• yamanii@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    It’s really a sad seeing Ubisoft going from a trendsetter up until Far Cry 3, to being a failed trend chaser.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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    18 hours ago

    “Tanked”

    Checks graph

    19% is a hit but I wouldn’t call it tanked.

    Some stocks are just volatile. Here is the full history:

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      15 hours ago

      Whenever I see social media say something dropped/jumped, I do the same thing as you - I visit the portfolio and take a birds eye view.

      I still think about the one time redditors celebrated a company’s stock dropping by 90% over the last day.

      But what the picture left out was how the company was climbing by 1000% in a week before dropping.

      • trankillity@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        WTF you think happened in 2020? No one could leave their house, so video game went gang busters.

        I worked at a video game retailer then, and it was the busiest we’ve ever been.

  • Obinice@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    You can make any graph look bad if you control the axis bounds weirdly like this.

    Not that I have good things to say about ubisoft, but at a glance one would assume their stock value plummeted to zero, which is not the case.

    • HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      This was also my initial take but look at these graphs with the Y axis starting from 0 Stock lost 67% value in the last year alone, and lost 85% in the past 5 years. Looks pretty dire to me. I would say this is undervalued but I have no confidence in the ubi leadership to turn it around.

      • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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        13 hours ago

        Might be that the CEO and upper management are dumb fucks running the company to the ground.

        No more innovation, just microtransactions in shitty games, and the same old rehashed concepts.

        • omarfw@lemmy.world
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          I saw an anecdote from someone who used to work there and they said their infrastructure and resources were outdated as hell. Basically zero support or investment from leadership. Those corpos are intentionally just trying to milk them and the customers dry before total collapse or a buyout.

  • Eiri@lemmy.ca
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    17 hours ago

    Has something in particular been happening lately? I feel like Ubisoft has sucked for quite a while, but their stock price was fine until relatively recently, right?

  • branch@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    Was ubisoft ever okay though? They always have problems going on whether it be a hostile takeover or this, but they always bounce back somehow surprisingly.

  • dustyData@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I hate graphs that don’t start the Y axis at zero.

    That said, fuck ubisoft.

    • huginn@feddit.it
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      1 day ago

      That’s pretty normal for financial charts like this though.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        And it’s dumb. It says all you need to know about the ethical integrity of most economists. Lying for profit.

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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          Jesus fuck no, it’s a valid graph. It shows the relative trend over time and the sudden change. It may show less of a change if it was zero based, but a drastic change that is well off the normal trend is important to visualize. Also like, all exchanges have a toggle to flip to the zero based.

          • yannic@lemmy.ca
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            I’d argue it doesn’t accurately show the relative value at a cursory glance. The chart shows the area under the curve having decreased over 90%, but when looking at the y-axis, you can see that initial assessment was misled.

            In a speculative industry like finance, shouldn’t we try our best to make charts less… alarmist?

          • dustyData@lemmy.world
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            Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.

            • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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              The stock is tanking. 20% is a huge drop for any massive company. Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this? From my very rough calculations, Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop. That’s more than any fine they’ve had.

              The worst day in Stock Market history was Black Thursday, the beginning of the Great Recession. The market only dropped 11% that day. (Somebody call me out if I got those numbers slightly wrong, that’s from Wikipedia). These are massive numbers, that I don’t think you fully appreciate or understand. The stock market usually deals in single digit or more likely fractional amounts of change. Double digit changes are a huge deal.

              • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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                23 hours ago

                Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop.

                So they have 300 million dollars less to spend? They’re going to fire 300 million dollars worth of talent? Their bank account changed by 300 million dollars?

                No, they did not lose 300 million dollars.

              • dustyData@lemmy.world
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                24 hours ago

                Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?

                I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.

                If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s

            • protist@mander.xyz
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              1 day ago

              You can see right there at the top of the graph it’s down 20% in the given timeframe. There are ways to make graphs misleading, but there’s nothing misleading at all about zooming in on the data in this chart

              • dustyData@lemmy.world
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                Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.

                • protist@mander.xyz
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                  1 day ago

                  Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant

                  Yes, and that’s literally all this post is trying to convey. This post is not a news report or a economist’s dissertation, this is a screenshot of the pre-bell stock price posted to a gaming community on Lemmy

            • chris@l.roofo.cc
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              1 day ago

              If you are not in for the dividents or the voting privileges stocks are always a game of “I hope someone is dumb enough to pay more than me for these shares”.

              • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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                23 hours ago

                Or someone else is in it for those things.

                Markets aren’t based on one party being dumber than the other one. Markets work because different people value different things.

        • ArtVandelay@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          If you are trying to show year-over-year profit and you have $100 million give or take a few thousand, then starting your y-axis at zero is going to be a pretty worthless graph

        • cheddar@programming.dev
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          23 hours ago

          And that’s why I can’t take online activists seriously. 100% of agenda, 0% of brain.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          The axes are clearly labeled so I’m not really quite sure what the concern is.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        22 hours ago

        A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      13 hours ago

      There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn’t give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.

        • SSJMarx@lemm.ee
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          17 hours ago

          Every time BTC crashes I say to myself, “I shouldn’t bet on it coming back, this will surely be The One.” Nope, currently higher than it was before the last one.

          • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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            2 hours ago

            There’s always someone betting it will go up, just as much as someone is betting to go down, but right now, Blackrock and Fidelity own a lot of BTC, and are selling it to investors via actual, official ETF funds.

            You can go on Fidelity and buy into this fund without ever touching BTC, and follow the price along with the holders, just like a gold or oil stock.

            things are going to be interesting over the next few years. BTC has entities invested in it’s future. I don’t expect a crash below the ETF price, which… from memory was around $50k, because then investors are in the red.

            I’m not in BTC, but it’s a fun thing to watch. Personally, I think the mining of it is a cancer to society, but once you strip all of that way, it’s just another index fund as long as private entities can manipulate the waves in their favor.

            I like gold more. You can make stuff with it, buuut Gold is at an ATH… buuut if Kamala wins, BTC will dump and Gold is a sanctuary hold for a lot of BTC holders, so, man what a year it’s gonna be.

  • Katana314@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.

    It’s fun to laugh at one failure, and it’s nice we still get occasional great indie hits. But when most major publishers fail to turn out anything of interest, and even Sony is kind of reaching vanishing expectations amid remasters of remasters, it becomes hard to even suggest what to buy an unknowledgeable kid for Christmas.

    • delitomatoes@lemm.ee
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      15 hours ago

      Japanese publishers retain staff because every Japanese company does, they don’t pay as well but you get life time job stability. Capcom is on a roll, Sega still has RGG, Bandai Namco has Fromsoft. They have the chokehold on jrpgs. And finally Nintendo is still king

    • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      I’d say I’m happy that AAA companies are reaping what they sow from listening to their dumbass stakeholders.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        The point is that it’s not just them paying the price, though. With continuous years of NO publishers putting out anything interesting, we’re at a point where people are just less interested in anything that’s coming out.

        It’s a carrot and stick problem to some degree. They know now we hate microtransaction-laden live service games, but it’s harder to define what players would enjoy. Keep in mind, there’s many cases of simply letting the developers cook that haven’t worked out either.

        • turmacar@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          There’s plenty of publishers putting out interesting games.

          They’re just not the traditional AAA / “AAAA” games companies because they’ve grown so big they’re hidebound.

          • Katana314@lemmy.world
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            20 hours ago

            I agree when it comes to taste-specific stuff. I’m playing Steamworld Heist 2 and have Tactical Breach Wizards in my wishlist, so indie tactics games have been satisfying me - they’re certainly good and interesting, as you say.

            But, those aren’t games I’d recommend to everyone. It does mean not much water cooler discussion since no one is playing the “same” games in most social circles. It used to be, a big release like Halo came out and everyone was talking about it, playing it, and discovering things together.

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              16 hours ago

              I mean that’s everything. There isn’t a “movie of the summer” anymore really, no I Love Lucy / Cheers / Friends / Simpsons that basically everyone is watching or familiar with. It’s been true for longer with books/music because of the lower gateways to entry and being able to be a “local artist”, but not by much, and even for them it’s exploded since the Internet became mainstream.

              The democratization of publication has dramatically broadened the type and quality of things being made and no industry titans really have figured out how to promote around that. At least not consistently.

        • Wolfram@lemmy.world
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          I fully understand your first point and that is how I feel. That’s why I made my comment; I and others have been dealing with endless AAA slop that mostly hasn’t been intriguing for a long time. Even if its a certain game franchise I’m not interested in, I understand other people’s pain of it been driven into the ground with micro transactions and buggier and buggier games.

      • arefx@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        I’m not saying this to be a dick, I would just like to add, no regrets on building my PC.

    • Sabata@ani.social
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      I appreciate them for the effort they put into bankrupting companies that make AAA corpo slop. Ubisoft could not have stopped Ubisoft without the help of Ubisoft. If were lucky EA could hop on board and bankrupt EA by acting like EA.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      There’s probably a whole thesis or five to be written on the subject.

      The “traditional” AAA pipeline is “make big games with loooots of assets and mechanics, maximize playtime, must be an Open World and/or GaaS”. Both due to institutional pressures (lowest common denominator, investor expectations for everyone to copy the R* formula, GaaS are money printing machines) and technical reasons (open worlds are easy to do sloppily, you can just deliver the game half finished and have it work (e.g. Cyberpunk), GaaS/open worlds are a somewhat natural consequence of extremely massive development teams that simply could not work together on a more narrowly focused genre).

      That’s not to say there aren’t good expensive games being payrolled by massive studios like Sony or Microsoft. But AAA is a specific subset of those, and blandness comes with the territory. However if I was a betting man I’d say we’re nearing the end of this cycle with the high profile market failures of the last few years and the AAA industry will have to reinvent itself at least somewhat. Investors won’t want to be left holding the bag for the next Concord.

    • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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      21 hours ago

      I am curious if the games community has anything positive to say about major publishers at this point.

      I’m laughing a lot, is that a positive? These are all self-inflicted wounds because they mistook “shareholders” for the customers.

    • greenskye@lemm.ee
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      23 hours ago

      90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.

      Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.

      • Katana314@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Right - they don’t even make a game a decade anymore, and even Deadlock is in a genre many people aren’t interested in.

        • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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          It’s a invite only alpha and as I write this it’s #7 on the steam rankings of current players, 6 if you wanna exclude Banana which is it’s own hilarious thing

          Dota 2 is #2 and has 565k right now

        • zzx@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          God deadlock is so good though I have to say. I have hundreds of hours already. This is coming from someone who HATED mobas and would still probably never touch dota or League

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            22 hours ago

            Agreed. As someone who doesn’t really like shooters and never got into League or DOTA, I had mixed feelings about playing a ‘hero shooter/moba’. I’m actually blown away at how good it is. They did phenomenal job. 10/10.

        • Katana314@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          I don’t think there’s that many big-budget releases you can invest in if you care about Denuvo. Even the Ace Attorney games, re-releases of old DS visual novels, have been getting Denuvo’d.

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    I guess the anti-woke crowd is having a hard-on rn. I don’t play ubisoft’s games but I know a lot of good persons who work there around Quebec, and many of them fear losing their jobs.

    • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip
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      23 hours ago

      To quote Jason Schreier, “whenever anything bad happens, worst people on the internet will be there to blame diversity”

      • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Disgusting.

        This isn’t about being diverse. It’s about making bad games.

        As a matter of fact, the new assassin’s Creed is so offensive that the Japanese government is in an uproar about it.

        Ubisofts attempt to be so inclusive and sexually neutral is what’s making their games bad because they’re stifling good game design in the process.

        That’s not to say that it’s not possible to make a good game while adhering to diversification and inclusion.

        Hellblade and horizon zero Dawn are two excellent examples of incredibly good games that don’t expound sexism. Hell, look at destiny 2. They handle these kinds of situations perfectly!

        But to simply imply people are upset because they don’t like “woke politics” is a gross over simplification of what’s happening to Ubisoft!

        • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip
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          Neither of us said that people are ONLY upset because “woke politics”. Original comment is saying that those people are probably celebrating right now because they were “right” and I’m simply pointing out that whenever this happens, the anti-woke crowd think that it’s because of the woke politics. There are plethora of reason to be upset with Ubisoft, just like there were plethora of reasons to not play concord.

        • Odum@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          In response to the whole bit about the Japanese government, it seems that the quotes were taken way more seriously than they should have been. Pretty cookie cutter responses that also say that It isn’t really their concern.

          https://www.gamesradar.com/games/assassin-s-creed/assassins-creed-shadows-debate-somehow-reaches-japanese-government-ministries-who-reportedly-remind-everyone-that-historical-fiction-isnt-really-their-concern-at-all/

        • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
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          Nah, the Japaneses government doesn’t care about fictional characters in a videogame. Neither are French-Canadians mad about being depicted as mimes with bread sticks in South Park.

          Oh and “it’s about making bad games” . The GAME ISN’T EVEN OUT YET. Just don’t buy it and stop crying because there’s a black character in fictional universe or because you don’t want to fuck the main protagonist of Star Wars game (I personally find here damn hot btw lol).

    • yamanii@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      When a game is successful it’s because of the executive, but when it bombs it’s the fault of the workers, sadly.

  • kandoh@reddthat.com
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    22 hours ago

    Ubisoft made some of my favorite games as a kid. Real shane shitty management and a culture of sexual harassment have ruined their legacy

    • Destide@feddit.ukOP
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      You are correct, it’s been on a downward slope since about 2021 but had a another sharp dip this morning probaly following the news they were delaying Asassins Creed

      • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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        A rushed game is usually pretty bad, a delayed game is eventually good. While I dont hold AC in very high regard, im glad they told people that it needs more time to cook instead of throwing it out there half-baked.

            • ours@lemmy.world
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              24 hours ago

              Such a tragedy. And that was a game that just needed a tech upgrade, expand a bit, more of the same, nothing crazy.

              • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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                23 hours ago

                They tryed to put a story in ksp2. That’s how bad they misunderstood the franchise.

                Oh and you can still join the discord if you want to talk to people who still believe in ksp2 (its fascinating).

              • tibi@lemmy.world
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                23 hours ago

                To be fair, those tech upgrades aren’t exactly trivial to do, and most programmers aren’t skilled enough to do it.

                These kinds of projects need very careful management to avoid running overtime and over budget.

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                  7 hours ago

                  I don’t know, the first one was cobbled up together from early access by programmers at a marketing firm and while janky (part of the charm some would say), it was quite an achievement.

                  The approach which should have delivered better results was wrecked with takeovers and company drama then dumped to the public in a bad state.

        • tomi000@lemmy.world
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          Yea. Really sad to see the price theyre paying for making the right decision once is 20% of their stock price…

        • SirDerpy@lemmy.world
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          Quartery earnings report due 10/25. There’s no reason to sit capital here if there’s no catalyst for change.

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          1 day ago

          It’s not much of a delay. It was supposed to come out in 2 months, but delayed another 2 months. Doesn’t seem like much time to get any real work done.

          They also cancelled their premier at the Tokyo game show days before schedule. I have to wonder if they’re worried about the backlash that a lot of games are getting lately (Dustborn, Concord, etc) and just trying to push the game a little bit further out to avoid controversy?