Gaming

The trouble is that, as always, leadership fucked around and now workers are finding out.

Leadership overextended while money was cheap, now money isn't so cheap and the bills are gonna start coming due so they need to cut some "dead weight" which is largely gonna mean cutting workers to save on salaries and other liabilities.

And as always this is gonna make them look profitable enough to stay above water for a couple years until interest rates come down and money is cheap again. And that's when the cycle starts over.

The worst part is there will be no accountability for that leadership because this isn't a sign of incompetence. It is a sign of a system working as intended.

This mystery deal that fell through is a convenient precipitating event to point to, but this was always the going to be the eventual outcome of the way these companies operate.

You can see it happening...well everywhere but especially in tech and adjacent companies over the past couple years. Maybe next time it'll be another industry, but at some point folks are gonna get addicted to free money again and get all shockedpikachu when it stops being so free and they need to pay it back.

Many, many more, as long as they are even ocassionally successful.

You gotta be really wary whenever your company gets acquired, such is the fact of life no matter how much it may suck.

It was announced back at the 2020 Game Awards. Crystal Dynamics has just been really quiet since then.

Oh no, don't tell me kotor is affected 😭

Rock and stone!

Rock and stone!⛏️

Man, I was one of the first peoe in the alpha and beta. Being that way, I never looked up the recent numbers but man, their review stats are insane. I really hope they make it through, but I think they will. I would gladly pay for future updates to keep the game going.

FOR KARL!

They're the western Tencent, in the sense that when one of their publishers does something the actual ownership rarely gets mentioned because it's not really newsworthy.

Non directly, they own a lot of companies and IP. A LOT.

Gearbox, Coffee Stain, Deep Silver, Warhorse, Aspyr, Saber, THQ Nordic, Dark Horse Comics, 3D Realms, Volition, Ghost Ship Games.

You can put them in the same sphere as Microsoft with all their owned companies as both were out scooping them up over the last few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embracer_Group

Copied from Polygon article:

Embracer Group owns the rights to both Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings; it acquired Tomb Raider when it purchased Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal from Square Enix in 2022. That year, Embracer Group bought the licensing rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by buying rights holder Middle-earth Enterprises. Early this year, Embracer announced that it has five mystery Lord of the Rings games in development by external partners.

I'm guessing they were trying to enter the Asian markets based on absolutely nothing at all.

The CEOs comments about exploiting LOTR are rather chilling.

*Edit: Sorry I didn't mean to reply to you.

While Embracer currently has the rights to make The Lord of the Rings video games, the Gollum Game was outside of their umbrella. Daedalic Entertainment developed it and published it with help from their parent company Nacon.

“We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world,” said Matthew Karch. “And that’s obviously something we’re going to be doing. That’s a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on. Working together we have those opportunities and we’re super excited to see that working relatively quickly.”

Well it certainly might have to do with some LoTR disasters.

I still have to catch up with what happened, do you have any good sources on that? Prederably short video form for my adhd ass.