By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Good. Lying bastards.
I think I've established on KoopaTV that I don't like frivolous lawsuits filed against gaming companies, like complaining that your kids are addicted to Fortnite and their lives are ruined.
But today, The Rosen Law Firm has filed a lawsuit that they hope to be certified as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors against CD Projekt, over their lies and materially false information/FAKE NEWS they've been providing to investors throughout 2020 on the progress of Cyberpunk 2077.
If you haven't heard, that game is a “virtually unplayable” buggy disaster on current-generation consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which is what millions of people are trying to play the game on. You can't buy it anymore off the PlayStation store (it's not listed), while Microsoft's has a big warning label that the game has severe performance issues, or, “Users may experience performance issues when playing this game on Xbox One consoles until this game is updated.” CD Projekt was facilitating refunds for a week, which doesn't seem like enough time.
CD Projekt would have to have known about the game's performance issues when they were getting it tested to be certified by Sony and Microsoft, and just because you test games when you develop them on consoles. However, according to the lawsuit, CD Projekt and the company leadership repeatedly made statements in investor calls and financial documents saying that any game performance issues would be minor, with major ones already fixed (they fielded the questions during the game's many delays, the frequency of which concerned investors), and there are no problems with it and nothing wrong. Nothing to worry about. The financial community believed those statements to be true, and inflated CD Projekt's stock prices based on expectations of the game's glory (which I personally never understood). Then the game came out, the problems became immediately known, and the stock collapsed. With it, investors’ fortunes.
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| If you don't know how to read a stock price chart, it sloping down, and that fast, at the chart's scale, is bad. There is a LOT of shareholder value lost there. |
Basically, the worth of CD Projekt's stock for the past couple of years, unless you really believe in the future of their Chinese Communist Party-appealing censorship platform, GOG.com, was entirely dependent on the success of Cyberpunk 2077, because that game was enormously hyped up and has already sold millions. However, the game being so buggy to the point of unprecedented refunds is cancelling much of that success, and CD Projekt's reputation has rightfully collapsed.
Let's be clear here: You can't sue a company because their game turned out to be bad or disappointing, despite them hyping it up to be great. But you can sue a company for making knowingly false statements to investors and market analysts—in this case that the game doesn't have problems that dramatically impair its playability. If investors knew the truth about Cyberpunk 2077 before the game's release, instead of believing the lies being told by CD Projekt's management, they likely would've never invested in the company.
Right now, The Rosen Law Firm is looking for real-life people who actually did buy (and were deceived about) CD Projekt stock because they anticipated big things out of Cyberpunk 2077 based on CD Projekt's statements. If you qualify, click here. The lawsuit can't proceed if there isn't an actual body of affected people, and right now it's theoretical.
By the way, this particular firm files these lawsuits all of the time against companies and for investors. There's dozens of them currently in progress or looking for people. I don't know if they're all valid, but screw companies lying to the financial community. This is not at all a frivolous lawsuit and is totally justified, assuming they can get names of real people.
Full disclosure: Ludwig isn't invested in CD Projekt, so he is personally unaffected by the lawsuit and the debacle as a whole. He's personally more upset with CD Projekt over being pawns to the Chinese Communist Party than releasing a glitchy, overrated videogame, though lying to investors is a bad thing to do and should be discouraged.
Rosen is at it again in 2021, going after Activision. No word on the CD Projekt suit.
A year later, it turns out that Rosen Law Firm actually... prevailed?! With a settlement.
LMAO INVESTORS GOT FUCKED LOL!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteYes, yes they did.
DeleteI hope CD Projekt gets punished for the way they treated them.
I never even heard of this game until very recently but apparently it was a very anticipated game for years? Shows how much I am out of the loop of non-Nintendo games.
ReplyDeleteWell, we wrote that article a year and a half ago asking why it's so anticipated, because apparently everyone already knew about the game by E3 2019 (it's been announced for many years prior to that, which means it was developed on the PS4 and Xbox One that it's so buggy for) and we just were somehow left out.
DeleteServes them right! Although, how long does it usually take to follow through with these kinds of lawsuits?
ReplyDeleteThe registration deadline to join the class is February 22, 2021.
DeleteThen there's some proceeding to get it as a real certified class, and... something happens after.
I tried reaching out to the Rosen Law Firm asking wot happened to this lawsuit, which they've removed from their website. They've ghosted me.
ReplyDelete