Ah, it’s good someone is looking out for the poor poor shareholders. Just earlier I saw a long line of them at the unemployment office, begging for food from passerbyes, destitute in their poverty. /s
The shareholders at the local yacht club were really bummed out because many of them were saving really hard to add another ship to their collection, and some might even have to cancel a 2 week international vacation. Ive started a GoFundMe because no shareholder should feel so deprived of those basic needs.
It really is sad these days. You can see them holding signs written on the back of Form 10-K documents at road intersections say things like:
“Need dividends. Any amount helps. God Bless.”
But really, you have to just ignore them. You know anything you give them they’re just going to blow on equities in unproven klepto-corporate business models with over aggressive spending attempting to capture market share in industries paying abusively small wages to their destitute workers. You can try to help them like I did one time:
Me: "Hey, here’s a couple of shares in a company that hires those recently released from prison for light industrial assembly work giving them a good reference for future employment. Its not worth much, but they do some good for the community."
Them: "Can I as a shareholder petition the board to fire the ex-cons, ship the assembly work offshore, and perform a stock buyback increasing the value of the shares?"
Me: "I don’t think the board is interested in that as it violates the company mission"
Holy shit, it’s actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn’t been able to beat 5000 since November… I know people love throwing the ‘dead game’ meme around prematurely, but if this isn’t dead yet, it’s definitely got one foot in the grave.
I played it a lot at launch. Frankly it’s just boring after a while. There’s only something like 6 or 7 missions. You get no rewards for completing missions except for random achievements and cash, which is pretty useless overall.
As an Embracer shareholder, I think i’m ready to sell at a loss and move on with my life. This company is doomed. I’ve lost more than value watching them go to shit, they’ve actively killed projects I cared about. They are going to fall apart and nobody will touch the IP.
CALLING ALL THE CONDESCENDING PEOPLE WHO KEPT SAYING “LETS JUST WAIT AND SEE” WHEN PEOPLE LIKE ME POINTED OUT THIS WOULD HAPPEN WHEN THEIR BELOVED GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO SOLD ITSELF TO EMBRACER
There is a precise technical answer to your question a finance person can probably give you but it doesn’t really answer the question no matter how many acronyms they throw at you.
The actual answer is that there is no reason any of this has to be rational. Business people believe so strongly that companies like embracer are valuable and have a function in society that they detect zero cognitive dissonance when said companies don’t actually do anything but buy smaller companies, dissect them and destroy value.
You can’t understand business and finance people like they are scientists, they are closer to priests of a religious sect that believe in things because of their belief system not because of some rational framework that actually supports their ideas.
I think for the rich, it is just “good practice” to commit economic violence against smaller companies, it is good hygiene for keeping the power in the hands of the rich like mowing a field once a year or something. This doesn’t fully explain how poorly some of these companies function like embracer however.
We always hear about shit companies like embracer, but who are the actual people in charge? Who are the people who are very bad at their jobs and should be publically ostracized for damaging not only their ips but the lives of hundreds to thousands of working developers? Like what are their names? Who are these faceless scumbags?
Embracer is just a name to hide behind, the people involved in the decisionmaking here should be known by name, like Bobby “incredible piece of human filth” Kotick
I honestly do believe Lars Wingefors is passionate about games and the industry, he’s been trying to find a place in it his whole career, but I do not think he’s a good business man nor worthy of stewardship for these IPs.
Very well could be. I didn’t research their backgrounds. I just know from first hand experience of people who get jobs who graduated with business degrees who don’t care about the stuff they sell.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne