Stellar Blade Developer Shift Up Goes Public, Institutes ESG Reports

Video Games

Shift Up’s tenure as a video game studio that catered to its fans may be over. The South Korean company that made this year’s hit game Stellar Blade has just become a publicly traded company, and so far, it’s quite successful, getting $320 million in its initial public offering, according to Bloomberg, the largest gaming IPO in South Korea since 2021. The problem is that when a company goes public, it becomes beholden to the will of its shareholders, and you can bet there will be some big interests looking to buy shares – interests like Blackrock and Vanguard, to name a couple. An X user named GIGABEAR – you may remember him as the guy who tricked that games journalist into publishing an insane fake story about Mark Kern – has a screenshot of Shift Up’s new want ad, and it’s worrying:

Shift Up is hiring. Do you have skills in ESG to please all the new investors? Apply today!https://t.co/D8ELctKOYS pic.twitter.com/y47u1SnL2i

— GIGABEAR (@Pandacausal) July 11, 2024

Mark Kern points out that this is something publicly traded companies must do for credit rating purposes, and they must be published for investors:

Technically, ESG reports or not required *by law* but they are required in the sense that large corporate bond credit rating agencies and investment firms want them.

As a public company who wants active trading, you publish these reports. Now they can focus on different things,…

— Grummz (@Grummz) July 12, 2024

Now, as Grummz said, their ESG implementation doesn’t necessarily have to focus on DEI and things that will lead to, off the top of my head, the elimination of sex differentiation in their video game characters. But I think we’ve seen entirely too much of that lately not to be worried that Shift Up may go woke to appease whoever buys into their company. It’s not definitely going to happen, but it’s a valid concern, especially after the dust-up over Eve’s more revealing outfits in Stellar Blade. It’s not possible for any of us to know how involved in that decision Shift Up was; most assume it was Sony who forced that on the game, especially since some of the outfits have returned, or variations of them, anyway. Still, it’s something to remember as we watch what happens with the now publicly traded studio. And I think gamers will be particularly deflated if this happens because in Shift Up, it felt like normalcy and a return to fun gaming was making a comeback, with one up-and-coming studio embracing their customers instead of insulting them. Maybe that’s still the case; I hope so, but I’m not getting too optimistic.