 percent for Europe and the rest of the world. The poor results reflect the paucity of big name successes for Atari during the period, and the significant layoffs of 20% of Atari's personnel seem to imply that the company is scaling down its American operations to compensate for this. Gamasutra recently spoke to Atari's vice president of development Robert Stevenson, who expounded on Atari's divestment of internal studios, and said that the company was transitioning to "a little more flexible model, with much lower overhead. You’re seeing a lot of those things actually taking a foothold." In terms of individual format successes, the company noted a rise in sales on next generation consoles with combined sales on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS and PSP accounting for 36 percent of overall sales. The PlayStation 2 format still accounted for 37 percent of all game sales.