alyaza [they/she]Embracer CEO confirms TimeSplitters studio faces closure before Christmas
this seems soon-to-be the Embracer cut. this company fucking sucks man. hate this shit
VGC reported earlier this month that Free Radical was at threat of being closed just two years after it was established, as part of huge company-wide cuts at Embracer and its owned publishers.
Although Embracer has yet to publicly confirm Free Radical’s position, sources told VGC that Wingefors has now acknowledged in a company e-mail that the Nottingham, UK-based company could be closed on December 11, following the completion of a consultation process.
Gbagginsthe3rdWhy did they buy up everything ? Seemed to fall apart pretty quickly
ampersandrewBorrowing money was cheap until it wasn't. When they bought the old Eidos stuff, everyone thought Square Enix was taking crazy pills. Now, given that everyone's cutting back right now, it looks more like they knew something Embracer didn't.
I honestly don’t think anyone was taken back by Eidos being sold off. The biggest mess Square Enix did was let IOI go while putting out The Quiet Man. Hitman 2? No! The Quiet Man, one of the worst games of the decade, YES! MORE PLEASE! Eidos hadn’t made a great game in a while but IOI had just put out a rather successful Hitman 1 season with large seasonal plans to keep it going. Now they are working on a James Bond game that everyone is excited about and Square is looking like an idiot. While Eidos will probably flop and flounder until they can get back their roots and build something substantial.
People were taken aback by how little they sold for. IO Interactive bought themselves back from Square Enix some time ago.
Really? I didn’t hear that people were shocked at thinking 300 million USD was that little of money for Eidos. It seems about right to me. Especially through Square Enix’s eyes where they had just put out GOTG which didn’t sell well enough to them.
Square Enix was going to close down or sell IO Interactive as they had pulled funding and were talking to other companies to sell them off. IOI employees triggered the MBO clause and made SE sell to them. This was only 2017.
2017 is ancient history compared to the current economic climate, and that sale came out of an attempt to make games episodic to their detriment. $300M seemed low considering the buyer makes that money back with probably 1.5 Tomb Raider games, and Deus Ex and all of those other Eidos properties are a bonus. Yes, the deal seemed crazy for Square Enix at the time.
I feel like your are over estimating the tomb raider profits there.
They sold 9 million copies of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think I'm in the ballpark. And again, that's only Tomb Raider, when they're not blowing their money on a live service Avengers game that everyone knew was a bad idea.
Marvel’s Avengers was mainly Crystal Dynamics, not Eidos-Montreal. I don’t think another Tomb Raider would sell exactly as well as Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Also, come to think of it, I don’t think Eidos-Montreal has the Tomb Raider IP.
Embracer got all of these studios and most of their IPs in the sale, the two biggest being Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. I focused on Tomb Raider because it's the most valuable one in that purchase and almost makes the sale worth it on its own, or it seemed to before the economy turned, but they got plenty more besides just Tomb Raider.
Hmm, that’s a good point, and looking back I realized it was 300 million for both Crystal and Eidos… that’s pretty cheap considering the IP attachment but I think Square Enix was also looking to shed a lot of their studios.