Does the Phantom Live?
written by Coury Turczyn on Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Infinium's President and COO Kevin Bachus Defends His Phantom Console From Critics Who Doubt its Existence
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Infinium’s Phantom game console/service has probably inspired more accusations of vaporware than any proposed video game product, ever. Promising to offer a vast library of downloadable PC games, the Phantom aims to create a true game-on-demand network with its streaming technology. Early on after its announcement in 2003, the Phantom was the subject of a withering investigation by tech site HardOCP.com, which did not find Infinium’s PR claims to be credible, and doubted whether the device itself even existed. When former Xbox visionary Kevin Bachus was hired as Infinium’s president and chief operating officer a year and a half ago, the company gained a good deal of credibility. However, with one postponed launch date in November 2004 and a no-show on the floor at E3 2005, the Phantom is once again getting a lot of skeptical media attention. Does it really exist? According to Infinium’s Kevin Bachus, yes it does—and he says it’s coming soon. After demonstrating the device on Attack of the Show, Bachus sat down for an interview to shed some light on the Phantom.
Let’s start with the biggest question on most gamers’ minds when it comes to the Phantom: Is this thing for real?
I’ve been in the game industry for a real long time, including my time at Microsoft with the Xbox, and I certainly wouldn’t be at this company doing what I’m doing if I wasn’t absolutely sure that we’re going to launch a product. It’s natural for people to be skeptical. I think a lot of the skepticism is building on itself at this point: people are skeptical so therefore they become more skeptical and therefore they become more skeptical. There is no way I can really address it other than doing what I’m doing, which is shipping a product. So when the product ships and people are happy with it, those questions will go away. Until then, there’s really no way for me to adequately address it because people will by nature be skeptical until it ships.
Why do you think that this product in particular has gotten a lot of negative media coverage?
Some of it happened before I joined the company. I think that the guys who started the company were really excited about what they were doing. They came from outside of the game industry and they used some imprecise terms and they also made some very bold predictions, and I think that turned some people off. There are certainly some things that happened in the middle of launching the product that added to some of the skepticism—the fact that we basically were developing the product in full view of the world was certainly a unique experience in the gaming platform world. There were a lot of really foolish ideas we had for Xbox initially that never saw the light of day because we were able to have these ideas internally before anybody even knew that we were thinking about doing a game console. It’s interesting to speculate about how people might have thought about Xbox if they had seen the thing evolving, and the different things tried out. On top of that, the stuff that would be commonplace for any other company became really a big deal because we haven’t shipped a product. You can’t really talk about the service or the product, but you can talk about “Oh, this guy’s making a claim and he’s suing the company, and that’s all really interesting. What does that mean?”
So it’s a function of all of that. One of the unique things from my standpoint about this experience is that we’re doing this inside a public company, and there aren’t very many pre-revenue start-up companies. Most public companies are well-established and shipping product and generating revenue. It’s been interesting from my perspective to watch how people view the company, particularly folks who sort of become amateur financial analysts looking at our company, because we are operating off of investment capital instead of revenue. Folks have looked at that and looked at all of our public filings that have a tremendous amount of disclosure. I mean, think about the amount of stuff that we put out there in public filings to help the investing public look at whether they want to invest in our company. It’s a phenomenal amount of information compared to what you hear about in terms of Sony’s plans for PlayStation 3 or Microsoft’s plans for Xbox 360. All that stuff is out there and people can pick through and dissect it, and try to connect the dots and figure it out. So it’s been more grist for the mill, as it were.
There were a number of stories last month about Infinium’s public disclosure statements and a possibly poor outlook for funding. Were they accurate?
Well, that story [seems to get] written every three or four months whenever we put out any kind of filings. I think it is important when people look at investing in our company that we do an adequate job of explaining exactly where we are as a company: the fact that we have not yet shipped a product, that it is a risky investment compared to a company that is more mature and more established. I think it’s fair, it’s appropriate, and it’s also required. You look at the risks sections that go into any kind of annual report or investment prospectus, it can be very frightening because you have to say, “These are all the things that can go wrong. Here’s a list of every way we can fail.” That doesn’t mean that those things are all going to come to pass, so if you assume that all that stuff is going to happen, then of course you would assume that the company is going to blow up imminently. Obviously, we feel very confident in our ability to not only launch a product, but to launch a successful product. That said, there’s a lot of stuff that could go wrong down the path, and it’s incumbent on us to reveal that. So it’s disappointing that some people look at that in other contexts, and try to assign probabilities to that, but I really focus on running the business and launching the product, and building the best thing I can.
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