Gaming News Round-Up: January 24th, 2005

Today's round-up includes a mea culpa from Blizzard regarding World Of WarCraft technical issues, as well as a new CFO for publisher Atari. - The creators of popular gaming webcomic Penny Arcade have posted the results of an interview with the World of WarCraft team regarding the MMORPG's recent server outages and lag. Asked to explain the reasons behind the game's technical problems, the unnamed respondent from Blizzard cited a user adoption rate that was roughly 16 times the company's expected curve. Blizzard has been trying to adjust to the accelerated growth of the game as quickly as they can, but as the team member explained: "We started to see several bottlenecks in the infrastructure that exposed themselves very quickly when the expanded hardware immediately took on massive load." The team is still working to fix the server load issues, and expects the matter to be resolved soon. - Atari has appointed Diane Baker as its new Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Jim Caparro, Atari's President and CEO, announced the appointment of Ms. Baker, which concludes Atari's search to fill the vacant CFO position. "Diane will play an integral role at Atari, not just in the day-to-day management of our various finance functions, but also as a key adviser to me as we chart the next stage of growth for the Company," said Caparro. "As the former CFO of The New York Times Company and Macy's, Diane's expertise will be invaluable at this critical juncture in Atari's evolution." The company and its parent, the French-based Infogrames, are still struggling with long-term debt issues, and recently sold the Civilization franchise to an un-named buyer to help alleviate shorter-term cashflow issues.