Stock Market Reacts to Lords of the Fallen Launch; CI Games CEO Rushes to Put Out Fires
The release of Lords of the Fallen was met with a mixed reception and widely diverse reviews. The aftermath is a strong drop in CI Games' shares on the stock market.
Premiere of Lords of the Fallen was as high-profile as it was not entirely successful. Reviewers were strongly divided in their verdicts, and gamers gave vent to their dissatisfaction with the game's technical condition.
Admittedly, the developers are working up a sweat trying to fix all the bugs, and the game's rating on Steam is slowly rising, but the reception of the game on Valve's platform is still "mixed" - it's just 56% of positive player reviews out of more than 10,000 reviews issued.
The market verifies
This state of affairs has clearly reflected on the stock market quotations of the publisher, CI Games. The price of the Polish company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange this morning recorded a decline of 13% (and over the course of a month CI Games' stock price dropped by nearly 50%).
Source: stooq.pl
CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski responded to the stock market situation, recalling on Twitter all the positive aspects of the latest game by CI Games.
"Although most [gamers - ed.] like Lords Of The Fallen, as illustrated by the PlayStation user rating of four out of five stars, we are not resting on our laurels, we continue to listen and respond quickly to player feedback. Two patches released over the weekend have already resolved many of the performance issues affecting a smaller portion of players. We will continue to update the game quickly to further improve the gaming experience in the future."
In addition, Tyminski notes in the comments that Spanish-Romanian studio Hexworks is working hard to improve the game's technical condition, and the reception of Lords of the Fallen on Steam is improving. CI Games' CEO also addressed the future of both the game and the company's operations:
"After the release of Lords of the Fallen we would like to confirm that CI Games is well prepared to make further games (Project Survive and action RPG Project III). In the coming days, we will be announcing key figures for Lords of the Fallen (sales and capital expenditures)."
Tyminski also addressed the topic of closed and open beta testing:
"Closed/open beta testing is now an essential part of the development process when working on such technologically advanced games as Lords of the Fallen. This is a very important learning that we will use in future projects."
Nevertheless, it's important to remember that you can only make a good first impression once, and that didn't work out well for CI Games. Will the second impression improve the company's stock market condition? That remains to be seen in the coming weeks.
