Today, on August 27, the world release of Control, the new Remedy game, officially took place. A few days before that, the studio management sold part of its own shares.
The Finnish journalist Karo Haamaalaainen (Karo Hämäläinen) was the first to draw attention to the situation. He calls this story a case.
What happened
On Monday, August 19, Remedy CEO Tero Virtala expressed optimism about the future performance of Control. According to him, the game had good presales.
After this statement, the company’s share price soared from €10.40 to €12.20.
Already on Wednesday, August 21, the same Virtala sold 20 thousand of its shares Remedy is already for €250 thousand (€12.53 for each paper).
The main shareholder and technical director of the company, Maaki Markus, also took part in the auction. He sold 150,000 shares worth €1.9 million (already at €12.50 per share).
Now, after the warm reception of the game by the press (81 points on Metacritic), the value of the company’s shares remains quite high — € 12.15.
Why was it sold
At NeoGAF, this step was immediately attributed to the lack of faith of the leadership Remedy to the Future Control. However, in such a case, Marcus would most likely have tried to get rid of most of his securities (he had 3.4 million of them as of December last year), and not a small part.
The situation was clarified a little later by Virtala himself. According to him, he and Marcus wanted to wait for the sales window after the announcement of the company’s results for the first half of the year. The results were published on August 13. In particular, thanks to this, the studio’s shares have reached peak values in their entire history.
The top of Remedy felt that this was the best moment to sell. Moreover, over the past two years, it has never sold shares.
They did not want to sell securities after the release of Control in Remedy. They understood that the first concrete results would immediately show what sales to expect in the future. Then there would be no opportunity for sale.
What’s next
Virtala and Marcus don’t think they’ve done anything wrong. According to our colleagues from Helsing Sanomat, according to European laws, insiders do not have the right to trade company shares within 30 days before the publication of financial reports. After that, there are no restrictions.
As for the Control, then her future looks good so far. The game has high ratings, it is one of the exclusives of the Epic Games Store on PC, and the cost of its development, despite the AAA status, according to Virtal, amounted to a relatively small € 20-30 million.
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