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Why Robin Makes Batman Better Majesco’s share price has again wandered south of Wall Street’s Mendoza line, prompting NASDAQ to tell the maker of Cooking Mama to get it back north of $US1 or face delisting from the exchange.
I’m just a simple caveman lawyer, and your world of finance frightens and confuses me. However, it sounds like Viacom wants a refund on a substantial bonus it paid to Harmonix’s founders.
Carl Icahn, whose 11 per cent ownership of Take-Two Interactive was by itself enough to restart buyout chatter, has grabbed another one million shares of the publisher according to a securities filing last week.
Atari found its new chief financial officer from TheLadders.com. Not that they went literally advertising on the service, which promises careers paying more than $US100,000 annually. They got the guy who was its veep for finance.
Major League Gaming got another US$7.5 million from one of its venture capital firms, which called the pro video gaming league “a cultural phenomenon.”
Things are tough all over. Despite being branded as a “recession proof” industry, the publicly traded stocks of video game publishers dropped like a rock today, following news that the US House of Representatives had rejected a $700 billion bail out for failing financial services.
Hardest hit? It’s looking like Activision Blizzard in the States, which dropped nearly 14% today. GameSpot ran the numbers on the publishers trading on the NASDAQ and it’s not looking pretty. Foreign stocks got a beating today too, with Ubisoft losing value to the tune of $17.92 over a period of a few hours. Ouch.
Careful out there, kids. Watch out for falling investors.
Market freefall drags down game stocks [GameSpot]
I’ve mentioned the unfortunately named Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection blog a couple of times, but I really do love it — I’m always curious to see what gems will be dredged up from the archives. Following on the heels of a post from Owen on five games to play during a stock market crash comes a post showing what (some) people were playing during the financial downturn of 1987. In addition to some less stimulating titles from ‘Blue Chip Software,’ we get the fantastic box art of Wall$treet and the dismal sounding Black Monday, among others:
If you’re into stock and finances you might recall that BlizzAct offered to buy up as much as 146.5 million shares of their common stock at $US 27.5 a pop. Well their offer wrapped up last week and they’re announcing today they managed to snag nearly 86,000 shares for about $US 2.3 million.
I’m a little surprised that they weren’t able to grab up more of their stock, but I’m even more surprised that they planned on financing the entire buy up with cash on hand. Am I the only one who thinks that the BlizzAct folks walk around with life-sized, solid-gold avatars that they dress up for fun. Wasteful! I’d spend all my WoW loot on monkeys and monkey training. And maybe monkey nappies… maybe.
Via Shacknews late Friday, Atari reported $AU 25.12 million net loss in its fiscal year ending March 31, 2008, the last FY on its books before it starts getting a monthly allowance from Infogrames, and a lecture on the value of money.
The $AU 25.12M loss however is one-third the $AU 74.18 fiscal assbeating Atari took in FY07, precipitating the whole Infogrames merger/buyout/$AU 21.29M loan announced April 30 and taking effect the third quarter of this year. Also, Atari’s loss includes about $AU 6.92 million in corporate restructuring charges. rather than regular business. Still, revenue was about $AU 85.14 million, less than $AU 129.84 million of a year before. So there wasn’t the kind of expenses that go toward publishing crappy games games, but there wasn’t anything to sell either.
Some brands, no matter how sickly they become, can just go on forever because they got in the race early, no matter where they dropped out. Just ask United Press International. Or Ovaltine. So if Atari is shifting to social, casual, whatever you want to call it, that’s probably going after brand of low-awareness game consumer who thinks Atari’s been around forever and will give games under its title a benefit of the doubt that the publisher didn’t earn in the past five years.
Atari Reports 23.6M Loss for FY2008[Shacknews]
