The UK-based Afri Advisors (which has an unknown amount of ownership in CD Projekt) wants the company hierarchy to change.
They wrote a letter to the company’s board, expressing „utter dismay and disbelief with developments at the company over the last 12 months.” They have done so because Cyberpunk 2077‘s troublesome launch has effectively wiped half of the value of the company away. (The value of the stocks has dropped 57%, which resulted in a net loss of 6.2 billion dollars for CD Projekt.)
Jeffrey Tirman, Abri’s CEO, said: „I don’t think you could have intentionally tried to make so many mistakes as these guys have made. It’s shocking.” He will try to solicit the other shareholders to replace the supervisory board unless Adam Kicinski (the CEO) and Marcin Iwinski (his deputy) get recalled. However, this will not be an easy task: they will have to gain a three-fifths (60%) majority among shareholders to remove supervisory board members. Also, since the current executives (including the CEO’s brother, Michal Kicinski, who also was a co-founder of CD Projekt) own at least 34% of the stocks, it means Abri would have to bring EVERYONE ELSE on its side. The biggest financial investor is NN Group NV’s Polish pension fund, with a 4.2% stake at end of last year.
Tirman claims Abri didn’t participate in the annual shareholder meeting (which was held on May 25) because he hoped that the company’s board would take actions to „correct the ship, instead of just hitting the replay button.” „I would like the company to put forward a public plan as to how it intends to address all of the shortcomings and how it plans, from a strategic perspective, to repair its brand and trust that’s been lost among its client base and its shareholder base,” he said.
CD Projekt RED knew about the game’s state before it launched. Three, quite comical videos have shown up, presumably as an aftermath of the February cyberattack. The videos were made months before Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, and they were likely meant to be extra material (as The Witcher 3 has done the same thing). One, already deleted tweet claimed that these videos are „a fun composition of bug materials collected by QA and developers through years of development.”
Attention: the second video has a bit of NSFW at the start. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
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