To those of you without corporate experience a little heads up. When they decided to sell their stock they chose a date, put the sell order in and then left it alone. The date was probably chosen before the IPO actually was done. That is normal, consistent and legal. The only way to do it in fact and not get hammered by insider trading rules.
The market being what it is (mostly people without a clue gambling on hype with no real knowledge of any industry whatsoever) are getting all butt-hurt now because the people that didn't read Gamasutra, the Escapist and most of the gaming sites were all about the IPO flood gates. Not the harsh realities of modern gaming businesses. Much less the dismal prospects of both Facebook gaming and Zynga.
Now the Feds will claim all kinds of shit but they are basically eunuchs and are trying to make it look like they are doing something when the reality is most of this crap is unregulated from back in the Reagan days and more in Bush-Alternate-Universe-Land. The odds are high that they did the pro-forma work that said this was all on the up and up. The most one can hope for (and I ain't holding my breath) is they start to wake some people up. It won't and I won't be turning blue any time soon.
The way IPOs used to work was if a company was worth $XB then some portion of that was sold to investors. Depending on how successful the business was in its market, its marketing and the IPO hype the stock sold. Over the course of the first months the price could skyrocket if everybody did their job correctly. More people wanted the stock then had it and the first buyers were in a place to make some cash. Now, IPO is just another way for an investment bank to charge A. The seller of the IPO stock B. Their own customers that want in C. Anybody else they can sucker D. Make a bundle of profit based on lying through their teeth. Today's IPOs are about the companies VC investors, the executive staff and the IPO banker. Everybody else, well those are called suckers.
