They fucked around and are finding out. This obsession with growing as fast as possible, going to find a way to make money later, is a cancer on the corporate world and it needs to stop. It hurts the employees and the communities around them, and it’s hurting gaming as well.
How many franchises will be affected, if not completely destroyed by these fuckers incompetence?
The trouble is that, as always, leadership fucked around and now workers are finding out.
Leadership overextended while money was cheap, now money isn’t so cheap and the bills are gonna start coming due so they need to cut some “dead weight” which is largely gonna mean cutting workers to save on salaries and other liabilities.
And as always this is gonna make them look profitable enough to stay above water for a couple years until interest rates come down and money is cheap again. And that’s when the cycle starts over.
The worst part is there will be no accountability for that leadership because this isn’t a sign of incompetence. It is a sign of a system working as intended.
This mystery deal that fell through is a convenient precipitating event to point to, but this was always the going to be the eventual outcome of the way these companies operate.
You can see it happening…well everywhere but especially in tech and adjacent companies over the past couple years. Maybe next time it’ll be another industry, but at some point folks are gonna get addicted to free money again and get all shockedpikachu when it stops being so free and they need to pay it back.
Many, many more, as long as they are even ocassionally successful.
Man, this really sucks. Great example of how the over-consolidation of the industry into mega corporations is bad for gaming in general.
Heart goes out to all the devs that’ll be laid off by this.
This is like watching a trainwreck in slowmotion. I feel so bad for employees whose company was bought up from Embracer.
You gotta be really wary whenever your company gets acquired, such is the fact of life no matter how much it may suck.
Holy shit, just casually dropping that they’re working on a new Perfect Dark is crazy.
It was announced back at the 2020 Game Awards. Crystal Dynamics has just been really quiet since then.
My poor Kotor remake will never get released at this point (and maybe for the better looking all this…)
Oh no, don’t tell me kotor is affected 😭
They mentioned that all cancelled projects are ones that had not yet been announced.
They better not touch Deep Rock Galactic! ⛏ 🍻
(I doubt they will, Deep Rock seems very successful, rock n stone!)
Rock and stone!
Rock and stone!⛏️
Man, I was one of the first peoe in the alpha and beta. Being that way, I never looked up the recent numbers but man, their review stats are insane. I really hope they make it through, but I think they will. I would gladly pay for future updates to keep the game going.
FOR KARL!
I’m really pissed about such a big company buying things en masse but still having those “do or die” moment. Especially When they don’t and die. For pity’s sake
It truly is insane how many subsidiaries and IPs are under their umbrella. And yet nobody really ever hears about Embracer. I’d heard of them once or twice in industry news, but never really knew how many things were under their belt. Truly grew too big for it’s own good.
They’re the western Tencent, in the sense that when one of their publishers does something the actual ownership rarely gets mentioned because it’s not really newsworthy.
Yeah. Metro in particular… The original author even said more was coming. I need it. Feed it to me.
I’ve never heard of embracer before, what games are they behind?
Non directly, they own a lot of companies and IP. A LOT.
Gearbox, Coffee Stain, Deep Silver, Warhorse, Aspyr, Saber, THQ Nordic, Dark Horse Comics, 3D Realms, Volition, Ghost Ship Games.
You can put them in the same sphere as Microsoft with all their owned companies as both were out scooping them up over the last few years.
That’s a real shame they owned Coffee Stain, I liked Goat Simulator.
Don’t forget Satisfactory. I really hope, this doesn’t affect its development.
Did the game turn from good to bad now that you found out they aren’t independent?
No, not at all. Just that there probably won’t be any more Goat Simulator.
Goat Simulator 3 was released after they were acquired by Embracer.
Yeah and now that Embracer is shuttering, no more Goat Simulator lol
What makes you say that?
Copied from Polygon article:
Embracer Group owns the rights to both Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings; it acquired Tomb Raider when it purchased Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal from Square Enix in 2022. That year, Embracer Group bought the licensing rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by buying rights holder Middle-earth Enterprises. Early this year, Embracer announced that it has five mystery Lord of the Rings games in development by external partners.
Squenix sold those off to pay for NFTs lol
All these companies are ran by fucking idiots that don’t understand the world or economics.
I think that means no new Deus Ex as well…
I wonder what this mysterious $2B deal was. It seems crazy to me that they would factor that income into their public projections without any further details on who they were partnering with on what.
I’m guessing they were trying to enter the Asian markets based on absolutely nothing at all.
I bet it was epic games, they were probably banking on epic co-founding projects to release on the epic games store but I don’t think any of the games they’ve released on there were successful.
Soooo, they skipped being Extender and went straight to the Extinguisher phase?
EA will probably pick at the corpse and buy the rights
Big oof. Sucks for all the developers and creative teams.
The CEOs comments about exploiting LOTR are rather chilling.
*Edit: Sorry I didn’t mean to reply to you.
No worries, that seems to be a major red flag tough
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Gollum disaster
While Embracer currently has the rights to make The Lord of the Rings video games, the Gollum Game was outside of their umbrella. Daedalic Entertainment developed it and published it with help from their parent company Nacon.
I still have to catch up with what happened, do you have any good sources on that? Prederably short video form for my adhd ass.
You don’t really need sources, it’s just a bad game from every perspective made by a studio that only had experience with point and click adventures (which had an actual good reputation, but I’ve never played them myself). It looks ugly (as in: games ten years ago had better graphics), it plays badly and the amount of people who want to play as Gollum just isn’t that high.
Tears of Grace has some videos that just showcase the… brokenness, seems a bit forgiving as a term, of the game.
“We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world,” said Matthew Karch. “And that’s obviously something we’re going to be doing. That’s a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on. Working together we have those opportunities and we’re super excited to see that working relatively quickly.”
Well it certainly might have to do with some LoTR disasters.
You mean that new Saints Row game wasn’t a massive payout!? Weird…… /s
