https://www.vgchartz.com/article/453918/intellivision-hit-with-layoffs-as-it-tries-to-save-its-amico-console/
I was just going to leave a post on the article, but it started turning into a long rant. So, I opted to post a thread instead.
"CEO Phil Adam says the company has taken drastic steps by laying off staff in order to save money, as well as licensing out its IP."
First off, how many employees does Intellivision Entertainment even have? How many people got laid off? Will laying off those employees actually have any effect on "saving" the Amico? Or did IE just not have money to continue paying their staff in the first place and would be laying them off whether the Amico gets permanently shelved or not. This reads as spin to me. If the higher ups in IE had as much passion for the Amico as they project publicly, then the highest paid execs in the company would either have not taken a salary, or would have taken a massively reduced salary, until actual physical Amicos were being manufactured and sold. You see start up CEO's do this all the time when they really have a passion for whether their business makes it or not. Meanwhile, IE somehow instead managed to accumulate 9.5 million dollars in debt without producing a single unit for sale. Compare that to Atari, who for all the delays and poor communication throughout the project, actually did manage to get their VCS onto the market with the 3 million dollars they raised from their Indiegogo campaign. IE boasted numerous times that they would "never resort to the crowd-funding route". Yet, they used several rounds of "investor campaigns" to raise 3 times that amount and not a single pre-order has been shipped. At least everyone who backed the Atari VCS eventually got one, whether they were happy with the finished product or not. At this time, it's not even clear if Amico backers who are already asking for refunds will even see their deposits back.
And, what IP's does Intellivision have to leverage in order to raise enough money to manufacture and ship the Amico? They had to change the name of the successor to one of their most popular Intellivision games to "Cloudy Mountain", because they can't afford a license to use the Dungeons & Dragons name anymore. Are there really corporations clamoring to license "Shark! Shark!" ? I don't see it.
Also, the pandemic is frequently cited as the reason for why the Amico did not release on time. But, if you take an honest look at IE's development process for this console, the Amico was never going to release on 10/10/2020. So many things would have already needed to be in place before the lockdowns set in that clearly weren't. The games weren't finished, and the console was nowhere near ready for production, so the few months between the start of the Covid-19 outbreak and the planned October launch date would not have magically changed that. This is a vanity project that has been completely mismanaged. IE somehow "lost" $1.35m paid to Ark Electronics USA. And even if the Amico makes it to market, IE has to pay $100 per console on a horribly negotiated $810,000 loan from angel investment advisor Sudesh Aggarwal. So, IE has already agreed to lose $100 on the first 8,000 Amico's sold. That's the majority of their initial 10,000 pre-orders. None of this points to a company that was ever competent enough to release a console on time. This is a company that has sold boxes with RFID cards in them for games that might not even be completed yet. This is a company that showed off games containing text from Nintendo's Star Fox and art from World of Tanks which they said was "placeholder" material, while claiming that it's common for devs to that during development. Sure. Nintendo gets caught all the time using text from Halo and art from Red Dead Redemption as placeholder material in it's teaser trailers for Breath of the Wild.
I don't see any of these recent moves (layoffs, IP licenses) getting the Amico any closer to a release than IE's previous disastrous rounds of loans/"investments" have done.
Last edited by Mandalore76 - on 08 June 2022