Midway to launch online games portal

Midway president David Zucker has told investors that the company plans to launch an online casual games portal in the near future, in an attempt to bolster the company's position following a loss of USD 97.4 million for the last financial year.

In a conference call following the announcement of the company's results, Zucker also added that Midway would be announcing some casual console titles shortly.

This move follows high levels of income being generated by the likes of Nintendo with its Brain Training titles and Wii games, and echoes similar sentiments coming out of Infogrames/Atari in the past week.

However, it's likely that any casual offering would remain in addition to the more traditional range of titles that the company is already working on.

Midway has invested huge amounts of money in developing proprietary technology for a range of new intellectual properties, although of the titles to benefit, so far only Stranglehold and Blacksite have been released.

Zucker acknowledged that 2008 would be a challenging year, but stated his belief that this investment would stand the company in good stead as it leverages the progress made by its development teams over the next few years.