Mad Catz is in Serious Trouble

Mad Catz: It’s a name that lives in infamy in the gaming world. If you’ve ever tried one of their third-party controllers, you probably hate them. If you enjoy the Tritton headsets, you’ve certainly heard of them, and any Rock Band fans out there will appreciate how they’re the company responsible for their creation.

If you’ve heard of them lately, it’s probably because they’re kind of in a bad spot right now. In 2016, some of their executives resigned and 37% of their workforce was laid off, something the company blamed the poor sales of Rock Band 4 on. After all, for that game, they went so far as to co-publish it, in the faith that the rhythm game genre was due to make a comeback.

It wasn’t.

And now things have gotten from bad to worse for the Mad Catz folks, as the company has now officially been dropped from the New York Stock Exchange, delisted due to “an abnormally low trading price”. Mad Catz does not plan to appeal the delisting.

This means that unless Mad Catz manages to seduce a high-powered investor who was willing to pull them out of this mess, they’re going to find themselves bankrupt before long. Which, of course, is very bad for the employees still working for them, and any hope for a future revival of Rock Band or similar rhythm games. For the gaming industry as a whole, I think losing the Mad Catz controllers wouldn’t be the end of the world, as nice as it is to have cheaper, functional alternatives to the official ones, but for the sake of those who have staked their careers on this, I can’t help but hope for a better outcome… particularly since a lot of people had their hopes on third-party controllers for the Switch, which desperately needs them.

I’ll keep ya’ll posted as this develops.