The final insult to Atari shareholders

Being an Atari shareholder for the past few years has probably been like a slo-mo recreation of getting chainsawed in "Gears of War." Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look at the chart above.

At this point, it's probably good news that Infogrames is offering to buy all the remaining shares of Atari stock on the Nasdaq market that it doesn't own. The scrutiny that will be on new Infogrames/Atari CEO David Gardner and president Phil Harrison as they try and revitalize a moribund company is probably intense enough without them worrying about the price of two separate stocks (Infogrames in France and its subsidiary Atari in the U.S.)

Nonetheless, for whoever's left holding Atari stock, they're being offered the exact same price by Infogrames as it was trading at on Wednesday (the day the non-binding proposal was delivered) : $1.68 per share. Absolutely no premium. That means Infogrames thinks that Atari shareholders don't expect their their stock will go up one penny in the coming months. $1.68 is probably the best price they're going to get and they should be grateful for it.

Just for the sake of comparison, remember that Electronic Arts offered Take-Two shareholders a 64% premium over the trading price. And the board rejected that as too low.