Starbreeze’s stock has been in decline since June and it looks like the recent release of The Walking Dead hasn’t helped at all.
Starbreeze’s stock has been in decline since June and it looks like the recent release of The Walking Dead hasn’t helped at all.
Just before E3 this year, Starbreeze’s stock took a huge nosedive, falling from 16.95 SEK ($1.88) to 9.93 SEK ($1.10) per share.
On November 6, the same day Overkill’s The Walking Dead launched for PC in North America, the company posted pre-tax loss of $11.3 million for Q3 2018 – triple the loss of the previous year.
“Today’s the day of our biggest release since Payday 2 more than five years ago,” Starbreeze CEO Bo Andersson said in the company’s interim report . “Overkill’s The Walking Dead is an important release for Starbreeze and is obviously our main focus right now.
“The game is the first we are releasing of the eight major games we have invested in to establish Starbreeze as a major and successful game company that is in it for the long haul.”
It is now well over a week since the game launched on Steam, and it has a mixed reception and a peak concurrent player count of just 14,292. In comparison, Payday 2’s peak was 247,628, although that figure was admittedly helped along by a promotion where the game was offered for free for a limited time.
For now, Starbreeze seems to be all in on The Walking Dead, which is planned to be improved upon and iterated over time, just like Payday 2.
“Today’s the day of our biggest release since Payday 2 more than five years ago,” Starbreeze says in the interim report. “Overkill’s The Walking Dead is an important release for Starbreeze and is obviously our main focus right now. Our expectations are high and the game received good and valuable feedback from the media and our community during the important beta phase.
“The game’s business model is the one we invented and know inside out: games as a service. That means we are releasing a base game that we intend to serve with new content for a long time coming.”
The Walking Dead is the first of eight games Starbreeze has planned. Next up is Payday: Crime War, a mobile take on the company’s popular co-op shooter.
It remains to be seen whether the stock performance will affect investment on System Shock 3 – a game Starbreeze promised $12 million in funding – or the planned release of Psychonauts 2.
The interim report also mentions Payday 3, although that appears to be the farthest out from the announced upcoming games. Perhaps the company will move to expedite its release, considering the success of Payday 2.
We reached out to Starbreeze last week for comment, but we haven’t heard back. The stock has declined even more since then, and looking at the year in stock on Yahoo finance paints a grim picture.
