Stellar Blade Dev Shift Up Goes Public, Makes a Huge Pile of Money

If they can land another hit I think they'll cement themselves as a young new contender as a studio

Deserved.

KT opening a new studio after the success of Ronin and SU making a lot of money for the CEO after Stellar Blade their first console game (and the exposition that comes with PS). Looks like the "Exclusives are only good for the publisher" argument only applies when there is bad management behind the games lol.

Now they answer to shareholders...this will end well.

I hope they don't take esg/dei money and start changing their games design. I have hope though since mobile market is ruthless and they can bankrupt themselves easily if they start changing their mobile games design to western esg style, lol.

@Frmknst The problem is not capitalist, it's the stock market greed for always expecting more and more profit which isn't realistic. Some private company like steam seems just fine selling games on their store and nothing else.

I hate when small companies go public. They will surely lose their appeal as time goes on. As they are beholden to shareholders whom only care about bottom lines. These shareholders do not care about anything but making more coin. And shareholders may cater to societal pressure in western countries for certain things if it becomes a problem. The previous full owner made money today at the expense of full control forever.

Great news for Stellar Blade fans, being publicly beholden to shareholders means that it’s incredibly likely that they’ll push into more single player games rather than focus on generating unfathomable amounts of money from gacha mobile games.

@GamingFan4Lyf The largest shareholder is still hold by Shift Up founder and CEO. So i doubt they suddenly changed their course like making games where all female characters wearing burqa or injected DEI stuff just because some shareholder ask the company do something different.

I personally would buy Shift Up share if i have some money since Nikke and Stellar Blade are generating good revenue for the company.

@GymratAmarillo yeah i'm not sure why some people keeps believing the idea that exclusives games doesn't generate money when we already seen many times that exclusives can sold well and even more than multiplat games.

@Vaako007 Haven’t you been over on PX rampantly defending the gamepass price rise….now your here complaining about the selfishness of a small company going public to make money? Pick a lane dude, are you pro conglomerates making money or not? Or is it just cool when it’s a trillion dollar company?

and now they are beholden to esg. Rip the second game being as sexy as the first game if there is a sequel.

And this is the day creative freedom ends for shift up... congrats

Horny teens and lonely middle aged men are a ridiculous group to cater. But it can sure be profitable.

@wiiware "The problem is not capitalist, it's the stock market greed for always expecting more and more profit which isn't realistic."

You can't have capitalism without greed. That sin is inherently built into the capitalistic system.

Imagine the gaming “journalists” face who constantly berated Stellar Blade when they saw this news. Shift Up is now worth more than all of them combined 😂

@Dunkin You can't have humanity without greed. Why single out capitalism? Any and every economic system is vulnerable to corruption and greed.

@Dunkin

Without capitalism there is no game industry. Literally zero.

Games are 100% a waste of resources. Do you feel any guilt at all that your consumption of games is keeping food out of a starving kid's mouth halfway around the world?

We could have diverted these resources to feeding people. You see why that's a silly take?

Btw greed is not inherent in capitalism. That's reductionist nonsense.

As long as the board is controlled by the founders then they can make any game they want. So everyday shareholders are not automatically who calls the shots just because you go public.

@Mince @GreatAuk @Dunkin The problem with the current "capitalism" model (there's no such system as capitalism, Marx called free market "capitalism" it that to mock it - and we all view everything through Marx's broken lens ever since....who won?) isn't "greed" specifically. Humans are greedy by definition. ALL models of dividing resources (economics) are inherently systems for managing greed primarily. Communists are greedy, Socialists are greedy, Anarchists are greedy, everyone's greedy. The whole point of economics is managing the greed into a functional distribution.

What went wrong in the modern world is that the free market system ("capitalism") is entirely incompatible with the post-technological revolution and "information economy.". It's functionality is built entirely on generating inefficiencies that then lead to competition and opportunities to benefit from the inefficiencies left within the system.

However in the post-technological revolution era, real-time data on every activity is recorded, tracked, and processed in real time down to the individual and as a group. Every trend, possibility, result, is tallied, calculated, reacted to in real time, allowing the near total elimination of any and all inefficiency in the system. With the lack of inefficiency generating opportunities, and the instant ability to field and monitor all markets in the world by a single entity, the need for redundant, overlapping players of any given market dissolved, which then led to wholesale consolidation of local to regional to national, to global control of a given industry by only a few players in any industry for the whole planet. And with little to no inefficiency and scales of economies, the possiblity of competition disrupting it by making use of the opportunites created by said inefficiencies is non-existent.

The end result is a "capitalism" that's nearly indistinguishable from a planned/command economy. It's not so much that "capitalism"/free market is bad. It's that "capitalism"/free market effectively no longer exists, and the conditions for it to exist can no longer exist. What we have is more of central planning among an oligarchy of aristocrats and gifted individuals who have near total control of both supply and the ability to create or dissolve demand, as they fight between each other for which one gets the most control. It doesn't really resemble anything similar to a real classical free market ("capitalism". )

@GreatAuk you're very wrong on a couple of things. For example the fact that games as both art, entertainment and education aren't a total waste of recourses. Art will always have a central role in almost every ideology.

You're right though, that we could, and should, divert alot of the resources, put into and generated by the industry, to better serve the worlds population.

@Dunkin

My friend, I would say that between creating art that costs millions (or even hundreds of millions) of dollars or keeping people alive via feeding them, I would have to say that gaming is still 100% a waste of resources. We make like playing video games, they might make cultural impacts, but they're not necessary, and they never have been.

Gaming is a luxury, sustenance is a necessity.

The only reason people create games is that their time and devotion to the project will be rewarded, whether it be through praise, accolades or monetary compensation.

Since you can't eat praise, people create video games for monetary compensation first and foremost. And since praise and monetary compensation usually go hand in hand, it's a general all around win for the creator.

Without an incentivizing economic system in place (capitalism) a lot of great things simply would not exist.

@wiiware They took sony money which is just adms bad as dei when you look at how many sony characters are straight up ugly/androgynous

@WhiteRabbit But that's pornography. This is a video game. Can you distinguish these mediums?

They made a combat system that is super slick, stylish, and fun with Stellar Blade. The moment-to-moment gameplay was so well done that I was able to look past a story I found quite predictable and character designs I found very cringeworthy to have a great time. I am excited for whatever they make next!

@WhiteRabbit big differents between corn and a gaming being sexy.

They deserve a GOTY nomination.
Stellar Blade shall not win it but the nominee itself is a huge honor.

Hope they stay true to themself after going public.

@Deityjester To be fair, it's their first big AAA console game, so maybe they want guidance from one of the big console makers. And considering the choice are either sony or xbox (nintendo switch console is too weak for stellar blade graphics), they prefer the console that sells the most.

@Dunkin Maybe, but right know that's the best system that humanity has. Or at least the one that has less kill count compared to others system like communism lol.

@GeeEssEff I didn’t say it was selfish for a small company to go public. Just saying that going public often changes companies for the worse for any industry. And if you read my comments objectively on PX defending the price increase for subsidized gamepass, they are doing so because of the operating costs plus inflation. I have no love for corporations mate. People need to remember that gaming is a hobby.

@WhiteRabbit going public often changes a company for the worse. I defended the Microsoft price increases for subsidized gamepass because entities like you and are are beholden to inflation. Data centers aren’t free and upgrades cost money. Plus the deals that Microsoft makes behind the scenes for GP offerings will increase as well. As the IP owners will have increased costs and their own employees wanting more compensation. These employees are like you and I whom have life costs. So it’s all a cycle. I have no love for giant corporations. Just pointing out that there is no free lunch and modern gamers whom participate in this hobby seem to forget that.