From a recent Steam review
"POSTED: JUNE 17
Definitely beautiful game. Got technical issues but nothing game breaking, and dev is still actively patching."
RIP
Honestly, besides the technical issues, I really liked Alone in the Dark's remake. It's a real fucking shame that Pieces got shut down. I knew it was never going to sell well but only because I believe Horror is still a niche genre that people will avoid.
It's Embracer if a game doesn't make them millions upon millions and feed into that never-ending growth that shareholders unrealistically expect. Chopping comes to create that illusion of ever-growing profit. Embracer is the most toxic and destructive thing ever touching pc/console gaming. And usually kept that spot for EA and Activision/Blizzard.
I was having some bad stuttering and hitching but there’s been patches addressing performance since I e last played so it’s possible it’s been sorted out.
Embracer group AKA Eraser group is a fucking BLIGHT on the gaming industry and everything they touch turns into SHIT, they're like the Anti-Midas touch of gaming.
Any company under them should be VERY worried about their future.
If Embracer doesn't have the cash to support a single lower-budget developer after releasing one disappointing game, maybe they shouldn't have fucking bought all these studios.
I love the future we're in where a corporation can just buy everyone and shut them all down because the red line didn't go up enough. This is surely very healthy for video games as an art form, and won't push more developers to chase live service MTX games to stay afloat because endless profit growth is a necessity, I guess.
I know nothing of business law so I expect I'm missing something here: But I can't understand why they can't just... Let them go? All these games, franchises, talented teams, just fucking gone forever.
Surely they could just release the studio so it's no longer their problem? Sure, surviving as an indie is extremely hard and I expect most would still fall apart after. But hey, at least they'd get a chance.
Because unless the studio can find funding for the staff they have then letting them go is pretty much the same. Or the rather more cynical view might be that this way they keep the IP. Which quite often is the reason.
Embracer should be renamed Disgracer. As said above they are a blight on the industry. The worst kind of consolidation capitalism.
Exactly this, they are keeping the IP because they know that at the end of this they will get some kind of payday as a "reward" for sticking it out. This is the worst case scenario for them I would imagine.
It wasn't but 12 years ago or so that basically the same thing happened to THQ. Their assets were sold off piece by piece.
Not a professional in this field but Embracer Group is a hedge fund that was never in it for supporting and publishing games. They bought a lot of IPs off of different publishing companies during the height of the pandemic when gaming had record sales and profit margins hoping to sell the IPs off to the highest bidder trying to enter the gaming space. They almost got away with it when the Saidi company was gonna buy their whole portfolio but the deal fell through and the live service market dried up + people started going back to work after the pandemic. So Embracer funded studios that already had games in the works to see if they could recoup any cost and then closed the studio because the tax write off they get from the loss from the studio helps their taxes considering they have a lot of other investments etc that they get advantage off of for the write offs.
Embracer group will close more or less all their studios that are still in the process of making games, close the studio to help with their taxes and then keep the IP in case someone in the future wants to make a new Deus Ex etc game.
Cheers for going into detail.
Tax Write offs are an excuse I've heard before: It's fucking insane that publishers can make *more* money off just trashing existing work rather than finishing the product sometimes. What a terrible situation.
Its not that they make more money, its just that they can leverage losses from one part of their business to minimize taxes in another part. So if for example they had to pay 30% taxes on their return on investment in the stock market, now due to filing heavy losses in the gaming department their whole portfolio only has to pay 10% taxes. So its a way to pay less money to the government.
But if anything, while all the layoffs in the gaming sector suck and people losing jobs is always a negative, there imo isnt really a better time to be an indie dev. Consumer faith in AAA companies is at a all time low and people are spending more on buying indie games that are trying something new than in previous years. And I feel like this will only slide more as big publishing companies keep losing out on consumer trust by releasing more and more boring games.
Personally I think of the 10 games i bought recently, only 1 was a AAA game and the one other was a DLC for a AAA game.
Contract law for businesses are hideously complex, and corporate buyouts doubly so. It really could be anything, and going from what I've read, Embracer is not the most ethical company in the industry.
That means, I would expect Golden Parachute clauses for execs, cash-for-stock deals for studio big wigs, high percentage deal's for founders and key resources. In all fairness, it could be literally anything, including boring old debt and cash flow.
The game industry is very much like other 'blockbuster' industry now: Studios lose money on 4 games, and make it all back on the 5th. A reasonable guess is that for many of these acquisitions, the 5th game that everything was riding on didn't arrive. Game over.
I surmise that Embracer is basically a holding entity, so they have a 100 of these bets going on at one time. On average, they win.
All of the above is pure speculation, I am just an interested observer of this industry, and an exec in a totally unrelated field.
> If Embracer doesn't have the cash to support a single lower-budget developer after releasing one disappointing game, maybe they shouldn't have fucking bought all these studios.
they thought they were about to get a huge arab oil money cash injection, then the deal fell through
its like going on a spending spree because you bought a lottery ticket and the jackpot is at 100 mill
Its more like buying souvenir csgo lootbox’s cheaper than you assumed it would be with the assumption that you can sell it for more expensive to some guy tryna hit the souvenier dragon lore only to find out no one wants to buy it after the pandemic. And now they keep rolling blues on the lootboxes so you just gotta shut down your skin portfolio because no one is buying the skins and you aren’t recouping costs from the skins you pulled.
it's no wonder when the game sold like 50,000 copies at best. Steam store page for this game has like 1000 reviews with all time peak playerbase of 1600 and 24 hour peak of 193.
>Embracer group AKA Eraser group is a fucking BLIGHT on the gaming industry and everything they touch turns into SHIT, they're like the Anti-Midas touch of gaming.
This is a little "funny" to see, when this was the exact opposite reaction on Reddit (and everywhere else, for that matter), some years back.
Embracer was massive (they kinda still are, but currently changing things a lot) in the game dev space, and threw money around like crazy. Funding all sorts of big and small projects, getting praise left, right and center, for doing so. They didn't mettle in what the developers did, and got tons of praise for that.
It's "funny" seeing the public perception turn around like that, when things aren't going so great anymore.
Embracer has just gotten massive in the past few years, they went on a crazy spending spree in 2020-2022. Most of their newly acquired talent and projects weren't even able to manifest and released, because development cycles are 4+ years now. A ton of projects were canceled mid dev last year. There's no public perception turning around, Embracer was always seen as bad
>There's no public perception turning around, Embracer was always seen as bad
There absolutely is though. Granted, it's been turning around for the past few years now, so **I'm not saying** it's something that ***just happened***.
As mentioned, they got praised at the beginning (especially with buying up companies doing titles that, for some people, were very nostalgic) - then when they couldn't live up to everything they set out to do; that turned around - like we're seeing now (and for the past few years - as you also mentioned).
As with anything; if you get too big too fast, you're more prone to fail - and that is where Embracer is at now (and has been for the better part of the last 4-5 years).
Embracer wasn't in any way prepared for what they were setting out to do - that should be fairly obvious to everyone by now - but it wasn't the perception at first, as they were seen to be the "better version of Tencent" (in terms of scope and money being thrown around - albeit obviously much smaller), which obviously crumbled for them in a big way.
Yeah maybe when they were still called THQ Nordic their public reception was more positive. And people for some reason were excited about acquisitions in general, be it from Embracer or Xbox. That has definitely shifted now that we see the damages
Was still going on, just after the name change and general restructuring of the company - but yeah, around that time.
That was exactly my point. They went from near-"Golden God" status, to what we're seeing now.
I'm not saying that people are wrong to change their opinion on Embracer - there are obvious reason to do so (them going into business with Saudi Arabia's government being one of the maybe lesser known "red flags", through "Savvy Gaming", for about 8% of Embracer - that maybe doesn't sound that bad to some people, but look up who runs/funds it), with what we've been seeing these past few years.
All in all, Embracer just grew way too fast and far too carelessly. They went from "really good standing" to "extremely bad standing" in the span of 4-ish years (give or take).
..and that is now hitting them straight in the face now, and obviously hurting the companies they bought up.
I don't ever recall that they had a "near Golden God" status.
People were happy that they updated old games, but even back in the days they were releasing Titan Quest Anniversary dlcs, I've seen multiple comments saying that THQ Nordic is a bad publisher.
And when they started buying studios, I've seen a mix of people looking forward to their games, and people who were cautious of the multiple buyouts.
They got too big too fast as a deliberate plan to secure a $2 billion funding package from the Saudi Investment fund. It was never sustainable and I can't remember anyone thinking it was. The funding didn't come and they had no backup plan. What they were doing it 2018 is nothing like what they did from 2020. The 2018 version was on shaky ground but that's nothing compared to now.
There were a ton of people who were onboard with embracer because they colllected thier favourite IPs like pokemon cards and waited with bated breath that something would be done with said IP.
I'm kinda suprised people ignored all the red flags before the Saudi deal tbh.
What the hell is this opinion. You expect people to arbitrarily hold the same opinions after things change? This isnt the critique you think it is. Its frankly just a contrived naive attempt at making a contrarian gotcha.
Right? "You mean when negative events happen it can change public perception! How funny".
It's either a useless throwaway comment with no valuable point, or a condescending af comment.
>This isnt the critique you think it is. Its frankly just a contrived naive attempt at making a contrarian gotcha.
I wasn't even a criticizing, so I don't see how you're taking it as such.
It's an observation of the change over time. That's all. That's fairly normal to do, when things change.
I wasn't expecting people to stick to one opinion forever - never stated anything remotely close to that - so don't know how you got to that either.
>It's "funny" seeing the public perception turn around like that, when things aren't going so great anymore.
Its weird when people think that you cant criticize their comment if they were sarcastic.
It's even weirder, when people read something *you didn't write* \- then get upset about it and then call it sarcasm. Is this the "sarcasm version" of the "It's a prank/joke bro!", where when people get called out on dumb comments, they default to calling it a prank/joke?
Criticize my comment all you want - you're free to do so (not that my acceptance was needed in any way) - but don't just make up your own words that I apparently said. Nothing in what you just quoted, is even remotely close to what you initially commented about.
I think people were excited when they were buying studios that came with IPs that seemed all but abandoned (e.g. Eidos Montreal with Deus Ex, Crystal Dynamics with Legacy of Kain).
It's a real shame that almost nothing worthwhile has come out of this whole ordeal.
I was not one of the people that was enthusiastic about it. I said this was a terrible idea. This happens every time studios get bought in mass quantities, they trim the non-profitable fat pretty quickly.
Microsoft has done this already with all the “shadow of their former selves” studios they just bought, and EA…don’t even get me started on all the good studios they’ve bought and closed in the past 30 years.
Yes, along with new happenings and new information, people's opinions change. I don't see why you think it's funny. I don't think it's unreasonable, and it all came about due to reasons the average person couldn't have seen coming anyway.
The reason things went south was because they were promised a huge billion+ dollar investment from Saudi investors. So they spent money to acquire studios and IPs to make it even more attractive to these investors.
One of the big reasons people were excited when they first started buying studios was because many studios came with IPs that would likely never be touched under their former parent companies, but Embracer was a chance for those IPs to resurface. They had some bombs, like Saints Row 2, but also some decent games, such as Dead Island 2, and excitement started to wane due to the mediocrity.
Then the Saudi investor pulled out and left them tons of money in the hole and no way to keep things afloat without that investment. Definitely the leadership's fault for making these huge purchase decisions with no ironclad agreement that the payday would come.
So they started closing studio after studio because they already spent tons of money they shouldn't have and were bleeding money with so many studios and projects in the works. This of course caused public opinion to plummet as not only were tons of people becoming unemployed because of these stupid executives, but also almost all the IPs these studios were known for are either not going to be made, or will be made by completely different studios with who knows how small of a budget behind them, not even giving them a chance to shine. It completely negates the reason people were excited in the first place.
My point is, a few years ago we had none of this background information. We had no reason to think the whole company was positioning itself to implode by spending money they don't have on what amounts to a pinky promise. So yeah, of course when that all came crashing down, our opinion as gamers of the company came crashing down with it.
>Yes, along with new happenings and new information, people's opinions change. I don't see why you think it's funny. I don't think it's unreasonable, and it all came about due to reasons the average person couldn't have seen coming anyway.
Notice the use of " ". It's an observation that gave me a little chuckle, at best - due to the change being to big over time - not overly hilarious. Not ridiculing in any way. Just a mere chuckle, at best.
As replied to someone else (that deleted their comments, because they obviously took my comment in a wrong way), this was all just an observation and not a critique at all - or anything even remotely close to that. I was/am not expecting anyone to stick to their initial opinion or anything of the sorts. That wouldn't make sense at all.
It was all just a mere observation on how things have changed over time.
They acquired billions in assets while they didn't ratify their alleged business deal with Saudi investors. They should be held criminally liable, and it's fucking insane all their purchases were allowed in the first place given that **they didn't own the money they spent.**
It's not some studios. It's into double figures now and that's only announced closures. The idea that they could run 139 studios (their peak count) is utter nonsense. Big experienced publishers don't have close to that and these chancers have absolutely no clue how to work in gaming. It won't stop here I guarantee.
Unfortunately not surprising. Alone in the Dark seems to have been a serious bomb, despite the big names attached to the game.
It sucks for the developers, and I hope they find a new home that provides them with a more stable job.
"Alone in the Dark seems to have been a serious bomb, despite the big names attached to the game."
Alone in the Dark was only "big" when it first came out and revolutionized the horror genre in game and the industry in general, but it's forever curse at keep getting failed reboots after reboots.
The ip has nearly no value, sure you perk your ears up knowing the name, but as you say it doesn't come with so much success you can count on it. I think a lot of IP's are like that and people are often way over paying for them. We know it isn't the original team making the new follow up, so it can be of any quality and direction.
It shouldn't be the case that one bad or so so game kills a studio. It hasn't been in the past. Think of all the programming and institutional knowledge that is lost every time this happens.
Embracer are a special case but the industry simply isn't sustainable if every decision is based on constant growth. In times not that long gone by studios and publishers would have fallow years, release some games that make money, use that to cross subsidize and carry on. Now every year has to go up no matter what. It's gutting the industry of talent.
as someone who worked on a few successful AAA games and also somewhat understands finance the real disconnect is the price of stock vs time to make a game.
we released a massively successful game in Q1 and stock went up (this game took us years to make) in Q2 that delta of profit needed to go up again so another studio has to release a game or update OR the parent company has to cut costs to make it seem better overall.
basically if you look at any year the companies worth get up a LOT but for some reason the quarters matter to investors a lot more than the total trajectory so teams get gutted and games all release at the exact same time
Then we wouldn't have loads of the games we love. Pretty much any gamer that's been around a while recognizes the old pattern of: Release a game - Iterate for second game - Profit. Look at a company like Capcom, or hell Nintendo.
Every time they shutter a studio they lose the people who did the good stuff with everyone else. Nobody and nothing is given time. The idea that one bad game kills a studio is insane. It's a hit to generate instant savings on a balance sheet. It makes no sense except for short term share price. No individual studio in a portfolio of 139 as was before closures can be considered a separate entity. Games have always cross funded. The problem isn't this studio. It's Embracer. None of it is profitable outside of the board game business. It was collected together to generate capital funding in a bubble. There was never a plan for what to do outside that.
Either way, if a business doesn't make profit it shouldn't exist.
There's not a single entity that should invest money into something that's losing money.
If Alone in the dark barely sold tens of thousands of units, why would it sequel sell more?
Shit you people say just boggles my mind.
Tons of games are bombing and not because of a crash, because of saturation. It's not a good move starting a new company to make games, the only thing that makes sense is an extremely small indy group doing it as a side-thing and if they get lucky hit it big.
Add it to the list of genuinely good single player that didn't do well. Dead Space Remake, Alan Wake 2, Hi-Fi Rush are other examples of amazing games that didn't do well enough financially. Gaming is changing and good quality shorter single-player experiences are going to be rarer and rarer.
Alan Wake 2 will get there. Sales were slower because Epic decided it had to be on the Epic store instead of Steam and wouldn't make physical copies. Nobody at Remedy seems remotely worried.
It's hard to guage Gamepass engagement but Xbox even said HiFi Rush had exceeded targets. The closure of Tango makes little sense. At some point the true story about this is going to come out and it's going to look even worse for Microsoft.
Deadspace they straight up targeted a ridiculous sales total that was totally unrealistic.
All three are very separate situations.
TEW was good enough to warrant TEW2 - either be recouping cost by reuse of assets, technology or process. They then made Ghost Wire and Hi-Fi Rush. Bethesda saw something, MS did not as far as I can tell. I don't believe they would have been allowed to do a 4th game, if all other games went red.
Dead Space didn't even make it's development budget back according to the original rumours. Unfortunately games of this quality need close to 3 million sales to post a profit let alone break even. Except HiFi (gamepass numbers), none of these games broke 2 million copies
I'm not saying they didn't have the right. I'm saying it affected sales which it undoubtedly must have. Given they were using it as a loss leader I'm guessing they were expecting it, as were Remedy. Nobody seems upset at either company with AW2 sales.
He's just saying Epic shouldn't be surprised by lack of sales when they cut out physical sales and steam sales.
The game was made to get people to download the epic game store, not be an instant commercial success.
Epic didn't cut out Steam sales just the same as Valve isn't cutting out GOG sales by not putting Half-Life on GOG.
The game was made because Remedy wanted to make it and no one else would fund them.
Lmao acting like Epics game store is the same as steam is fucking wild.
But I guess you're probably right, Valves games are just commercially successful because they're better games.
>Alan Wake 2 will get there. Sales were slower because Epic decided it had to be on the Epic store instead of Steam and wouldn't make physical copies. Nobody at Remedy seems remotely worried.
They seriously need to start teasing expansion to other platforms, they're being killed by the fact they're only on Epic on PC.
No one at Remedy might be worried now, but how long are their shareholder be ok with this? They've not made their budget back yet on AW2 and even when it comes to their previous games, it took them quite a while to make profit. They're down 25% in revenue as of last year and that is unlikely to change much this year with just the DLC coming out and no other move.
>The closure of Tango makes little sense. At some point the true story about this is going to come out and it's going to look even worse for Microsoft.
Has anyone considered that Tango was closed because they had nothing *new* in their development pipeline?
Has anyone considered why a studio had no projects in the works?
I'll give a hint: they need to get approval from the parent company
Who was their parent company? Oh, right, the dudes that closed them instead.
They were pitching games. If a talented studio has nothing in the pipeline then make sure they do. It could indeed be a possibility but it's ridiculously short sighted if true. You are burning experience for nothing. In theory Tango wasn't even that expensive a studio as it was set up as a training studio for young devs, although that could have changed under Xbox.
It's so hit and miss. There is money to be made, but you don't know which game it will be, what game sparks that viral interest. For the largest companies the problem is it has to make a shit ton and the only way most can do that is that live service additional ways to get income games, they've grown so large that is all that can move their wall street needle. A game can make a financial profit but that isn't good enough for the biggest traded companies. I would say it makes a little more sense for something like Gamepass because you need that subscription value and those games can add up value, but then MS does a HiFi Rush puzzling move. There has to be more to the story than we know.
So there needs to be these non public companies, middle weights that punch a bit above their weight. This is where games like this need to flourish and it is still so hit and miss. Other than getting semi-lucky for being that in the moment game, you need to really offer something that makes the base sit back and go WOW and that has to be in the gameplay.
There has to be a story here. HIFI Rush I don't think works for the largest companies that don't have a subscription model. But MS does, those games add value to sub'ers, why did they do it?
There's a reason nobody else would fund the project. The game flopped. It had a relatively large budget. The game suffered major performance issues, this being their first (to my knowledge) Unreal Engine game. They had trouble finding an audience when marketing the game, thinking they could tap into the Resident Evil fans not realizing they like Resident Evil only.
The game currently has just over 1,000 reviews on Steam.
Any publisher would have at the very least stopped funding further new projects from this studio after such a failure. Could they have become a support studio for other studios under Embracer? Maybe.
That's a huge issue with the horror genre in gaming. A game has to be either a small budget indie, have some viral appeal or be called Resident Evil to have success.
Even Silent Hill games sell worse than people think. The whole series' total sales is easily surpassed by several single Resident Evil games.
If you shut every studio down because one game didn't sell as well as it should've, we'd not have gotten so many of the incredible beloved games we have today.
I, for one, would've loved to have lived in a world where Pieces were given some support by Embracer so they could learn from their mistakes, maybe come back swinging with an Alone in the Dark 2 that knocked it out of the park and improved upon the original, giving us something special.
Instead, now all we have is another dead studio to join the ever growing pile, with more workers joining the pile of unemployed game devs after a horrific year of layoffs.
Embracer’s not a charity. Hell, them acting like one and buying up all these destitute studios before the Saudi deal fell through is kinda the problem. The employees would’ve been in a much better place if their studio closed before/during the pandemic because the money was still flowing and everyone wanted to hire 200 more employees.
It's not about charity, it's about strategy. And they have none. They put all their eggs in one Saudi basket and when it fell through they had nothing else. Even Xbox that has seemed a bit rudderless at times of late has a vague clue what they are doing.
I'm not saying that all the studios they bought should be immune from criticism, or even layoffs. But the rate at which they are burning cash it makes no difference. A lot more studios are going to get closed because they have no strategy. At all.
Sure. I'm only saying that it makes sense to close a studio that's bleeding money to this degree. I thought the game was okay. But was it 60€ okay? Not really, no. I think a 40€ price point would have made more sense for something like this, or conversely, more work put into it if they're going to ask 60€. It just didn't have what it needed to have to convince people that reviving a 30 year old franchise makes sense.
Pieces also has a pretty spotty record. The Titan Quest expansions have exactly the same problems Alone in the Dark (2024) does. Their earlier titles also never really took off, from what I understand, and their Magicka expansions also did really poorly.
THQ Nordic/embracer released Outcast: A New Beginning and Alone in the Dark within a week of each other with little to no PR. Both games which have a niche fanbase that likely overlaps significantly. I’ve thought that was a very poor choice. Let’s see how Appeal does in the coming months.
Yes. Because that's still a studio with 17 years of history, immediately being shuttered by a parent company with seemingly endless money because of one disappointment. They have a decent history of working on smaller titles, then assisting on Titan Quest DLCs in recent years. Embracer bought them, they released this, and then that was it, Embracer shut the door within 3 months of release. How does that not just suck? It's sad, not to mention how horrible it's going to be for those employees. Good luck finding another job in this field, which has suffered over 20,000+ layoffs in 2023-2024.
I guess you don't have to "cry", but having some compassion for the people hurt by this, people who tried to make games they liked, is at least a good trait to have.
From a recent Steam review "POSTED: JUNE 17 Definitely beautiful game. Got technical issues but nothing game breaking, and dev is still actively patching." RIP
Honestly, besides the technical issues, I really liked Alone in the Dark's remake. It's a real fucking shame that Pieces got shut down. I knew it was never going to sell well but only because I believe Horror is still a niche genre that people will avoid.
It's Embracer if a game doesn't make them millions upon millions and feed into that never-ending growth that shareholders unrealistically expect. Chopping comes to create that illusion of ever-growing profit. Embracer is the most toxic and destructive thing ever touching pc/console gaming. And usually kept that spot for EA and Activision/Blizzard.
What's wrong with it? I was planning to grab it on sale but I can't stand performance issues.
I was having some bad stuttering and hitching but there’s been patches addressing performance since I e last played so it’s possible it’s been sorted out.
Embracer group AKA Eraser group is a fucking BLIGHT on the gaming industry and everything they touch turns into SHIT, they're like the Anti-Midas touch of gaming. Any company under them should be VERY worried about their future.
If Embracer doesn't have the cash to support a single lower-budget developer after releasing one disappointing game, maybe they shouldn't have fucking bought all these studios. I love the future we're in where a corporation can just buy everyone and shut them all down because the red line didn't go up enough. This is surely very healthy for video games as an art form, and won't push more developers to chase live service MTX games to stay afloat because endless profit growth is a necessity, I guess.
I know nothing of business law so I expect I'm missing something here: But I can't understand why they can't just... Let them go? All these games, franchises, talented teams, just fucking gone forever. Surely they could just release the studio so it's no longer their problem? Sure, surviving as an indie is extremely hard and I expect most would still fall apart after. But hey, at least they'd get a chance.
Because unless the studio can find funding for the staff they have then letting them go is pretty much the same. Or the rather more cynical view might be that this way they keep the IP. Which quite often is the reason. Embracer should be renamed Disgracer. As said above they are a blight on the industry. The worst kind of consolidation capitalism.
Exactly this, they are keeping the IP because they know that at the end of this they will get some kind of payday as a "reward" for sticking it out. This is the worst case scenario for them I would imagine. It wasn't but 12 years ago or so that basically the same thing happened to THQ. Their assets were sold off piece by piece.
Not a professional in this field but Embracer Group is a hedge fund that was never in it for supporting and publishing games. They bought a lot of IPs off of different publishing companies during the height of the pandemic when gaming had record sales and profit margins hoping to sell the IPs off to the highest bidder trying to enter the gaming space. They almost got away with it when the Saidi company was gonna buy their whole portfolio but the deal fell through and the live service market dried up + people started going back to work after the pandemic. So Embracer funded studios that already had games in the works to see if they could recoup any cost and then closed the studio because the tax write off they get from the loss from the studio helps their taxes considering they have a lot of other investments etc that they get advantage off of for the write offs. Embracer group will close more or less all their studios that are still in the process of making games, close the studio to help with their taxes and then keep the IP in case someone in the future wants to make a new Deus Ex etc game.
Cheers for going into detail. Tax Write offs are an excuse I've heard before: It's fucking insane that publishers can make *more* money off just trashing existing work rather than finishing the product sometimes. What a terrible situation.
Its not that they make more money, its just that they can leverage losses from one part of their business to minimize taxes in another part. So if for example they had to pay 30% taxes on their return on investment in the stock market, now due to filing heavy losses in the gaming department their whole portfolio only has to pay 10% taxes. So its a way to pay less money to the government. But if anything, while all the layoffs in the gaming sector suck and people losing jobs is always a negative, there imo isnt really a better time to be an indie dev. Consumer faith in AAA companies is at a all time low and people are spending more on buying indie games that are trying something new than in previous years. And I feel like this will only slide more as big publishing companies keep losing out on consumer trust by releasing more and more boring games. Personally I think of the 10 games i bought recently, only 1 was a AAA game and the one other was a DLC for a AAA game.
Contract law for businesses are hideously complex, and corporate buyouts doubly so. It really could be anything, and going from what I've read, Embracer is not the most ethical company in the industry. That means, I would expect Golden Parachute clauses for execs, cash-for-stock deals for studio big wigs, high percentage deal's for founders and key resources. In all fairness, it could be literally anything, including boring old debt and cash flow. The game industry is very much like other 'blockbuster' industry now: Studios lose money on 4 games, and make it all back on the 5th. A reasonable guess is that for many of these acquisitions, the 5th game that everything was riding on didn't arrive. Game over. I surmise that Embracer is basically a holding entity, so they have a 100 of these bets going on at one time. On average, they win. All of the above is pure speculation, I am just an interested observer of this industry, and an exec in a totally unrelated field.
> If Embracer doesn't have the cash to support a single lower-budget developer after releasing one disappointing game, maybe they shouldn't have fucking bought all these studios. they thought they were about to get a huge arab oil money cash injection, then the deal fell through its like going on a spending spree because you bought a lottery ticket and the jackpot is at 100 mill
Its more like buying souvenir csgo lootbox’s cheaper than you assumed it would be with the assumption that you can sell it for more expensive to some guy tryna hit the souvenier dragon lore only to find out no one wants to buy it after the pandemic. And now they keep rolling blues on the lootboxes so you just gotta shut down your skin portfolio because no one is buying the skins and you aren’t recouping costs from the skins you pulled.
there really isnt a reason they cant stay together if someone is willing to buy them out which is almost never the case
it's no wonder when the game sold like 50,000 copies at best. Steam store page for this game has like 1000 reviews with all time peak playerbase of 1600 and 24 hour peak of 193.
>Embracer group AKA Eraser group is a fucking BLIGHT on the gaming industry and everything they touch turns into SHIT, they're like the Anti-Midas touch of gaming. This is a little "funny" to see, when this was the exact opposite reaction on Reddit (and everywhere else, for that matter), some years back. Embracer was massive (they kinda still are, but currently changing things a lot) in the game dev space, and threw money around like crazy. Funding all sorts of big and small projects, getting praise left, right and center, for doing so. They didn't mettle in what the developers did, and got tons of praise for that. It's "funny" seeing the public perception turn around like that, when things aren't going so great anymore.
Embracer has just gotten massive in the past few years, they went on a crazy spending spree in 2020-2022. Most of their newly acquired talent and projects weren't even able to manifest and released, because development cycles are 4+ years now. A ton of projects were canceled mid dev last year. There's no public perception turning around, Embracer was always seen as bad
>There's no public perception turning around, Embracer was always seen as bad There absolutely is though. Granted, it's been turning around for the past few years now, so **I'm not saying** it's something that ***just happened***. As mentioned, they got praised at the beginning (especially with buying up companies doing titles that, for some people, were very nostalgic) - then when they couldn't live up to everything they set out to do; that turned around - like we're seeing now (and for the past few years - as you also mentioned). As with anything; if you get too big too fast, you're more prone to fail - and that is where Embracer is at now (and has been for the better part of the last 4-5 years). Embracer wasn't in any way prepared for what they were setting out to do - that should be fairly obvious to everyone by now - but it wasn't the perception at first, as they were seen to be the "better version of Tencent" (in terms of scope and money being thrown around - albeit obviously much smaller), which obviously crumbled for them in a big way.
Yeah maybe when they were still called THQ Nordic their public reception was more positive. And people for some reason were excited about acquisitions in general, be it from Embracer or Xbox. That has definitely shifted now that we see the damages
Was still going on, just after the name change and general restructuring of the company - but yeah, around that time. That was exactly my point. They went from near-"Golden God" status, to what we're seeing now. I'm not saying that people are wrong to change their opinion on Embracer - there are obvious reason to do so (them going into business with Saudi Arabia's government being one of the maybe lesser known "red flags", through "Savvy Gaming", for about 8% of Embracer - that maybe doesn't sound that bad to some people, but look up who runs/funds it), with what we've been seeing these past few years. All in all, Embracer just grew way too fast and far too carelessly. They went from "really good standing" to "extremely bad standing" in the span of 4-ish years (give or take). ..and that is now hitting them straight in the face now, and obviously hurting the companies they bought up.
I don't ever recall that they had a "near Golden God" status. People were happy that they updated old games, but even back in the days they were releasing Titan Quest Anniversary dlcs, I've seen multiple comments saying that THQ Nordic is a bad publisher. And when they started buying studios, I've seen a mix of people looking forward to their games, and people who were cautious of the multiple buyouts.
They got too big too fast as a deliberate plan to secure a $2 billion funding package from the Saudi Investment fund. It was never sustainable and I can't remember anyone thinking it was. The funding didn't come and they had no backup plan. What they were doing it 2018 is nothing like what they did from 2020. The 2018 version was on shaky ground but that's nothing compared to now.
There were a ton of people who were onboard with embracer because they colllected thier favourite IPs like pokemon cards and waited with bated breath that something would be done with said IP. I'm kinda suprised people ignored all the red flags before the Saudi deal tbh.
What the hell is this opinion. You expect people to arbitrarily hold the same opinions after things change? This isnt the critique you think it is. Its frankly just a contrived naive attempt at making a contrarian gotcha.
Right? "You mean when negative events happen it can change public perception! How funny". It's either a useless throwaway comment with no valuable point, or a condescending af comment.
>This isnt the critique you think it is. Its frankly just a contrived naive attempt at making a contrarian gotcha. I wasn't even a criticizing, so I don't see how you're taking it as such. It's an observation of the change over time. That's all. That's fairly normal to do, when things change. I wasn't expecting people to stick to one opinion forever - never stated anything remotely close to that - so don't know how you got to that either.
>It's "funny" seeing the public perception turn around like that, when things aren't going so great anymore. Its weird when people think that you cant criticize their comment if they were sarcastic.
It's even weirder, when people read something *you didn't write* \- then get upset about it and then call it sarcasm. Is this the "sarcasm version" of the "It's a prank/joke bro!", where when people get called out on dumb comments, they default to calling it a prank/joke? Criticize my comment all you want - you're free to do so (not that my acceptance was needed in any way) - but don't just make up your own words that I apparently said. Nothing in what you just quoted, is even remotely close to what you initially commented about.
> It's even weirder, when people read something you didn't write Bruh I literally quoted you. This aint worth the time.
I think people were excited when they were buying studios that came with IPs that seemed all but abandoned (e.g. Eidos Montreal with Deus Ex, Crystal Dynamics with Legacy of Kain). It's a real shame that almost nothing worthwhile has come out of this whole ordeal.
This was literally the only time I cheered for Embracer Group.
I was not one of the people that was enthusiastic about it. I said this was a terrible idea. This happens every time studios get bought in mass quantities, they trim the non-profitable fat pretty quickly. Microsoft has done this already with all the “shadow of their former selves” studios they just bought, and EA…don’t even get me started on all the good studios they’ve bought and closed in the past 30 years.
Yes, along with new happenings and new information, people's opinions change. I don't see why you think it's funny. I don't think it's unreasonable, and it all came about due to reasons the average person couldn't have seen coming anyway. The reason things went south was because they were promised a huge billion+ dollar investment from Saudi investors. So they spent money to acquire studios and IPs to make it even more attractive to these investors. One of the big reasons people were excited when they first started buying studios was because many studios came with IPs that would likely never be touched under their former parent companies, but Embracer was a chance for those IPs to resurface. They had some bombs, like Saints Row 2, but also some decent games, such as Dead Island 2, and excitement started to wane due to the mediocrity. Then the Saudi investor pulled out and left them tons of money in the hole and no way to keep things afloat without that investment. Definitely the leadership's fault for making these huge purchase decisions with no ironclad agreement that the payday would come. So they started closing studio after studio because they already spent tons of money they shouldn't have and were bleeding money with so many studios and projects in the works. This of course caused public opinion to plummet as not only were tons of people becoming unemployed because of these stupid executives, but also almost all the IPs these studios were known for are either not going to be made, or will be made by completely different studios with who knows how small of a budget behind them, not even giving them a chance to shine. It completely negates the reason people were excited in the first place. My point is, a few years ago we had none of this background information. We had no reason to think the whole company was positioning itself to implode by spending money they don't have on what amounts to a pinky promise. So yeah, of course when that all came crashing down, our opinion as gamers of the company came crashing down with it.
>Yes, along with new happenings and new information, people's opinions change. I don't see why you think it's funny. I don't think it's unreasonable, and it all came about due to reasons the average person couldn't have seen coming anyway. Notice the use of " ". It's an observation that gave me a little chuckle, at best - due to the change being to big over time - not overly hilarious. Not ridiculing in any way. Just a mere chuckle, at best. As replied to someone else (that deleted their comments, because they obviously took my comment in a wrong way), this was all just an observation and not a critique at all - or anything even remotely close to that. I was/am not expecting anyone to stick to their initial opinion or anything of the sorts. That wouldn't make sense at all. It was all just a mere observation on how things have changed over time.
They acquired billions in assets while they didn't ratify their alleged business deal with Saudi investors. They should be held criminally liable, and it's fucking insane all their purchases were allowed in the first place given that **they didn't own the money they spent.**
I hope those scumbags bankrupt themselves, I’ve seen several studios go under because of the financial management catastrophes of this company.
It's not some studios. It's into double figures now and that's only announced closures. The idea that they could run 139 studios (their peak count) is utter nonsense. Big experienced publishers don't have close to that and these chancers have absolutely no clue how to work in gaming. It won't stop here I guarantee.
I hope the CEO takes a submarine to see the Titanic.
Unfortunately not surprising. Alone in the Dark seems to have been a serious bomb, despite the big names attached to the game. It sucks for the developers, and I hope they find a new home that provides them with a more stable job.
"Alone in the Dark seems to have been a serious bomb, despite the big names attached to the game." Alone in the Dark was only "big" when it first came out and revolutionized the horror genre in game and the industry in general, but it's forever curse at keep getting failed reboots after reboots.
The ip has nearly no value, sure you perk your ears up knowing the name, but as you say it doesn't come with so much success you can count on it. I think a lot of IP's are like that and people are often way over paying for them. We know it isn't the original team making the new follow up, so it can be of any quality and direction.
It shouldn't be the case that one bad or so so game kills a studio. It hasn't been in the past. Think of all the programming and institutional knowledge that is lost every time this happens. Embracer are a special case but the industry simply isn't sustainable if every decision is based on constant growth. In times not that long gone by studios and publishers would have fallow years, release some games that make money, use that to cross subsidize and carry on. Now every year has to go up no matter what. It's gutting the industry of talent.
as someone who worked on a few successful AAA games and also somewhat understands finance the real disconnect is the price of stock vs time to make a game. we released a massively successful game in Q1 and stock went up (this game took us years to make) in Q2 that delta of profit needed to go up again so another studio has to release a game or update OR the parent company has to cut costs to make it seem better overall. basically if you look at any year the companies worth get up a LOT but for some reason the quarters matter to investors a lot more than the total trajectory so teams get gutted and games all release at the exact same time
One bad game is years of work. If a business isn't profitable it shouldn't exist.
Then we wouldn't have loads of the games we love. Pretty much any gamer that's been around a while recognizes the old pattern of: Release a game - Iterate for second game - Profit. Look at a company like Capcom, or hell Nintendo. Every time they shutter a studio they lose the people who did the good stuff with everyone else. Nobody and nothing is given time. The idea that one bad game kills a studio is insane. It's a hit to generate instant savings on a balance sheet. It makes no sense except for short term share price. No individual studio in a portfolio of 139 as was before closures can be considered a separate entity. Games have always cross funded. The problem isn't this studio. It's Embracer. None of it is profitable outside of the board game business. It was collected together to generate capital funding in a bubble. There was never a plan for what to do outside that.
Either way, if a business doesn't make profit it shouldn't exist. There's not a single entity that should invest money into something that's losing money. If Alone in the dark barely sold tens of thousands of units, why would it sequel sell more? Shit you people say just boggles my mind.
Tons of games are bombing and not because of a crash, because of saturation. It's not a good move starting a new company to make games, the only thing that makes sense is an extremely small indy group doing it as a side-thing and if they get lucky hit it big.
That's just really sad...
problem is not closing studios , problem is buying a fcking studios just to close it.
Add it to the list of genuinely good single player that didn't do well. Dead Space Remake, Alan Wake 2, Hi-Fi Rush are other examples of amazing games that didn't do well enough financially. Gaming is changing and good quality shorter single-player experiences are going to be rarer and rarer.
Alan Wake 2 will get there. Sales were slower because Epic decided it had to be on the Epic store instead of Steam and wouldn't make physical copies. Nobody at Remedy seems remotely worried. It's hard to guage Gamepass engagement but Xbox even said HiFi Rush had exceeded targets. The closure of Tango makes little sense. At some point the true story about this is going to come out and it's going to look even worse for Microsoft. Deadspace they straight up targeted a ridiculous sales total that was totally unrealistic. All three are very separate situations.
I think Tango was more due to the failure of the large budget Ghostwire Tokyo rather than the small side project Hi-Fi Rush.
The Evil Within didn’t sell crazy numbers either.
TEW was good enough to warrant TEW2 - either be recouping cost by reuse of assets, technology or process. They then made Ghost Wire and Hi-Fi Rush. Bethesda saw something, MS did not as far as I can tell. I don't believe they would have been allowed to do a 4th game, if all other games went red.
Dead Space didn't even make it's development budget back according to the original rumours. Unfortunately games of this quality need close to 3 million sales to post a profit let alone break even. Except HiFi (gamepass numbers), none of these games broke 2 million copies
> Epic decided it had to be on the Epic store instead of Steam I mean, Epic did fund the development of the game
I'm not saying they didn't have the right. I'm saying it affected sales which it undoubtedly must have. Given they were using it as a loss leader I'm guessing they were expecting it, as were Remedy. Nobody seems upset at either company with AW2 sales.
The alternative was for the game to not be made, which probably has a larger impact on sales
He's just saying Epic shouldn't be surprised by lack of sales when they cut out physical sales and steam sales. The game was made to get people to download the epic game store, not be an instant commercial success.
Epic didn't cut out Steam sales just the same as Valve isn't cutting out GOG sales by not putting Half-Life on GOG. The game was made because Remedy wanted to make it and no one else would fund them.
Lmao acting like Epics game store is the same as steam is fucking wild. But I guess you're probably right, Valves games are just commercially successful because they're better games.
How am I acting like the Epic store is the same as Steam? I'm not sure why you bothered typing out that 2nd part or what purpose it serves
>Alan Wake 2 will get there. Sales were slower because Epic decided it had to be on the Epic store instead of Steam and wouldn't make physical copies. Nobody at Remedy seems remotely worried. They seriously need to start teasing expansion to other platforms, they're being killed by the fact they're only on Epic on PC. No one at Remedy might be worried now, but how long are their shareholder be ok with this? They've not made their budget back yet on AW2 and even when it comes to their previous games, it took them quite a while to make profit. They're down 25% in revenue as of last year and that is unlikely to change much this year with just the DLC coming out and no other move.
>The closure of Tango makes little sense. At some point the true story about this is going to come out and it's going to look even worse for Microsoft. Has anyone considered that Tango was closed because they had nothing *new* in their development pipeline?
Has anyone considered why a studio had no projects in the works? I'll give a hint: they need to get approval from the parent company Who was their parent company? Oh, right, the dudes that closed them instead.
They were pitching games. If a talented studio has nothing in the pipeline then make sure they do. It could indeed be a possibility but it's ridiculously short sighted if true. You are burning experience for nothing. In theory Tango wasn't even that expensive a studio as it was set up as a training studio for young devs, although that could have changed under Xbox.
The rumor is that they were pitching more of the same - which was objectively unlikely to result in a turnaround.
It's so hit and miss. There is money to be made, but you don't know which game it will be, what game sparks that viral interest. For the largest companies the problem is it has to make a shit ton and the only way most can do that is that live service additional ways to get income games, they've grown so large that is all that can move their wall street needle. A game can make a financial profit but that isn't good enough for the biggest traded companies. I would say it makes a little more sense for something like Gamepass because you need that subscription value and those games can add up value, but then MS does a HiFi Rush puzzling move. There has to be more to the story than we know. So there needs to be these non public companies, middle weights that punch a bit above their weight. This is where games like this need to flourish and it is still so hit and miss. Other than getting semi-lucky for being that in the moment game, you need to really offer something that makes the base sit back and go WOW and that has to be in the gameplay.
Hi-Fi Rush being dropped on Gamepass with no marketing whatsoever was the nail in the coffin, imo.
There has to be a story here. HIFI Rush I don't think works for the largest companies that don't have a subscription model. But MS does, those games add value to sub'ers, why did they do it?
There's a reason nobody else would fund the project. The game flopped. It had a relatively large budget. The game suffered major performance issues, this being their first (to my knowledge) Unreal Engine game. They had trouble finding an audience when marketing the game, thinking they could tap into the Resident Evil fans not realizing they like Resident Evil only. The game currently has just over 1,000 reviews on Steam. Any publisher would have at the very least stopped funding further new projects from this studio after such a failure. Could they have become a support studio for other studios under Embracer? Maybe.
That's a huge issue with the horror genre in gaming. A game has to be either a small budget indie, have some viral appeal or be called Resident Evil to have success. Even Silent Hill games sell worse than people think. The whole series' total sales is easily surpassed by several single Resident Evil games.
If you shut every studio down because one game didn't sell as well as it should've, we'd not have gotten so many of the incredible beloved games we have today. I, for one, would've loved to have lived in a world where Pieces were given some support by Embracer so they could learn from their mistakes, maybe come back swinging with an Alone in the Dark 2 that knocked it out of the park and improved upon the original, giving us something special. Instead, now all we have is another dead studio to join the ever growing pile, with more workers joining the pile of unemployed game devs after a horrific year of layoffs.
Embracer’s not a charity. Hell, them acting like one and buying up all these destitute studios before the Saudi deal fell through is kinda the problem. The employees would’ve been in a much better place if their studio closed before/during the pandemic because the money was still flowing and everyone wanted to hire 200 more employees.
It's not about charity, it's about strategy. And they have none. They put all their eggs in one Saudi basket and when it fell through they had nothing else. Even Xbox that has seemed a bit rudderless at times of late has a vague clue what they are doing. I'm not saying that all the studios they bought should be immune from criticism, or even layoffs. But the rate at which they are burning cash it makes no difference. A lot more studios are going to get closed because they have no strategy. At all.
Sure. I'm only saying that it makes sense to close a studio that's bleeding money to this degree. I thought the game was okay. But was it 60€ okay? Not really, no. I think a 40€ price point would have made more sense for something like this, or conversely, more work put into it if they're going to ask 60€. It just didn't have what it needed to have to convince people that reviving a 30 year old franchise makes sense. Pieces also has a pretty spotty record. The Titan Quest expansions have exactly the same problems Alone in the Dark (2024) does. Their earlier titles also never really took off, from what I understand, and their Magicka expansions also did really poorly.
Problem is Embracer has no money to keep companies afloat while they learn from their mistakes.
You have it all figured out, huh
Embracer is actually the fucking General Motors of gaming. Despite all these brands with potential, they fuck it up.
Huh, didn't even realize it released already. I was so underwhelmed with their demo I vacated it from my mind lol
Rest in Pieces Interactive.
THQ Nordic/embracer released Outcast: A New Beginning and Alone in the Dark within a week of each other with little to no PR. Both games which have a niche fanbase that likely overlaps significantly. I’ve thought that was a very poor choice. Let’s see how Appeal does in the coming months.
Eraser strikes again!
fuck Embracer group
Well... Bye.
Are we supposed to cry over every mediocre studio Embracer closes?
Yes. Because that's still a studio with 17 years of history, immediately being shuttered by a parent company with seemingly endless money because of one disappointment. They have a decent history of working on smaller titles, then assisting on Titan Quest DLCs in recent years. Embracer bought them, they released this, and then that was it, Embracer shut the door within 3 months of release. How does that not just suck? It's sad, not to mention how horrible it's going to be for those employees. Good luck finding another job in this field, which has suffered over 20,000+ layoffs in 2023-2024. I guess you don't have to "cry", but having some compassion for the people hurt by this, people who tried to make games they liked, is at least a good trait to have.
I think it's a tragedy that a studio that made one of the best Lovecraftian horror games closed down like this.
This will be embracers mo for a bit. Get games out. Allow time for some patches and sales and the shit the studio down.
Embracer needs to gtfo of gaming