It’s not against the rules because chodes like these guys get to write the rules. If we judge wether or not something is harmful by if it’s legal or not, our civil rights will continue to erode.
No, this is against the rules. Perhaps the penalties aren't harsh enough, as most financial crimes come with very little actual punishment, but there are penalties.
Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
They're announced months in advance and can either trigger on a set date, or at a set stock price. It's more complex than that, and can involve taxes and shit, but the sale itself was above board(ish).
They likely delayed the announcement of the fees to ensure a higher stock price for the sale, which starts getting into a gray area.
If it’s scheduled, which I know a lot of execs need to do anyways to trade stock, and it’s not just randomized and he knows when those sales happen, and he knows his decision is going to tank the price, he can manipulate what he announces and when it’s announced.
What’s stopping him from just announcing this, selling the stock in a timer, then waiting just before he’s scheduled to buy stock and announce that he’s changed his mind?
If I’m the guy who bought that stock from him I’d want to sue. He fucked some sucker over
It only looks like insider trading if you forget the definition of insider trading and only read a headline curated to ignore the important details that show small, consistent sales across time regardless of company activities.
Well yeah of course I didn’t read the article. I don’t give much of a fuck about it. I took the headline at face value (“sold stock days before announcement”) and fired off my Lemmy content into the ass crack of this butt land. You’re welcome.
Insider trading is the trading of a public company’s stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company
CEOs have to schedule their sales many months ahead of time. Also, it was 2000 shares, which is peanuts.
The article is focusing on this guy because people know who he is. Instead, they should be focusing on the board members who sold tens of thousands of shares right before the announcement. From Kotaku:
Tomer Bar-Zeev, Unity’s president of growth, …sold 37,500 shares on September 1 for roughly $1,406,250, and board director Shlomo Dovrat, who sold 68,454 shares on August 30 for around $2,576,608.
Also, I actually didn’t know this until yesterday, but CEOs are also permitted to buy shares of their own company, so long as they clear the purchase with the SEC. But that would indicate they’re optimistic about their company…
Glad they’re finally catching up to Xbox from a platform features standpoint. Things like this were why I used to be so pro-Xbox, but that gap is narrowing rapidly.
Maybe they shouldn’t be doing everything possible to drive off consumers. Exclusivity deals everywhere, prices that don’t like to dip, multiple versions of the same game so you need to pay more for the complete thing later. I tried to get into FF with 15, and I actually really liked it. Then all this nonsense happened with FF7R and I just gave up because it seemed like a pain to try and follow the series.
Bloomberg reports that newly-appointed CEO Takashi Kiryu is aiming to improve the company's profitability by whittling down the number of smaller projects it releases, while focusing on big-budget games with a higher potential to improve profitability.
So you're disappointed with the sales of these enormous games that spend far too long in development and don't get the return you want, and your plan is to double down on these games instead of Dragon Quest Builders and Octopath? Here's an idea: take someone who's successfully led a smaller game and then give them progressively larger projects to lead. And maybe don't make a main entry in your marquis series exclusive to a single console in an age where the PC market will likely outsell it.
That person ends up being the success or failure of the project. If they're doing a bad or mediocre job there's nothing that can change that course because you won't know that until it's too late. The flip-side is that it prevents 'design-by-committee' mediocrity and can allow people with bold visions to express those ideas.
Having the scumbag of a CEO in the headline may have been a mistake. Riccitiello sold the least shares in the recent transaction history of the company. Also, I don’t know where you get your "retaining over 3000000 shares’ from. The source says Riccitiello sold all his shares in his possession.
The article mentions two others:
Tomer Bar-Zeev who sold 37.5k shares on 1st September, for around $1.4m. Shlomo Dovrat, meanwhile, sold 68k shares on 30th August for around $2.5m.
Bar-Zeev sold 37500 shares of ~1300000 owned on automated sell. That’s a factor of ten and a fair bit away from 2k sold from 3 mil, but that might be normal. It was automated, after all.
Dovrat’s transaction is mostly the same, roughly double the shares sold and roughly double the shares owned. However, it was not automated.
I believe the article mentioned them because they sold the most, but they clearly weren’t taking the amount retained into account. The third most sold, however, by Robynne Sisco was a sell of 25768, retaining 14700 (sold ~64%).
There are a fair number of other sells, but if the Bar-Zeev and Dovrat sells don’t look suspicious, nothing else will stand out.
What does seem a little odd- and I have no idea if this is at all unusual- is that in the last twelve months, more shares have been bought than sold (net shares almost 10,000,000), and in the last 3 months more shares have been sold than bought (net shares almost 3,500,000). In the last 3 months, the number of insider traders is a little over 1/3 of the amount of insider trades over the last 12 months (under the assumption it should be about 1/4). All of the insider buys seem to be the options granted for working for Unity. I assume it isn’t too odd for the board of directors to sell and never buy, but they have increased selling a fair bit in the last 3 months, and it seems specifically the last two weeks.
More confusing accounting that I’ve never learned, and probably never will.
At first I thought it was because of direct/indirect ownership. But what is the point of “5. Amount of Securities Beneficially Owned Following Reported Transaction(s) (Instr. 3 and 4)” being 3mil with no transaction, but the 2000 stock transaction showing they owned none? I see nothing on the form or in the definition showing that direct or indirect ownership show be reported differently. They are all owned by the ‘reporting person’. But clearly this is all me just not being able to read how they filled it out.
I agree $80k is nothing to $100mil, I do believe that if they have 3mil of securities, then it doesn’t matter, no matter how high or low the securities are worth. I disagree with the idea that automation makes it not suspicious, though. If the stocks were all automatically sold off, then the company devalues itself afterwards, it has the same intent and outcome as any other insider trading.
Ok, so the report is on the person (CEO in this case). Only directors and certain executive levels are required to report.
Table I shows ‘non-derivative securities’ (regular stock). The CEO holds in their own name 3 million+ shares. No transaction was reported for those, but they have to be listed.
The CEO’s spouse aquired 2000 shares at a cost of $1.425 each. After this transaction, they had 2000 shares total (column 5).
They then sold those shares for $40 each. After, they weren’t holding any stock, so column 5 shows 0.
The CEO financially benefits from this, so the transactions are listed on their form, as (I) for indirect. If the spouse also had a position within Unity which required reporting this would be listed on their own SEC form as well.
Oh man, people are releasing physical copies of new games on retro consoles, right? Is anybody making a game that you can plug into the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge?
I think the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge could be added to any game and it would generate a new level based on the content of it, but I’d love to see someone check!
eurogamer.net
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