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GoPro is in serious financial trouble. Action camera giant is at risk for potential bankruptcy
(www.digitalcameraworld.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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What should they be doing? They are an action camera company, they make action cameras. Do you think they needed to branch out to do energy drinks and lunchables or whatever?
They could try and make a camera that doesn't overheat and shut down.
If they have a solid product and do not want to make "energy drinks and lunchables", the best financial move would be to optimize it. Find ways to make it smaller, lighter, and most importantly, reduce costs.
But if I were in charge, I'd seriously think about trying to eat DJI's drone lunch now that there are FAA rules around foreign drone companies. GoPro is headquartered in San Mateo. Drone design is well known enough that there aren't any hard problems in the way of introducing a decent DJI mini replacement. There may be patents or other non-technical stuff in the way though. But if they could get in on that, it could be immensely lucrative, especially if they can get government contracts.
They're still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.
The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.
But they were also missing features. They didn't have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.
Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.
They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.
Marketers shouldn't have gotten involved until they knew they had a solid product. Without the hype they generated, there wouldn't have been the reputation hit. And without the heavy volume produced to try to meet a demand inflated by hype, they could have fixed at least some of the issues.
Though it sounds like the root of the problem was that no one who had power over business or engineering decisions had any passion for making a great drone.
Mini drone that follows/records the user and wide angle panoramas of the surrounding area at the same time.
Get to it, gopro. Be the change you wish to see.
They doubled down hard on editing via the phone app with cloud storage via subscription. I have zero desire to edit video on my phone. Their desktop apps are frankly horrendous. They have cameras that capture footage at higher than 4K but their phone app only allowed export at 4K at least on an iPhone. This seemed to be a limit on the h265 libraries on the iPhone so it might be different on Android.
If you wanted to export their 5.6K 360 footage on a desktop from a GoPro Max you couldn’t do that in any sane way. You had to export it in their cine* whatever format and an hour of footage was over 400GB. This also used your graphics card to accelerate it. You could export the h265 files in 4K if memory serves which was obviously smaller and faster but you dropped the resolution as a trade off.
YouTube in a desktop browser supports 360 footage in 5K+ resolutions. I believe the mobile app is still 4K only.
Their camera tech is stagnating. I had plenty of gopros and it's just almost the same product every year now, they don't even bother updating the sensor or innovating and look at how DJI and Insta360 is cleaning them out because of it.
I'm curious if their current CEO has more of an engineering or business/finance/marketing background, which would put them in the same pattern numerous other once dominant in their market companies have fallen into.