Devolver Digital Wants To Return To Private Ownership

Devolver Digital has asked shareholders to approve a delisting, according to Eurogamer, four years after the publisher went public. In a press release sent to investors, Devolver said the current share price does not reflect the true market value of the company, and pointed to the ongoing challenge of delivering growth in line with market expectations despite difficult sector conditions.

Devolver listed in 2021 at £694.6m, roughly $950m. The share price has fallen 96.27 percent since then, which values the company at about £34.64m, or $46.63m. Dropping the listing is estimated to save around $1.6m a year, money that currently goes on filings, advisers and the reporting calendar. For a publisher worth under $47m, that is not a rounding error.

Shareholders vote at the annual general meeting on 8 September, and they can block it. If the vote passes, Devolver goes private on 16 September. A spokesperson told GamesIndustry.biz that the board sees delisting as the best outcome for the company, its employees, its partners and its shareholders.

"Being private will allow the Devolver Digital team... to singularly focus on the long-term health of the company and less on satisfying the requirements of the public market, which have nothing to do with being a successful game publisher."

— Devolver Digital spokesperson

I don't spend many evenings in Devolver's catalog. My hours go to open worlds and long drives, not roguelikes. I still watch the company, because the list of publishers willing to pay for small, awkward, hard-to-market ideas keeps getting shorter.

Game stocks have been punished since the pandemic spike in play and spending faded. Publishers that listed during the 2021 boom have spent every year since explaining to investors why the boom did not continue. Layoffs followed at studios of every size, including Microsoft's cuts at Double Fine, Compulsion Games and Ninja Theory earlier this year. Devolver kept shipping through all of it. Cult of the Lamb and Skate Story both arrived during that stretch, and POINPY came back to phones this month.

POINPY is a vertical platformer by Ojiro Fumoto, the developer behind Downwell. You climb procedurally generated caves with one hand, grabbing fruit to feed the creature chasing you from below. It spent years locked inside Netflix Games, disappeared when the service dropped it, and now sits on the Google Play Store and the App Store again. That is the kind of rescue job nobody puts in an investor deck, and it is roughly the opposite of what a growth story is supposed to look like.

A private Devolver stops answering to a share price. It also stops publishing the figures that let anyone outside the company check how the business is doing, which is the trade the board is asking shareholders to accept. I read the move as an admission that a publisher this size was never built to post growth on a schedule set by people who do not buy the games.