It looks like Cryptic Studios had its choice of buyers rather than being courted just by Infogrames/Atari. While the publisher announced that they have purchased Cryptic earlier this week, Edge Online reports that Ubisoft was also in the running to buy the original City of Heroes developer.

Ubisoft's chief financial officer Alain Martinez admitted during a speech today in New York, "We lost one deal, which we were a bit mad to lose: Cryptic, a U.S. company that was taken by Atari. We were disappointed, but that was one try at an MMO." Ubisoft has made it no secret that it wants to enter the MMO genre including one based on their Tom Clancy franchise.

Meanwhile our sister site GameDaily has posted up a new chat with Atari's president Phil Harrison who talked more about this week's Cryptic Studios purchase. Harrison stated that in terms of future MMO revenues, a micro-transaction model is looking more and more viable. He states, "I think it's going to become the preeminent business model for the future, but not all games will work for that style. Some will be subscription-based, some will be micro-transaction-based and some will be a combination of the two."