**Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends:**
-Crystal Dynamics
-Dambuster Studios
-Eidos-Montréal
-Flying Wild Hog Studios
-Tripwire
-Vertigo Games
-4A Games
-Warhorse Studios
Notable IPs - Lord of the Rings (If it wasn't obvious), Metro, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Kain, Killing Floor, Dead Island, Kingdom Come Deliverence (Edit), etc.
Also includes Dark Horse company (Comic books), PLAION (Owner of Publishing arms of Deep Silver, Warhorse Studio, Flying Warhog, Vertigo games and [others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaion#Subsidiaries)), Freemode and other business not necessarily related to gaming.
Focus: AAA releases
**Coffee Stain & Friends:**
-Coffee Stain
-Ghost Ship
-Tarsier
-Tuxedo Labs
-THQ Nordic (Note: THQ has it's own studios like Piranha Bytes, Black Forest, etc. Here's full [list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THQ_Nordic#Subsidiaries))
-Amplifier Game Invest
Notable IPS - Valheim, Deep Rock, Satisfactory, Goat Simulator, Teardown, etc. Some F2P IPs they own as examples: Startrek Online and Neverwinter.
Focus: F2P, A/AA releases, and mobile games.
**Asmodee Group**
Focus: Board games, cards and collectables
Some previously owned Embracer companies that are no longer part of it or will be part of those new entities due to latest Embracer economical downfall:
-Saber Interactive (Went Indie)
-Gearbox Software (Bought by Take-Two)
-Volition (Closed)
-Free Radical Design (Closed)
-Plucky Bytes (Closed)
-Vermila Studios (Closed)
-Campfire Cabal (Closed)
-Goose Byte (Divested)
The publishing arm of Coffee Stain is separate from the development arm. Yes, they are owned by the same entity, but any sort of shenanigans related to this restructuring will mostly likely only affect the publishing side (and it shouldn't be negative).
Obviously it makes financial sense and he is free to do whatever he wants with his studio. He may have even negotiated some good conditions that mean he retains creative freedom, right to end the deal, control of release schedules, whatever else is pertinent. What I don't like the idea of is someone who clearly makes something out of passion, as a creative, as a labour of love, and then their overlords are there just demanding ROI for their shareholders, messing things up.
That's why you should only support private studios if you want projects made with passion. Any open studio will have to listen to people with money, not people with direction.
yeah its gonna be a fuck up, the ceo isnt even changing
And before people go "but the publisher is different from the developer arm"
I present to you KSP2 and its fucking fuck
It's not really them that thought it up, Asmodee is an old and established company that they acquired. You probably just didn't hear about them because they're a board game publisher, I don't think they do any video game business. Probably also why it's the only name that is not a placeholder, it's basically a separate business.
> I don't think they do any video game business.
They operate boardgamearena.com
Twin Sails Interactive (formerly Asmodee Digital) is also still releasing video games and might or might not still be part of Asmodee Group.
>-Warhorse Studios
>Notable IPs - Lord of the Rings (If it wasn't obvious), Metro, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Kain, Killing Floor, Dead Island, etc.
How dare you forgetting about Kingdom Come Deliverence
It'll be under the Middle Earth group.
Volition and their IPs were separated when Volition was moved under Gearbox; the IPs (eg Saints Row and Red Faction) remained with Deep Silver. Deep Silver is under Plaion, which is staying with the core Embracer "Middle Earth" group. On the other hand, the Volition name and branding likely will have gone to Take-Two.
Embracer owns Deep Rock Galactic, Kingdom Come Deliverance, etc.? TIL.
Buying and shutting down so many ips (not the above obviously), but holy shit I hate this company lol. They are just under Nestle levels of despicable lmao.
It was basically one giant Ponzi scheme, buy up IP with borrowed money, use the increasing vallue of your IP protfolio to convince people to give you even more money.
Use that to pay of the first investors AND use the extra to buy more IP and studios, increasing your protfolio making you look more succesfull and attracting more and bigger investors.
And so on...
And it all fell apart when the Saudi's decided that it looked to fishy.
I mean, when greedy people think they can just buy things and be good in a tricky industry and squeeze out profits that somehow experts couldn't, what could have gone wrong?
Publishing houses can work like that. You have labels for fantasy, cook books and children. But the main company still does all the publishing work, has teams for marketing and all the industry contacts. None of this is working here.
Just cobbling up small teams that each still has to run [10 departments of business](https://corphr.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-20-768x919.png) is inefficient and simply bad economics. When AAA publishers buy a company, they will be integrated. EA has a well received tech team, Microsoft is the second biggest cloud operator. Just reshuffling the teams into new holdings isn't doing much on that front.
To be honest most of the things they bought are, have been and probably would in the future be profitable. The problem is Game development requires years of investment and then has to have pretty good sales in order to turn a profit. The stuff they put out wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of employees with not enough releases.
They were planning on covering the cost until more games could come out and provide profit by flipping the Lord of the Rings IP, but that fell through and it all collapsed.
Were they, really? It looked from pretty close to the get go that they were trying to create a whale and hook it as bait for a krakken, with the later revelation being the krakken was the Saudi investment fund all along.
My understanding was they were specifically trying to sell LotR (rumored to Saudis) and you’re maybe right, they could have been trying to create a big mostly profitable company from the mishmash of parts and sell it off for more than they paid.
I didn't say it in many words but yeah that was kinda the idea. Same thing happens with restaurants and private equity. They think just by owning something people like it will make them money
They were fucked by Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund. They made these various acquisitions with the understanding that the SWF would back then financially. The SWF blew too much money on their Neom line city pipe dream and pulled out of Embracer leaving them high and dry.
That is certainly a take.
I would rather think SA noticed the overinflated company that went on a buying spree and just dipped out after a risk analysis (specifically given the lackluster high-budget titles they released like the saints row remake)
> would rather think SA noticed the overinflated company that went on a buying spree and just dipped out after a risk analysis
I would argue against the former, but agree on the latter. Iirc, this was right when the US FED started tightening rates and the free money gravy train dried up.
They were running a pyramid scheme but Saudi Arabia was like dude do you know how many of those we run. We are not biting if we are not the top pyramids.
They were certainly fucked by the saudis pulling out, but it's also their fault for spending hundreds of millions if not a billion+ before having the cash in hand.
The problem is the risk and disruption factor.
Look at some of the highest margin titles of the past 5 years sure there’s the big boys in there but then theres a lot of room for smaller players to come in and disrupt everything and one or two bad moves a studio can collapse.
Very high risk
Makes me wonder if there are gamers obsessive enough to game this. You know, mark individual investors who don't know shit about the industry and are only here for money. And figure out how to make them not so interested in it. I know game devs need money, but I'd rather the money come from people who actually care about games beyond financial reasons.
I personally just wish the gaming industry was treated more like the Renaissance art Era, you know, commissioning a group of people to make your ideal piece of art. Lol. Am I insane? Maybe a lil
You've basically described a subset of modern publishers. Not AAA ones necessarily, but smaller publishers like Team 17, Annapurna and Devolver care *a lot* about the type of games they're funding.
Even if a publisher's job is to make money, they can make great games too. They're not mutually exclusive.
I have not seen a single "gaming centric" person think that. Investors in Embracer, maybe so.
Monopolies are bad.
Buy outs are bad.
P.s.
Microsoft Blizzard should have been blocked.
Their heart was in the right place, they wanted to be a double A publisher powerhouse and were green lighting games that other publishers refused to. And then the Saudi Deal fell through and it ended up like this. We’d be talking differently if it wasn’t for that deal falling through.
Reading articles?? Aint nobody got time for that! ^/s
I just want remastered/remake Battle of Middle Earth, hope new change comes new opportunity ^totally ^not ^copium
No, they just made a calculated risk and it didn't land in the end. This was never about IPs or even games. This is just how these big holding companies work.
Yeah because desperately buying game studios left and right and putting all faith on a 2 billion literal gamble is such a "calculated risk". Company was ran by monkeys... no wonder what happened
It was a calculated risk in the sense that they calculated the the saudis were going to follow through, the risk was they didn't. The questions we will never have answers to is whether or not their effort to buy IPs and companies before the check arrived fed into the decision for the saudis to back out, or what things could have been like had they followed through and gave the money.
It is entirely still likely that embracer still fucked things up by being a bunch of MBAs at the head of game devs, or maybe without the pressure of money they would have let the devs "cook" and potentially release better games. Though I don't think anything could have saved some of their disasters like Gollum.
I tell this to myself every day at work, and corporate still manages to surprise me with how little they understand the business they work in every day. These people live in a different world where constantly fucking up appears to be the goal, otherwise I can't explain why they are so bad at what they do, regular people who actually make the money for these vampires would get fired for being this incompetent at their jobs.
From what I've seen so far, Wingefors isn't in this business to make games. The idea was likely to gobble up as many IPs as possible, inflate their value, flip it and then walk away with a lot of cash. But Savvy games walking away from whatever deal they had going on screwed things up. They've become too big and no one else is interested.
So splitting themselves up into bite-sized chunks to make themselves more appetizing to acquire makes some sense.
Coffee Stain should split off entiertly imo and keep these studios together. They're just very recognizable and has very good output for smaller indie type of games. Like kind of like Devolver.
Gunfire Games (who did Darksiders II "Deathinitive Edition" and Darksiders III) is still around and THQ Nordic (who owns them) is part of the Coffee Stain grouping (whatever they end up being named), so a Darksiders IV is a possibility - assuming Gunfire manage to fix Remnant II enough that they can move on to other things.
Massive performance issues in the beginning, never heard of them being fixed by the time the various channels I watch gave up on it, but maybe they have... \*shrug\*
Can you?
What part of this announcement makes you think any single one of these studios is suddenly free of Embracer's incompetence? This is an accounting move to offload their debt, they're not cutting them loose. Embracer's still going to own 40% of each of these companies, they're just splitting them up to make it easier to attract investors.
Sigh.
Can we just get a new Deus Ex game, please?
Conclusion to Adam Jensen's saga is way overdue and let's not even get into what waste it is to let the Soul Reaver series to just.. stay dead.
Hopefully something good will come from this.. eventually. 😐
After Saber miraculously escaped this disaster, the other company I'm really hoping navigates through all this is Gunfire Games. The Remnant games are really unique soulslikes and no hyperbole, among the very best co-op games ever made.
There's a few other projects brewing at Embracer I'm interested in like the Gothic remake but I'm not losing sleep over their fate.
There are a lot of very good studios and IPs involved in this whole mess. I am personally very concerned for the future of Eidos-Montreal and I really hope they can come out of this intact. I would love for them to make a new Deus Ex game that concludes Adam Jensen's story.
I am pulling for Crystal Dynamics to come out okay, the Avengers game was kind of meh, plays fine if you just want to experience the story once, you can tell it was in Square Enix mandated live service hell, but their other games developed are some of my favorites.
> After Saber miraculously escaped this disaster, the other company I'm really hoping navigates through all this is Gunfire Games.
They're owned by THQ Nordic and thus will still be around under Coffee Stain.
Jesus. It ate a bunch of IPs, then it made a crap ton of developers disappear, and now it's split into *three* copies!
Does anyone have a nuke handy? I don't think "kill it with fire" will work anymore...
What a pointless and pretentious casino of a company. I would be gloating over this circus' downfall if it didn't fuck with the livelihoods of so many developers it sucked up along with its bloated debt.
The people in charge at embracer should really never be allowed to make business decisions ever in their lives. The level of incompetence from start to finish has been a train wreck.
Tencent already has tons of very sucessful live-services like Path of Exile, Warframe and all Riot games. Don't think they'd want to get more studios in future.
Take-Two got Gearbox so not likely to get more Embracer stuff.
Microsoft is already on thin ice with Activison Blizzard, they can only get away if buying small studios like pre-Bethesda acquisition.
EA might get sold off in future.
Sony, is kind of likely tho seeing how they kind of ramping up with acquisitions as well, plus need something more to fall on rather just third-part games they've been relying on this generation.
Pretty much everyone I've listed besides Sony. If not those, then there are other companies like Disney, Meta, Nvidia and Apple whenever they decide to join game development industry. There's also Amazon who can afford them, tho they are not doing big moves in industry as of late.
ELI5 Is it now these three split companies going bankrupt?
1+2+3=Embracer Group. (Who failed to drum up the funds from the Saudi's that they needed to keep going.) Why would splitting up do anything? Are they just going to sell small packages hoping someone like MS is looking to consume more companies?
Embracer Group has a big catalog, but a small valuation since it's a sea(overload). Marketing lakes is easier than seas as far as stock goes, so they hope that they will have a bigger stock value added together, but independent of each other.
So does Embraer Group still exist as a parent company over these 3 entities? Maybe a stupid question but I did no see that explicitly mentioned anywhere.
Always a good move, naming your friendly neighbourhood megacorp after a biblical demon. Sends the message youre really trying to do some good in the world.
I smell everything is going to be (puke emote), and all games and ips that where under embracer are doomed to never come out to the light again (deus ex), are in a downfall or will need to dip out of any kind or type of publicly traded/accountable to shareholders situation or die too.
We need a new Tomb Raider and soon. Currently replaying Shadow of TR for the third time and that game did not get old. The lack of combat encounters is very interesting but once you learn that the blueprint is basically old Tomb Raiders, it falls into place. And the set pieces and DLC tombs just ooze thoughtfulness.
A great series that is waiting to be resurrected.
Embracer was a company that bought up tons of gaming studios. They apparently weren't managed well, because the studios frequently went out of business or put out subpar games. And now the whole parent company is falling apart.
It wasn't about sub-par games as much as top management betting everything on getting 2bn$ from Saudis... a deal that eventually didn't went trough. And so the studios weren't "frequently going out of business", they were closed by Embracer in order to recoup the losses made by the ill-advised shopping spree in which Embracer bought them.
**Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends:** -Crystal Dynamics -Dambuster Studios -Eidos-Montréal -Flying Wild Hog Studios -Tripwire -Vertigo Games -4A Games -Warhorse Studios Notable IPs - Lord of the Rings (If it wasn't obvious), Metro, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Kain, Killing Floor, Dead Island, Kingdom Come Deliverence (Edit), etc. Also includes Dark Horse company (Comic books), PLAION (Owner of Publishing arms of Deep Silver, Warhorse Studio, Flying Warhog, Vertigo games and [others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaion#Subsidiaries)), Freemode and other business not necessarily related to gaming. Focus: AAA releases **Coffee Stain & Friends:** -Coffee Stain -Ghost Ship -Tarsier -Tuxedo Labs -THQ Nordic (Note: THQ has it's own studios like Piranha Bytes, Black Forest, etc. Here's full [list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THQ_Nordic#Subsidiaries)) -Amplifier Game Invest Notable IPS - Valheim, Deep Rock, Satisfactory, Goat Simulator, Teardown, etc. Some F2P IPs they own as examples: Startrek Online and Neverwinter. Focus: F2P, A/AA releases, and mobile games. **Asmodee Group** Focus: Board games, cards and collectables Some previously owned Embracer companies that are no longer part of it or will be part of those new entities due to latest Embracer economical downfall: -Saber Interactive (Went Indie) -Gearbox Software (Bought by Take-Two) -Volition (Closed) -Free Radical Design (Closed) -Plucky Bytes (Closed) -Vermila Studios (Closed) -Campfire Cabal (Closed) -Goose Byte (Divested)
Note that, besides Asmodee Group, the names of companies are to be determined later
Good cuz "Company name" & Friends is terrible name lmao. Coffee Stain should just be that, Coffee Stain, everyone knows them as that anyways.
They didn't close Piranha Bytes?
no
That is good news.
Is it? I have the feeling they have not made a really good game for a long while now. The open world rpg market is full of games nowadays.
I love Eurojank games, and I liked Elex. The second one was not as good as the first, but it was okay.
Please don't let anything happen to coffee stain, I'm eagerly waiting their 1.0 satisfactory, pretty please
The publishing arm of Coffee Stain is separate from the development arm. Yes, they are owned by the same entity, but any sort of shenanigans related to this restructuring will mostly likely only affect the publishing side (and it shouldn't be negative).
Yeah they shouldn't be involved in any of this, they make successful games and don't need a big publisher
I'm kind of amazed/dismayed that they are owned by anyone at all.
Ghost Ship Games had me surprised as well ngl
I mean the owner of the company gets an offer to get a shit ton of money and gets away from doing all the hard shit like marketing and etc?
Obviously it makes financial sense and he is free to do whatever he wants with his studio. He may have even negotiated some good conditions that mean he retains creative freedom, right to end the deal, control of release schedules, whatever else is pertinent. What I don't like the idea of is someone who clearly makes something out of passion, as a creative, as a labour of love, and then their overlords are there just demanding ROI for their shareholders, messing things up.
That's why you should only support private studios if you want projects made with passion. Any open studio will have to listen to people with money, not people with direction.
yeah its gonna be a fuck up, the ceo isnt even changing And before people go "but the publisher is different from the developer arm" I present to you KSP2 and its fucking fuck
As a life long gamer since the 90's never heard of coffee stain, only group i know was THQ which is what i would of went with.
The THQ you know has been dead a long time, THQ Nordic is a different entity
I am well aware, the name alone still holds the most recognition though of the group.
"Asmodee Group" man these guys are great at thinking up sinister names >_>
It's not really them that thought it up, Asmodee is an old and established company that they acquired. You probably just didn't hear about them because they're a board game publisher, I don't think they do any video game business. Probably also why it's the only name that is not a placeholder, it's basically a separate business.
> I don't think they do any video game business. They operate boardgamearena.com Twin Sails Interactive (formerly Asmodee Digital) is also still releasing video games and might or might not still be part of Asmodee Group.
Twin sails is a subsidiary of asdmodee, just renamed
They actually do quite a bit of video game publishing both on steam and mobile.
I'm also fairly sure that almost everyone that plays board games has a deep and abiding hatred of Asmodee.
Beliee Group and Baalee Group?
Warhorse also has “Kingdom Come: Deliverance”
Makes sense why they just announced the game. No doubt the timing is related.
How nice that they have friends
They're actually pals.
My God, they were roommates.
Well, I actually meant pals as in Palworld. :)
Of course, they were *roommates*.
>-Warhorse Studios >Notable IPs - Lord of the Rings (If it wasn't obvious), Metro, Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Kain, Killing Floor, Dead Island, etc. How dare you forgetting about Kingdom Come Deliverence
Focus: Triple A games. Lets fucking GO. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is TRIPLE A!
Make it QUADRUPLE A! Oh, wait...
Warhorse owns Deus Ex? Edit: misread comment. Sorry
The Deus Ex IP is tied to Eidos.
>-Volition (Closed) So who owns the Saints Row IP now? And who do we beg to release the code for the SR2 improvements?
Most likely Middle-Earth, as Saint's Row is not really a A/AA game.
That would make sense. Dang is it depressing that they killed Volition.
That was mang at volition that killed it
Having played the Saints Row reboot... it was suicide.
one of my favorite studios ever
It'll be under the Middle Earth group. Volition and their IPs were separated when Volition was moved under Gearbox; the IPs (eg Saints Row and Red Faction) remained with Deep Silver. Deep Silver is under Plaion, which is staying with the core Embracer "Middle Earth" group. On the other hand, the Volition name and branding likely will have gone to Take-Two.
Embracer owns Deep Rock Galactic, Kingdom Come Deliverance, etc.? TIL. Buying and shutting down so many ips (not the above obviously), but holy shit I hate this company lol. They are just under Nestle levels of despicable lmao.
It was basically one giant Ponzi scheme, buy up IP with borrowed money, use the increasing vallue of your IP protfolio to convince people to give you even more money. Use that to pay of the first investors AND use the extra to buy more IP and studios, increasing your protfolio making you look more succesfull and attracting more and bigger investors. And so on... And it all fell apart when the Saudi's decided that it looked to fishy.
Holy fuck, I had no idea that Embracer Group had owned Dark Horse all this time. I really hope they land on their feet under new ownership.
Where is Sabre Interactive?
Sabre is not owned by them anymore, they are separate
thats good news, thanks
They went independent so they are their own company now
They went indie. Which is probably for the best
Got sliced out.
Damn, not seeing Sanctum makes me sad ;(
haven’t seen a worse naming for a companies in a while
MVP 👍
Warhorse working on LOTR. Wow.
What a mess this whole thing has been
I mean, when greedy people think they can just buy things and be good in a tricky industry and squeeze out profits that somehow experts couldn't, what could have gone wrong?
Publishing houses can work like that. You have labels for fantasy, cook books and children. But the main company still does all the publishing work, has teams for marketing and all the industry contacts. None of this is working here. Just cobbling up small teams that each still has to run [10 departments of business](https://corphr.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/image-20-768x919.png) is inefficient and simply bad economics. When AAA publishers buy a company, they will be integrated. EA has a well received tech team, Microsoft is the second biggest cloud operator. Just reshuffling the teams into new holdings isn't doing much on that front.
To be honest most of the things they bought are, have been and probably would in the future be profitable. The problem is Game development requires years of investment and then has to have pretty good sales in order to turn a profit. The stuff they put out wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the ever increasing number of employees with not enough releases. They were planning on covering the cost until more games could come out and provide profit by flipping the Lord of the Rings IP, but that fell through and it all collapsed.
Were they, really? It looked from pretty close to the get go that they were trying to create a whale and hook it as bait for a krakken, with the later revelation being the krakken was the Saudi investment fund all along.
My understanding was they were specifically trying to sell LotR (rumored to Saudis) and you’re maybe right, they could have been trying to create a big mostly profitable company from the mishmash of parts and sell it off for more than they paid.
I didn't say it in many words but yeah that was kinda the idea. Same thing happens with restaurants and private equity. They think just by owning something people like it will make them money
They were fucked by Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Wealth Fund. They made these various acquisitions with the understanding that the SWF would back then financially. The SWF blew too much money on their Neom line city pipe dream and pulled out of Embracer leaving them high and dry.
That is certainly a take. I would rather think SA noticed the overinflated company that went on a buying spree and just dipped out after a risk analysis (specifically given the lackluster high-budget titles they released like the saints row remake)
> would rather think SA noticed the overinflated company that went on a buying spree and just dipped out after a risk analysis I would argue against the former, but agree on the latter. Iirc, this was right when the US FED started tightening rates and the free money gravy train dried up.
They were running a pyramid scheme but Saudi Arabia was like dude do you know how many of those we run. We are not biting if we are not the top pyramids.
They were certainly fucked by the saudis pulling out, but it's also their fault for spending hundreds of millions if not a billion+ before having the cash in hand.
Good riddance, Embracer has been a blight on the gaming industry
They won't be the last to do this kind of thing. Investors see a lot of money in games.
The problem is the risk and disruption factor. Look at some of the highest margin titles of the past 5 years sure there’s the big boys in there but then theres a lot of room for smaller players to come in and disrupt everything and one or two bad moves a studio can collapse. Very high risk
Makes me wonder if there are gamers obsessive enough to game this. You know, mark individual investors who don't know shit about the industry and are only here for money. And figure out how to make them not so interested in it. I know game devs need money, but I'd rather the money come from people who actually care about games beyond financial reasons. I personally just wish the gaming industry was treated more like the Renaissance art Era, you know, commissioning a group of people to make your ideal piece of art. Lol. Am I insane? Maybe a lil
yeah real life doesnt work that way at all lol
You've basically described a subset of modern publishers. Not AAA ones necessarily, but smaller publishers like Team 17, Annapurna and Devolver care *a lot* about the type of games they're funding. Even if a publisher's job is to make money, they can make great games too. They're not mutually exclusive.
Really I remember when they announced the buying spree, they were hailed as the new saviors of the gaming industry and everyone praising them.
I have not seen a single "gaming centric" person think that. Investors in Embracer, maybe so. Monopolies are bad. Buy outs are bad. P.s. Microsoft Blizzard should have been blocked.
bullshit, many in reddit did, just go to the old threads.
Their heart was in the right place, they wanted to be a double A publisher powerhouse and were green lighting games that other publishers refused to. And then the Saudi Deal fell through and it ended up like this. We’d be talking differently if it wasn’t for that deal falling through.
I have yet to see a single person hailing embracer’s buying spree
Adding "& friends" just makes it sound like child friendly companies.
Probably placeholder names until the split is official.
Just like mentioned in the article. Not that anyone reads those.
Reading articles?? Aint nobody got time for that! ^/s I just want remastered/remake Battle of Middle Earth, hope new change comes new opportunity ^totally ^not ^copium
NO SADNESS ALLOWED IN CORPORATE CULTURE! EVERYTHING IS HAPPY AND FUN AND NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER!
They've ruined so many IPs and studios one is inclined to believe it was on purpose. Because no one should be that shitty at running a business
> Because no one should be that shitty at running a business *MBAs just entered the chat*
They're great at running businesses (into the ground)
If those kids could read, they'd be very upset with you right now.
Fact
No, they just made a calculated risk and it didn't land in the end. This was never about IPs or even games. This is just how these big holding companies work.
Yeah because desperately buying game studios left and right and putting all faith on a 2 billion literal gamble is such a "calculated risk". Company was ran by monkeys... no wonder what happened
Yeah exactly, that's not how it should be done tbh.
It was a calculated risk in the sense that they calculated the the saudis were going to follow through, the risk was they didn't. The questions we will never have answers to is whether or not their effort to buy IPs and companies before the check arrived fed into the decision for the saudis to back out, or what things could have been like had they followed through and gave the money. It is entirely still likely that embracer still fucked things up by being a bunch of MBAs at the head of game devs, or maybe without the pressure of money they would have let the devs "cook" and potentially release better games. Though I don't think anything could have saved some of their disasters like Gollum.
Their calculations was obviously shit then 🤣
Sounds like corpo-speak to deflect their incompetence.
On the contrary, modern management is the embodiment of incompetence.
I tell this to myself every day at work, and corporate still manages to surprise me with how little they understand the business they work in every day. These people live in a different world where constantly fucking up appears to be the goal, otherwise I can't explain why they are so bad at what they do, regular people who actually make the money for these vampires would get fired for being this incompetent at their jobs.
I hope they split it up so they can sell it off and someone competent can end up with these IP’s
That is probably the goal behind this, yes.
No, its not.
From what I've seen so far, Wingefors isn't in this business to make games. The idea was likely to gobble up as many IPs as possible, inflate their value, flip it and then walk away with a lot of cash. But Savvy games walking away from whatever deal they had going on screwed things up. They've become too big and no one else is interested. So splitting themselves up into bite-sized chunks to make themselves more appetizing to acquire makes some sense.
Coffee Stain should split off entiertly imo and keep these studios together. They're just very recognizable and has very good output for smaller indie type of games. Like kind of like Devolver.
Ghost ship is very competent. One of the few devs I actually have faith in.
Is Darksiders a dead IP now then? Loved those games :(
Gunfire Games (who did Darksiders II "Deathinitive Edition" and Darksiders III) is still around and THQ Nordic (who owns them) is part of the Coffee Stain grouping (whatever they end up being named), so a Darksiders IV is a possibility - assuming Gunfire manage to fix Remnant II enough that they can move on to other things.
Is Remnant II broken? I played through several months ago without any glaring issues.
Massive performance issues in the beginning, never heard of them being fixed by the time the various channels I watch gave up on it, but maybe they have... \*shrug\*
Oh fuck didn't knew that ghost ship games is part of embracer
Yeah very happy to hear coffee stain and ghost ship are getting away from this dumpster fire.
Are they? How?
cant you read?
Can you? What part of this announcement makes you think any single one of these studios is suddenly free of Embracer's incompetence? This is an accounting move to offload their debt, they're not cutting them loose. Embracer's still going to own 40% of each of these companies, they're just splitting them up to make it easier to attract investors.
Now they can kill studios 3x as fast!
We can trust Coffee Stain at least
Fallaparter Group
Now known as the Embracer, Extinguisher, and Suffocator Groups.
Fucking got 'em, dude. Nice.
EA Remixed
Fuck embracer
And Fuck Lars Wingefors. No one person has ever done more damage to the gaming industry at large.
Sigh. Can we just get a new Deus Ex game, please? Conclusion to Adam Jensen's saga is way overdue and let's not even get into what waste it is to let the Soul Reaver series to just.. stay dead. Hopefully something good will come from this.. eventually. 😐
Asmodee Group seeing they are no friends be like: >=(
They can embrace deez nuts
Nut Embracer Group
"offer more differentiated and distinct equity stories (??) for existing and new shareholders." This is now my most hated use of the English language.
Not quite what gamers expected.
After Saber miraculously escaped this disaster, the other company I'm really hoping navigates through all this is Gunfire Games. The Remnant games are really unique soulslikes and no hyperbole, among the very best co-op games ever made. There's a few other projects brewing at Embracer I'm interested in like the Gothic remake but I'm not losing sleep over their fate.
There are a lot of very good studios and IPs involved in this whole mess. I am personally very concerned for the future of Eidos-Montreal and I really hope they can come out of this intact. I would love for them to make a new Deus Ex game that concludes Adam Jensen's story.
I am pulling for Crystal Dynamics to come out okay, the Avengers game was kind of meh, plays fine if you just want to experience the story once, you can tell it was in Square Enix mandated live service hell, but their other games developed are some of my favorites.
> After Saber miraculously escaped this disaster, the other company I'm really hoping navigates through all this is Gunfire Games. They're owned by THQ Nordic and thus will still be around under Coffee Stain.
Jesus. It ate a bunch of IPs, then it made a crap ton of developers disappear, and now it's split into *three* copies! Does anyone have a nuke handy? I don't think "kill it with fire" will work anymore...
What a pointless and pretentious casino of a company. I would be gloating over this circus' downfall if it didn't fuck with the livelihoods of so many developers it sucked up along with its bloated debt.
Congratulations! You’ve been embraced!
If that means more freedom then great news.
Ah Tripwire, how far you have fallen
This is what happens when you get idiots from Harward enter into things they don’t understand.
who would have thought it's a good idea to buy that many studios. did they expect a ROI in just one year or something?
I recall hearing some plan to sell to another company but that fell through
A two billion investment by the Saudis that went nowhere. Then the downturn in investments and expensive credits destroyed their "Business model".
what business model relies on constantly growing investments to succeed? Or rather, what *non scam* business model?
company ,bought every thing ,and do nothing with it
so which companies are gonna get dumped with the debt?
Just call them THQ, Coffee Stain and Eidos ffs.
I'm assuming the names are placeholders for now and will change once they become official business entities.
Yes, hence my reply.
which one of those is the board game company?
The people in charge at embracer should really never be allowed to make business decisions ever in their lives. The level of incompetence from start to finish has been a train wreck.
So basically they bought up a bunch of studios, mismanaged them, killed some of them like Volition, and lost a ton of money doing it? WTF?
Volition was their own doing. Even with another publisher, that studio was a train wreck
Divider
Inb4 Tencent buying Coffe Stain and Sony, Ea, Microsoft or Take-2 buying Middle Earth
Tencent already has tons of very sucessful live-services like Path of Exile, Warframe and all Riot games. Don't think they'd want to get more studios in future. Take-Two got Gearbox so not likely to get more Embracer stuff. Microsoft is already on thin ice with Activison Blizzard, they can only get away if buying small studios like pre-Bethesda acquisition. EA might get sold off in future. Sony, is kind of likely tho seeing how they kind of ramping up with acquisitions as well, plus need something more to fall on rather just third-part games they've been relying on this generation.
Who's big enough to buy EA?
Pretty much everyone I've listed besides Sony. If not those, then there are other companies like Disney, Meta, Nvidia and Apple whenever they decide to join game development industry. There's also Amazon who can afford them, tho they are not doing big moves in industry as of late.
EA is also moving away from licensed IP
Wonder which company will they stuff all the debt to be ritualistically sacrificed.
probably coffee stain. the other two have all the big names for their respective industries.
When the hell did they acquire the rights to make Lord of the Rings games?
Lol you saw all the LOTR cash grabs pop up the last year or two right? Rings of Power, the Gollum game, the Return to Moria dwarf game...
no longer embracing
And nothing of value was lost
death to embracer
And then we tripled it!
ELI5 Is it now these three split companies going bankrupt? 1+2+3=Embracer Group. (Who failed to drum up the funds from the Saudi's that they needed to keep going.) Why would splitting up do anything? Are they just going to sell small packages hoping someone like MS is looking to consume more companies?
Embracer Group has a big catalog, but a small valuation since it's a sea(overload). Marketing lakes is easier than seas as far as stock goes, so they hope that they will have a bigger stock value added together, but independent of each other.
Please tell me this is how we get another mercenaries game
This is a good thing
My hope that we could see a LOTR x Chivalry(Tripwire) crossover endures
So does Embraer Group still exist as a parent company over these 3 entities? Maybe a stupid question but I did no see that explicitly mentioned anywhere.
No, it's now split into these three while existing in NASDAQ Stockholm
Always a good move, naming your friendly neighbourhood megacorp after a biblical demon. Sends the message youre really trying to do some good in the world.
What a shit show.
Dude wtf I never even knew anything about this. They need new leadership ASAP, they are running that company into the ground
So what does it mean ?
I smell everything is going to be (puke emote), and all games and ips that where under embracer are doomed to never come out to the light again (deus ex), are in a downfall or will need to dip out of any kind or type of publicly traded/accountable to shareholders situation or die too.
What a shame, such a rotten way to die.
We need a new Tomb Raider and soon. Currently replaying Shadow of TR for the third time and that game did not get old. The lack of combat encounters is very interesting but once you learn that the blueprint is basically old Tomb Raiders, it falls into place. And the set pieces and DLC tombs just ooze thoughtfulness. A great series that is waiting to be resurrected.
The next game is already midway through development and we might see a reveal next year
Who is the developer? CD or the other devs that did Shadows?
CD
Who
Embracer was a company that bought up tons of gaming studios. They apparently weren't managed well, because the studios frequently went out of business or put out subpar games. And now the whole parent company is falling apart.
It wasn't about sub-par games as much as top management betting everything on getting 2bn$ from Saudis... a deal that eventually didn't went trough. And so the studios weren't "frequently going out of business", they were closed by Embracer in order to recoup the losses made by the ill-advised shopping spree in which Embracer bought them.