Acclaim Entertainment Inc, the Glen Cove, New York computer games publisher, has closed its coin-operated games division. The move is in line with financially troubled company’s recent initiatives to focus on its core home interactive entertainment market. Acclaim says it will reallocate the resources from the coin- operated division, including development staff, equipment and project budgets, to Acclaim Studios, which develops games for the home market. Nine months ago Acclaim announced the restructuring and consolidation of administrative and operational functions that resulted in the loss of 115 jobs. At that time, Acclaim said the actions would save it about $40m per year. The closing of the coin-op unit comes only six weeks after it announced the adoption of Intel Corp’s Open Arcade Architecture for its promised Acclaim Arcade PC which was to offer developers an arcade platform that allowed for easy migration to the home PC. Now those plans are out the window. A spokesperson for Acclaim noted the quick about- face and said, Every day there’s a change in a business like this. Our core market is the home market and we need to focus on that. It is unclear whether any jobs will be lost with the closure of the unit, but it’s likely a relatively small number of administrative positions could be lost.
