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Game-Time report/Recently, the Korean game company Shift Up has been making constant moves and is full of topics.
After submitting its listing application in early March, Shift Up recently announced the company’s financial results for 2023, and the data performance is quite excellent.
According to the official announcement, in previous listing applications, Shift Up’s valuation in this round of listing was approximately 3 trillion won (approximately RMB 16.2 billion).
According to official financial information, Shift Up’s operating income in 2023 reached 168.6 billion won (approximately RMB 900 million), a year-on-year increase of 154.5%, of which operating profit increased by an astonishing 516% year-on-year, reaching 111 billion won (approximately 590 million yuan).
In terms of net profit, although Shift Up had a net loss of 7.1 billion won (approximately 38 million yuan) in 2022, it achieved a profit of 106.6 billion won (approximately 570 million yuan) in 2023.
Of course, Shift Up, which had no new products launched last year, mainly relied on “Nikke” released overseas by Tencent’s Level Infinite to achieve growth.
However, at the same time that Shift Up announced the excellent performance driven by “Nikke”, Chinese players launched a truck demonstration in South Korea.
According to the information observed by Game-Time, the truck demonstration by Chinese players seems to be mainly due to some players being dissatisfied with the “Exclusive Weapon” system that was prepared to be launched in the previous update of “Goddess of Victory: Nikke”, believing that it is harmful to both the game environment and the Players’ own wallets will not have a good impact.
Coupled with the recent linkage between “Goddess of Victory: Nikke” and “Re:Zero Starting Life in Another World”, the quality of some character paintings and art assets needs to be improved in the opinion of some players, and the grievances between players and the company have become It broke out intensively during the Qingming Festival.
Fortunately, because the road in front of the Shift Up company is not wide enough, players can only rent relatively small trucks to protest in order to demonstrate without blocking traffic. Therefore, the entire scene actually looks somewhat lacking in momentum.
Of course, it’s not just “Victory Nikke”. “Stellar Blade (official Chinese name: Sword Star)”, which will be launched at the end of this month, has actually been mired in controversy recently.
I believe everyone knows the cause of the matter. IGN French branch criticized the heroine design of “Sword Star” in articles related to the game, and even personally attacked Jin Hengtai and the developers behind the game.
Although IGN headquarters quickly severed ties with IGN France after the incident and published an apology, it is clear that the editor-in-chief of IGN France did not think he had a problem and even stated in a forum that the design of “Sword Star” was killing women.
Although Shift Up officially stated that it believes that “Sword Star” is just an entertainment product, it hopes that everyone will pay more attention to the game itself.
However, the current discussion environment around the game has become a mess. On the one hand, some netizens represented by IGN France do not approve of the design of “Sword Star”. On the other hand, Korean media and many game players are angry about the former’s excessive political correctness. , believe they have no right to define what a real woman is.
PS store beauty area
However, amid the controversy, as Shift Up’s first AAA game, “Sword Star” has quietly climbed to the top of the pre-order list on PSN stores in many countries and regions, including the United Kingdom and the United States, indicating that many people are still staying away from social media , chose to vote with their wallet.
It is worth mentioning that according to data from market research organization Circana, 84% of the 5,100 players who purchased “Sword Star” are male, and 69% of them are aged 30-44 years old.
Under the tweets of the analysts who currently released the data, this data has been interpreted in various ways by both the offensive and defensive sides, and everyone is welcome to express their opinions.
