Could have been an area graph.
Basically Embracer is huge, but smaller than the other big 6 big players. Also much, much younger, so there’s something to what they are doing that works (more diversification and less focus on tent poles).
In a way it looks like one of the big publishers from the late 90s/early 2000s in their approach to the market (in part due to necessity, I think).
At least in terms of personnel, Embracer now has almost 5000 more developers than EA or Activision Blizzard…and some 30 AAA games in development.
In terms of revenue and operating budget it’s far below, though. Their MO produces far less profits per title/developer, as of now. Also their AAA games are less AAA than the usual tent poles that are pretty much all EA/Ubisoft produces now (much more modest budgets in general).
But again, it’s a huge player that aims to produce a huge swath of games, vs the traditional, non-platform holder, AAA publishers that publish less and less games per year and are more dependent on huge titles.
That’s why I say it looks more like an old-school publisher. So far it’s business model is very different to EA/Activision/Ubisoft.
Does Embracer have the kind of centralized PR, testing, product planning, marketing, etc etc that actual big publishers do though? My understanding is that it acts much more like a holding company with a bunch of almost entirely independent (from each other) business units.
I think it’s a holding group, with 10 subgroups, and each of those 10 are the ones that act more like publishers:
great article
I know Avengers wasn’t well received but I just started playing Guardians of the Galaxy and I can’t fathom how they screwed up getting people interested in that. Sure it’s not the movie guardians but the voice acting and writing sure is a great imitation. I’ve gotten quite a few laughs from just the first 90 minutes.
Yeah, now that it is on Gamepass I have had a chance to check it out.
Very fun combat, and the graphics and voice acting are great.
I need to get back to GotG. I bounced off it during the initial tutorial hour or so. Didn’t like the aiming or combat (not that there was a lot of it in the time I played). But I should trust the hive mind here and get back into it.
I was about a quarter of the way through when I realised how little I was enjoying the chaotic combat sections, I was having to repeat fights and I didn’t seem to be getting any better at it. But the difficulty options in the game are great, they are fine-grained so you can tune a lot of different parameters to your liking - in my case I made it all generally a lot easier, and enjoyed the rest of the game for the characters and story and don’t feel like I missed out on much.
Ooooh. I’ll give that a shot next time I give this one another try.
Nintendo:
The EA/FIFA split is official. EA Sports FC is the new brand.
FC stands for Football Club, I’m assuming? Good name for a football club. Questionable name for a football game.
I guess this also means no more World Cup games. I should find a copy of the last good one before they become hard to find. The World Cup ones are the only ones I have fun playing.
Gonna be interesting. They’ll probably spend a buttload of marketing cash next year to make sure everyone is aware of “FIFA” now being “EA Sports FC”, but it’s not like there’ll be immediate competition since Konami really shat the bed with their latest soccer efforts…
Oh no, Jim Ryan. What is you doing?
https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1524833769580023829
In the email seen by Bloomberg, PlayStation president Jim Ryan didn’t take a stance on abortion rights, instead writing that the company and its community are “multi-faceted and diverse, holding many different points of view.” He wrote that “we owe it to each other and to PlayStation’s millions of users to respect differences of opinion among everyone in our internal and external communities. Respect does not equal agreement. But it is fundamental to who we are as a company and as a valued global brand.”
Ryan then went on to write that he “would like to share something lighthearted to help inspire everyone to be mindful of having balance that can help ease the stress of uncertain world events,” saying it was recently his two cats’ first birthday and elaborating over the next few paragraphs about his cats’ birthday cakes, their noises and his desire to one day get a dog.
“dogs really are man’s best friend, they know their place, and perform useful functions like biting burglars and chasing balls that you throw for them.”
There are certainly better ways to get across the message he was trying to get across, though at this point I’m getting really tired of the attempt of corporations to claim neutrality in a world where increasingly there is no such thing.