http://ds.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5123

Company looking to produce "manageable" products in favor of big-scale productions.
Atari VP of Development Robert Stevenson spoke with Gamasutra regarding the recently announced publishing deal with 1C games in order to bring a wealth of new titles to the North American gaming market.

The company has undergone a number of transitions lately, enduring everything from ceasing support of internal development studios in favor of external development to restructuring other internal aspects in order to turn around profits loss. "It comes down to execution. I think we have a great lineup, we've got a lot of exciting titles coming, and I think we�re doing exciting deals with a lot of stuff that�s still unannounced," Stevenson said.

The executive readily admitted the company's desire to produce games of smaller scales for both handheld gaming systems and Nintendo's Wii. "When you start saying that you'd like to invest 30 million dollars on a certain titles and it's got to hit a home run for it to be successful in terms of sales, and start making those sorts of bets on brands that weren't built 10 years ago � you start asking for a lot of risk."

The desire for more "manageable" products has been a great decision factor in the process of deciding which platforms to develop for. "All the platforms are in play, we're actively developing on everything, but the focus is much more on attainable, controllable product."

With 'managable' I imagine they will be mini/party games, Oh Nintendo look what you made them do!

 Ok That's all I have to add.

 One more company devoting resources to this quickly becomming overpopulated game type.

Quite!

Kwaad, Shane and Hus don't believe that the Wii is getting development resources at the expense of the PS3 and XBox 360 ...

Not necessarily!

Most games in the previous generation (and almost all games in the N64 vs. Playstation Generation) were developed for $10 Million or less; manageable just means that they won't be spending the extra money to have the graphical content that many PS3 and XBox 360 developers are pushing.

I have no problem admitting Wii is getting cash ins. Apparently neither does any publisher. "Small scale manageable products." Yay, the tide is turning. The only shame is they no longer have the Transformers license to exploit. I think they still have Tonka, though.

um, Atari has been on the verge of closing down for months. I really question their ability to make decent games, period. Who cares what system they're on?

Atari still Makes games 0.0!!

But, jman8, with Atari in financial hot water, developing for cheaper systems may not be a bad idea. It has a strong userbase and it much easier to make games for. With how Atari is now(and most smaller developers) it's impossible to produce games for thee 360 or PS3.

 Dude, they never stopped. In about 2000 someone bought atari, and they started re-making all their old games, all of wich sold like crap.