Infogrames reports first half results

Yesterday Atari released its quarterly earnings report and took its lumps. Today its parent company, Infogrames, did the same.

For the first half of its fiscal year (which ended September 30), Infogrames' revenues were a little shy of 126 million Euros ($149 million), down 52 percent from the same period last year, when it claimed revenues of 264 million Euros ($312 million). As bad as that might sound, the second quarter showed some improvement over the first, with revenues of 70 million Euros ($83 million), down 30 percent from 100 million Euros($118 million) for the same quarter a year ago.

Similar to how Atari attributed its quarterly performance yesterday, Infogrames blamed the reduced revenue on its strategy to have a release schedule heavily weighted toward the back half of the year. The company said sales for the second quarter were driven by catalog games and strong performances of Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in North America) on the PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, as well as the European release Asterix XXL 2 for the PlayStation 2.