stock posts

Funcom CEO sells company stock

by Shawn Schuster Aug 25th 2008 at 1:30PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Real life, Age of Conan, Economy, MMO industry

Sure it may be completely innocent, but it's interesting nonetheless. According to a recent announcement, Funcom's CEO Trond Aas has recently sold 400,000 shares of his company's stock. The announcement also states that these shares were sold "primarily to cover Mr. Aas' acquisition costs of the shares as well as accumulated wealth tax costs of the past six years as a result of the holdings in Funcom." This 400,000 number represents only a fraction of the shares owned by the CEO.

While this Brighthub article tends to focus on the timing of the sale, pointing out that Age of Conan has already lost nearly half of its customers, no official connection has been made. However, the stock's price has fallen quite dramatically lately, closing at $13.60 per share on August 22, 2008, which is down from $55.50 per share on Age of Conan's release in May.

Update: This is a take on the Brighthub article more than anything, blaming AoC for everything, not to be confused with this original post. Plus, we get a look at the actual announcement about the stock sales itself. Sorry for any confusion of duplicates.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, ceo, funcom, stock, trond-aas

Funcom suffering a loss of investor confidence

by Alexis Kassan Jul 27th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Age of Conan, Business models, MMO industry

Funcom, makers of Age of Conan, are dealing with some serious financial flux. Since the launch of AoC, their stock has tumbled from $54 to $24 a share on the Oslo Stock Exchange (last price as of the end of the trading day on Friday). This represents the loss of over 55% of the stock value. With little news coming from the world of high finance on the subject, it seems that investors may be jumping ship from the gaming industry starlet.

Much speculation continues to be made regarding the true status of Age of Conan and its success or failure, with references to the bugs of all sizes seen post-launch. There have also been several accusations of forum censorship and a number of highly publicized player flights from the game, which may be contributing to market fears that the game is in trouble with its fan base.

On the flip side, it should be noted that the price of Funcom stock had been fairly steady, around $25, for several months prior to March of this year. A sharp increase in price coincided with the release of X-Play pre-order statistics for AoC about two months before boxes hit the shelves. That was followed by a distinct downturn just a few weeks after the game's drop date and the slide has continued since, returning it back to familiar price territory just this past week.

So the question remains: was the $54 stock price just a temporary bubble around the launch when pre-orders were running rampant or have investors been scared off with the sentiment around the game?

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, finance, funcom, investors, stock

NCsoft: has the focus shifted?

by Jonathan Northwood Nov 23rd 2007 at 9:30PM

Filed under: MMO industry, News items, Tabula Rasa

NCsoft -- known for such stunningly beautiful games as Guild Wars and Lineage/Lineage II -- is slowly expanding its focus in Korea into the non-game sector. Working with in-house studio Openmaru, the company is building a series of online services to aid in comforting investors. Admittedly, the South Korean Won (KRW) is trading in a slightly stronger position against the United States Dollar (USD) now than it was in October, but that doesn't stop their concern over seeing NCsoft's stock slowly spiral downward from 86,4000 KRW in October (approximately $94.43/share) to 45,000 KRW ($48.27/share) as of Friday's market close. As a result of this move, CEO Kim Taek-jin has promised that the company will increase its investment in online applications, including data and schedule management programs and social-networking services.

Tags: breaking, City-of-Heroes, City-of-Villains, CoH, CoV, CoX, Gamerankings.com, Kim-Taek-jin, Lineage, Lineage-II, MMORPG, MSNBC, NCsoft, Online-Services, Openmaru, Scott-Taves, Stock, Tabula-Rasa

The Value of Second Life

by Akela Talamasca Nov 6th 2007 at 8:45AM

Filed under: Business models, Economy, MMO industry, Second Life

This TechCrunch article lets drop that one of Linden Lab's early investors, Catamount Ventures, sold ten percent of their stock to a third party for an undisclosed amount that was valuated at 'above half a billion' dollars, as stated by an anonymous source with knowledge of the company.

What surprises me most about this article, beyond the massive amounts of money being mentioned, are the mostly positive comments after the article. Having seen rather a lot of these go by, I expected a ton of lame duck jokes about the value of Second Life being virtually nothing, etc. but by and large people are taking it seriously. Of course, for me and thousands of others, the true value in SL is its social component. Without that one-to-one connection, there truly is little to value.

(Via techcrunch.com)

Tags: catamount-ventures, investor, linden-lab, massively, second-life, stock, tech-crunch, value