Mark Kern aka Grummz, the former World of Warcraft Team Lead speculates that Ubisoft executives and top investors including the Guillemot family have a Plan B under their hats that will allow them to take more control of the company while also escaping the debt and bloat that has accumulated under their management.
Again, we don't know the details, but based on this simple description, it would be tunneling. Even Wikipedia has a decent intro to this topic:
"Tunneling or tunnelling is financial fraud committed by "the transfer of assets and profits out of firms for the benefit of those who control them". In legal terms, this is known as a fraudulent transfer, such as when a group of major shareholders or the management of a publicly-traded company orders that company to sell off its assets to a second company at unreasonably low prices."
The thing is, they are not facing just any random gamers here, they are up against 4/5 of their shareholders and those groups tend to have very deep pockets. So deep, they could very well sustain a massive legal counterattack and criminal charges. This is not a random forced arbitration with an individual gamer that Ubisoft is provoking here.
Now, have the Ubisoft top managers been deliberately sabotaging the company and its stock value in order to claim it's the market price (although ridiculously low) and transfer valuable IPs out of the dying company for virtually zero costs? Hard to prove, but as the saying goes: I can't say you've deliberately tanked your stock, but if I wanted to do that, I would not have done it any other way...
I asked Grok on X if Ubisoft could side-step laws on tunneling by seeling teh IP's at fir market value and not on the cheap andthe reply was that could in some scenarios work. I can easily see the crooks at the head of Ubiwoke doing thios; creating a new entity with TenCent that they sell the valuable IP's to at a fair price and then let the existing Ubiwoke company go under and file bankruptcy eventually. A way to unload all debt onto the old company and then dump it.
I can't say how I know but I have some inside connections to some of the Ubisoft studios and I can tell you they have at least 1 highly valuable IP set to release in teh next 2-3 years. This thing has the potential to sell 20+ million copies if done right.
Again, we don't know the details, but based on this simple description, it would be tunneling. Even Wikipedia has a decent intro to this topic:
"Tunneling or tunnelling is financial fraud committed by "the transfer of assets and profits out of firms for the benefit of those who control them". In legal terms, this is known as a fraudulent transfer, such as when a group of major shareholders or the management of a publicly-traded company orders that company to sell off its assets to a second company at unreasonably low prices."
The thing is, they are not facing just any random gamers here, they are up against 4/5 of their shareholders and those groups tend to have very deep pockets. So deep, they could very well sustain a massive legal counterattack and criminal charges. This is not a random forced arbitration with an individual gamer that Ubisoft is provoking here.
Now, have the Ubisoft top managers been deliberately sabotaging the company and its stock value in order to claim it's the market price (although ridiculously low) and transfer valuable IPs out of the dying company for virtually zero costs? Hard to prove, but as the saying goes: I can't say you've deliberately tanked your stock, but if I wanted to do that, I would not have done it any other way...
I asked Grok on X if Ubisoft could side-step laws on tunneling by seeling teh IP's at fir market value and not on the cheap andthe reply was that could in some scenarios work. I can easily see the crooks at the head of Ubiwoke doing thios; creating a new entity with TenCent that they sell the valuable IP's to at a fair price and then let the existing Ubiwoke company go under and file bankruptcy eventually. A way to unload all debt onto the old company and then dump it.
I can't say how I know but I have some inside connections to some of the Ubisoft studios and I can tell you they have at least 1 highly valuable IP set to release in teh next 2-3 years. This thing has the potential to sell 20+ million copies if done right.
Why yes, I’m sure investors will line up to give them more money to burn!
“They managed to run the company in the ground… Let’s give them another chance!”