I couldn’t make it to E3 this year. Apparently I’m not the only one.

LOS ANGELES (CNN/Money) – Last year’s E3 was the Phantom’s coming out party.

Infinium Labs, the company behind the on-demand video game service, spent millions of dollars for an elaborate booth meant to quiet growing speculation at the time that the service — and the system that powered it — were non-existent.
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In a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Infinium Labs said there’s a good chance it won’t raise enough money to launch its key product in time, putting its existence at risk.

“The company believes, based on past performance, that there is a high likelihood that sufficient capital will not be available … and many or all of these milestones will be missed and the launch date will again shift and/or the company will go out of business,” it said in the April 20 filing with the SEC.
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But while it hopes to offer at least 10,000 of the Phantom machines by year-end, Infinium acknowledged in the filing that “no firm launch date has been set” for the system. Previously announced launch dates have been missed.

The ironic thing, of course, is that it turns out they weren’t entirely on crack. It’s just the guys already making consoles are going to beat them to the punch. Catch this quote from a report about the Next-Generation Nintendo:

Eschewing the company’s previous business ideas, the Revolution will be online-friendly and will support a broadband gaming service similar to that of Microsoft’s Xbox Live. Its most significant contribution to online gaming will be the ability to download Nintendo’s entire catalog of NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 console games. As for GameCube titles, they have the potential to be downloadable, though it’s not clear whether the games will be saved to storage devices or memory cards.

So the good news is that they weren’t, apparently, on as much crack as the conventional wisdom suggested. The bad news, though, is that they aren’t going to profit from their vision.

Hey, having ideas are cheap. Being able to execute – that’s the hard part.