Less than a year into gaming content creator mega-brand FaZe Clan’s disastrous Wall Street experiment, the Nasdaq has said please, no more. The New York-based stock exchange sent a “Notice of Delisting” last week to the esports company threatening to drop it from trading if it doesn’t get its stock price above $1 in the next few months.
FaZe Clan, an esports company that aims to monetize the fan bases of some of the biggest pro gamers, streamers, and YouTubers around, went public last year in an unprecedented $1 billion move everyone talked about and nobody quite understood. It’s been downhill ever since. Investor interest failed to materialize, initial shareholders wanted out, and the stock price plummeted to just under $1 in January. Following a momentary bump in February, that’s where it’s been now for over 30 days.
That prompted a “Notice of Delisting” from the Nasdaq that gives FaZe Clan an additional 180 days to get its stock price above $1 for at least 10 consecutive days. Should be easy, right? “The Company intends to monitor the closing bid price of the Common Stock and may, if appropriate, consider implementing available options to regain compliance, though the Company cannot provide assurance that these efforts will be successful,” it wrote in a March 24 filing to investors.
FaZe Clan’s actual esports teams continue to outperform the competition in many games. Its Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players were just awarded the Intel Grand Slam $1 million bonus over the weekend after placing first at four premier ESL tournaments this season. On the content creator side, however, big names like Nordan “FaZe Rain” Shat have called out the company with vague accusations of selling out and exploiting talent.
Still, a brewing backlash among fans and FaZe Clan members was enough to prompt an equally vague promise from the company to do better. “We know that for too long we haven’t been the FaZe we need to be, but we’re working hard towards fixing that,” the company tweeted last week.
It’s not clear what that fix might be, but finding enough money to take the company private again could be a big first step. A report by Sports Business Journal last week suggested sources within the company were attempting to do exactly that. FaZe Clan’s stock price has since doubled from $0.40 a share to $0.80 on the news that it might end up delisting itself before the Nasdaq can.