Atari Moving Away from Single-player Efforts, Contemplating Online Social Game Focus

Alone in the Dark publisher Atari will soon move away from publishing and developing "high-budget single-player games," according to Phil Harrison, the president of parent company Infogrames.

"I don't see that we're going to be making huge-budget, single-player games in the future," he told Gamasutra. "That doesn't mean that we won't have ambition to do really incredible games that have high quality, high execution, and high innovation, but they won't be one-player, narrative-driven, start-middle-end games."

Instead, Harrison, who previously served as the president of Sony Computer Entertainment's worldwide studios, suggested that Atari might take a leading role in the shift towards online social games.

"I think Atari is part of an industry in some transition from pure packaged media to an online business model and social communication and community model," he observed. "If we are part of that transition, perhaps we are going to take a slightly aggressive, leading-edge role in that transition."