Atari VCS has had some development woes, several delays and issues with demoing the product but it appears it will finally release in autumn and holiday season 2020.
Atari found themselves in a bit of a bind when they couldn't showcase their console to a journalist during a convention, prompting the latter to call it a hunk of plastic . That was two years ago and the company now finally has a release date for the VCS, although it's not like it didn't happen before.
Anyway, the console should be making its way to crowdfunding backers in October 2020 while those who pre-ordered the hardware otherwise will have to wait until holiday season 2020.
Considering this is also when the next generation of consoles is coming out, we can see it negatively impacting Atari's sales plans but it remains to be seen whether a video games market phenomenon will occur and get Atari a win.
The main difference, and probably the main selling point when compared to PS5 or XSX, is that Atari VCS can be an open system as users will apparently be able to instal an operating system of their choice. In other words, Atari are trying to push their hardware as a PC-console hybrid which may or may not be a great thing.
At the price of $390, it could definitely serve as a substitution for a low range PC but it remains to be seen how well it will perform with the games that are going to come out on other consoles.
The actual hardware specs are still not entirely transparent, only mentioning that will feature a 14nm AMD Ryzen CPU and Vega graphics so it's really hard to compare it with the new hardware coming from Sony and Microsoft.
