Infinium Labs Owes $4 Million, Requires $68 Million to Stay Afloat 88
nz17 writes "Looks like Infinium Labs, 'maker' of the Phantom game console, can't manage its debt. According to GameSpot, the company's recently filed Securities and Exchange Commission papers show that Infinium currently owes $4 million as a capital deficiency, but requires an estimated additional $68 million to continue work until the end of 2006. However, Infinium remains chipper in the face of oppression, as it estimates its first year of sales will garner $35 million in revenue. Will the Phantom console launch on the projected date of November 18th, 2004, or will the system live up to its name?"
Careful (Score:2, Informative)
These guys have sued people for slanderous statements in the past.
Re:Careful (Score:2)
I wouldn't worry about it. Living up to vaporware isn't hard, and Phantomware can't be much different ;)
Re:Careful (Score:4, Insightful)
Ob. Simpsons (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Careful (Score:2)
Heh, we all know (Score:1, Insightful)
$35mill? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a totally unreaslitic figure - I guess there are at least 70,000 suckers in the world, although I imagine that there will be fewer sales and more revenue from subscriptions or whatever model the Phantom is supposed to use for gaming.
The problem is that I can't see $35M revenue (not profit) paying Infiniums costs or paying any of that $68M debt. How exactly do you rack up $68M in debt developing a PC anyway? The personal computer is pretty straightforward as it is... most of the work has already been done.
Needless to say, they also have a poor reputation from that legal fight with Kyle earlier on, that won't help them get sales because reputation counts for a lot in the gaming industry.
Re:$35mill? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:$35mill? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:$35mill? (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh??
The only thing "custom" is the case. It takes some money to design and mass produce the case, but after that, it's just a matter of paying people to stuff standard off-the-self parts into it.
Re:$35mill? (Score:3, Funny)
Any way we can buy a Phantom case shell? It would be fun to get a Mini-itx system in there, and then you can pretend you own a real Phantom console.
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
Re:$35mill? (Score:4, Informative)
(to buy those consoles before selling them for example, it takes a lot of mone up front)
Re:$35mill? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:$35mill? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$35mill? (Score:5, Interesting)
You weren't around in the dot com days, I take it. I worked at a company that blew $250M in six months just buying rights to pop star's websites. Not the rights to any of the SALES or AD REVENUE, mind you, just the right to host and the website... that's right, PAYING to eat the costs of high bandwith sites without any of the possible benifit.
Re:$35mill? (Score:1)
Stop it...you're making me misty-eyed for the past. Oh, for those glory days...
Re:$35mill? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worse than that-- likely they only get 40% of the cost, since they have to sell to distributors, who sell to retailers, who then have to sell at consumers. So the company makes maybe 40% of the cost.
They say you should retail price things at 10x your cost to make money. So they need to make their PCs for $50 to do this... eeps. They have to make them at less than $200 to profit. If revenue-per-i
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
Before this article, I always thought they were a fraud in the 'ha-ha april fools' sense, but I guess if they pissed away $68 million with very little chance of recouping it, maybe they're more of an investor lawsuit SEC investigation etc. style fraud?
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
Suddenly, those suckers are worth a lot less money, and you need a lot less of them. Worried you can't keep the suckers? Don't worry, make the ha
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
I can easily see racking up $68M just because of the massive amount of advertising and promotions required to break into a very tough market.
Re:$35mill? (Score:2)
Then, Infinium will sue Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony for anticompetitive practices.
They may also claim they own proprietary code or patents, after the anticompetitive cases are thrown out. While the final stages are underway, the executives will relocate to a non-extradition country.
Reputation counts? Are you kidding? (Score:2)
I respectfully disagree. Xbox seems to be doing fine. Of all the companies who face a reputation problem among gamer-techno-types, M$ has to be one of the worst. M$ gets openly slammed by /. on an almost daily basis, yet the Xbox is still going strong.
I doubt the few niche articles on /. and hardocp are any part of the average mom-dad purchaser. If Infinum Labs can hit the market with a large enough mainstream advetising campaign, they cou
Phantom Launch (Score:5, Insightful)
After spending several years in a pretty much static state, the minimum specs for PC games have finally resumed their upwards march. Farcry, Unreal Tournament 2004 and, in particular, Doom 3, have finally forced many people into upgrading PCs which hadn't needed it since soon after Quake 3 came out. From what I've seen, the Phantom's hardware is inferior to that needed to run any of the above games well on a current PC. Admittedly, the resolution will be a lot lower, as you'll presumably be playing on a TV, but even so, the Phantom's going to be obsolete with regards to mainstream PC games pretty much as soon as it's released.
Then we have the issue of bugs and hardware compatibility. The X-Box is also built on PC hardware, and it's not really suffered from these. A console game having a major bug generally warrents a slashdot games story devoted to it; a PC game NOT having major bugs at release probably warrents the same. Will the Phantom be clever enough to be able to automatically patch any games the user has bought for it? Moreover, while the X-Box can count on its developers making games specifically for its hardware, the Phantom, which will apparently run full-blown PC games, has no such guarantee. Any PC gamer will at some point come across the situation where he gets a game that doesn't like a specific bit of his hardware, necessitating a specific patch, driver update or even hardware change. With the battle between ATI and Nvidia really getting into swing, it's perfectly possible that we'll see deliberate hardware incompatibilities starting to crop up. How is the Phantom going to react to this?
If the Phantom ever does actually appear, the only role I can see for it is as a kind of extension of current "digiboxes" and the like, running simple games that will be covered in the montly subscription price. How many people will be willing to pay for this? I know I wouldn't...
preorder? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:preorder? (Score:4, Funny)
The odds? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unless your like M$ who had money to throw at it and who could deal with a loss of this magnitude, vaporware or not it seems to me like a sinking ship.
Look at the equation (Score:5, Funny)
Have nothing of real value
Sue people
Lacking money
Infinium
Have nothing of real value
Sue people
Lacking money
Oooooh one at a time please, there are plenty of stocks to go around.
Prediction: Infinium can suck my balls.
How many game developers have voiced support?
0
I think it is a hyped up PC with gfx card and a subscription to a games download server - sounds pants to me.
Gotta link:
Timothy Roberts, CEO of infinium labs [penny-arcade.com]
Gotta love penny arcade.
Re: (Score:2)
Enough with the Haiku (Score:1)
The only reason the haiku persists is because it has a specific set of rules. If the average guy tries to write poetry, well, it's just sucky poetry. But instead it's "No, no, it's a Haiku. Look, count the syllables!"
Re:Enough with the Haiku (Score:2, Interesting)
Technically speaking, grandparents comment is closer to the poetic form of Senryu, which is in turn derived from a literary game not unlike the French "Exquisite Corpse". Unless you're writing in Japanese, the hard syllable limit is not really relevant - the idea is that the Haiku should convey an image, usually in two parts, with brevity.
However...
venture capital
fades into bleak nothingness
like fallen snowflakes
Re:Enough with the Haiku (Score:1)
YAFIYGI (Score:1)
On a console that we think is lame
They haven't the cash
To market this trash
"It sucks!" the
Re:Look at the equation (Score:2)
Well, duh. This is the kind of incisive analysis I've come to expect from people who quote Penny Arcade.
Re:Look at the equation (Score:2)
Well, I guess that's one way to make money, although it's going to be hard to come up with US$4M that way.
Honesty in advertising (Score:1)
Explain to me... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Explain to me... (Score:2)
Re:Explain to me... (Score:2)
So have spammers and 419ers, and SCOsource, as well as a number of other businesses. I seem to keep getting spam, phishers in my mailbox, and SCO is stil worth more than the paper it's written on. Repeat the mantra: "People are stupid."
Re:Explain to me... (Score:2)
And/or naive investors. Hopefully there aren't enough of the latter that Infinium can fuck over the former.
Re:Explain to me... (Score:2)
(and it's buying a subscription service from a company that's about to go bankrupt)
Appearantly... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Appearantly... (Score:1)
Re:Appearantly... (Score:2)
Using that logic, no one short of the few that were able to try the mockup at E3 will ever be able to bash it.
Re:Appearantly... (Score:1)
Infinium hires new spokesperson (Score:5, Funny)
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf: We have much, much money. Many games for console. Console has already appeared in shops, and we have made many millions out of it.
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf: Nintendo and Microsoft pigdogs are running for the cover. We will crush them like a snake, and burn their machines in the streets.
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf: Our console can fly, hoover and tidy your bedroom whilst making dinner for 4 and creating virtual reality world where you are the One, with boomboom magic powers.
$Four Million? BFD (Score:5, Funny)
This would probably be shocking to mw if I hadn't just sent my daughter off to college this weekend. To me, $4m is just "eh."
A lot of money, that... (Score:1)
Lol, unlikely, but what are they gonna say?
ahhh (Score:2, Funny)
I live near these ass-hats.. I'll club their kneecaps until you get the $ back, for 5% of the total. email me, we'll figure out the details
Re:ahhh (Score:1)
Re:ahhh (Score:1)
Bad Business Model From The Start (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bad Business Model From The Start (Score:1)
After your company made some money with this, then you could try to add a console to it, for people without pc's.
It's the CEO (Score:4, Insightful)
He probably knew that Infinium would go belly-up, but he gets a nice paycheck until it does.
Re:It's the CEO (Score:1)
Re:It's the CEO (Score:2)
How exactly are they planning on attractin anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
-They have NO hype for commercials, internet advertisements or even the occasional popup.
-They have NO credibility in the gaming community overall
-No major, minor or even INDEPENDENT names that I know of have backed them or stated they're planning to in the future
-Their CEO is known to be, by and large, an asshat and possibly the only person the company
-They have a couple million in debt with all the above and their plan is to produce a console which in order for us to keep playing on they HAVE to stay in business
So how exactly did they plan on going anywhere except to perhaps Cuba? Africa? Some other country that won't export them?
I've garnered most of my opinions on this from hardocp, PA and other misc sources btw
Re:How exactly are they planning on attractin anyo (Score:2)
But they do seem to get alot of press on slashdot
>--They have NO credibility in the gaming community overall
Which doesn't matter if their console is actually good, which it probably won't be but tha's another story.
>-No major, minor or even INDEPENDENT names that I know of have backed them or stated they're planning to in the future
I saw the names eidos and vicendi but that might just be marketing hype
>-
This could be as big as IT! (Score:1)
4M not 68 (Score:1)
If they are only 4M in debt right now..IMHO I'd say it's pretty clear they're going to be eating a lot of money on their console (much like all of the other console makers do) and are praying that their subscription services make them their money. How do they intend to make 35M in 1 Year in subscription services and Pay per play alone? Has ANY company managed to make t
Re:4M not 68 (Score:1)
Re:4M not 68 (Score:1)
Re:4M not 68 (Score:1)
They've lowered the price for the console itself to $199. That gives them a better shot, but if you are trying to sell to casual gamers, it's not going to work. People who aren't already dedicated gamers (i.e. people who don't already own a game console) will regard it as too high an investment.
If you want to sell games to casual gamers, and hopefully to expand that market, you'd be best off making the games ru
Re:4M not 68 (Score:1)
*expects to get modded offtopic.. but it was worth it!*
Whereisphantom.com (Score:4, Informative)
Just because Gamespot finally gets around to posting information doesn't mean that it's news. It's rather old news to be sure.
No, Seriously. Mod Parent Up. (Score:2)
Phantom (Score:1)
Tee-Hee aside, what a shame IMO. I really think that the on-line game rental would be a great deal. Our little group http://virtualcarnage.com/ [virtualcarnage.com] of Thursday night XBox live players is always waiting around for everyone to pony up and purchase a game. It would be great to simply rent the game for the eve allowing everyone to play.
The Motley Fool Phantom Ads... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmm... well, I guess people trading stocks have lots of disposable income to spend on game consoles, that's why they advertised there, right?
FozzieCDN == Infinium Employee? (Score:2)
Re: FozzieCDN == Infinium Employee? (Score:2)
Re: FozzieCDN == Infinium Employee? (Score:1)
Sorry the burst your bubble guys but no I do not work for Infinium Labs. I can see where you got that assumption though.
I am an independant game developer who makes games (such as Dark Horizons Lore [garagegames.com], which is coming to Linux very soon) with the Torque Game Engine. As a game developer I see the Phantom as another potential market to move my products onto with the added benefit that I don't have to change much (if anything) from my WindowsPC build to get it working.
As for "defending" the Phantom Console..
Sigh... (Score:1)
Not in today's world (Score:2)