Finnish Remedy Entertainment sold roughly 1.4% of its shares before the launch of Control.

Helsingin Sanomat, a Finnish newspaper, reports that the team behind the first two Max Payne games and Quantum Break has sold roughly 170 thousand of its shares, which is slightly weird timing, as a multiplatform game is about to launch from them after a long time (Control on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC), as their previous game, Quantum Break, is only available on Xbox One and PC, and the two before it (Alan Wake and Alan Wake: American Nightmare) surfaced on the Xbox 360 and PC (although these two titles’ publishing rights are now theirs, so they could port them to other platforms if they wished to).

Tero Virtala, the CEO of Remedy Entertainment sold 20 thousand shares for 12.53 euro a pop, while Markus Järvi, the president of the company, sold the other 150K for 12.5 euro apiece. „We understand that questions may arise. We have not sold any shares in two years. The game [Control] will launch on Tuesday, and once most of the sales are made on digital channels, we will have a clear vision of what the sales are and what can be deduced from them, so we felt that after that it would no longer be a good time to sell. The idea is that the window to sell shares is open right now, after the fiscal review of the semester, when everyone has seen that the game will have good reception, and we have a certain notion of how the game will perform based on reservations. Our trading volume has never been very large. There was a perception that this week there was a willingness to buy the quantities we wanted to sell, so we decided to put them up for sale,” Remedy’s two leaders explain.

All this happens shortly after a rumour about Sony Interactive Entertainment wishing to buy Remedy. Since then, they acquired Insomniac Games, underlining their notion of expanding their studio portfolio. How easy it is to tie the two points together.

Source: Helsingin Sanomat