Since they’re talking of closing or divesting studios now, I hope they’re able to sell them to other companies instead of closing them. I still can’t get my head around their size. They have 131 studios.
Man, I hope they don’t close Eidos. I love the Deus Ex games.
I don’t expect them to fire many developers. They’ll probably cancel a number of small to medium sized projects and move the developers to bigger games, to speed up their development cycle. Volition is the only big studio I would consider in danger.
Consolidation in all other departments looks like a juicy option though.
Yeah, no. Usually doesn’t work that way. Maybe if, like at EA, all the studios are mandated to use the same toolset (and that comes with its own issues). But these are studios with no cultural connection, not necessarily any similarities in tools or workflow or house genre or target platforms. Literally the only thing they have in common is that they were acquired by the same holding company. Not to mention that they own the biggest hobby board game publisher, Asmodee, and Dark Horse Comics.
Are you saying this because the Saints Row reboot underperformed? That would be the worst reason to shut down a studio. Great teams produce underperforming games all the time. It will be more about what they have in development and how much studio personnel cost to keep employed. A studio in Champaign, Illinois, is going to be a LOT cheaper than one in San Francisco.
Okay, that makes sense. I thought in a support studio sense, given specific tasks to handle. But that’s probably problematic.
Sure, and a LOT more expensive than their AAA studios in Cyprus (Metro) and Czech Republic (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) and their AA studios in Germany, Spain and Italy. I’m not sure about the cost comparison to Scandinavia, the UK snd Canada.
If you look into Volition’s history since they’ve been purchased by Deep Silver, it doesn’t look good at all. Their first 1.5 games (Saints Row 4 plus the add-on) were hits, but they were already in development when they were taken over.
Then their new IP Agents of Mayhem got mediocre reviews and it was a commercial failure. At least early on. It’s possible it made its money back in the long tail. Then the new Saints Row got a 5 year development cycle - this means more than 1000 man years.
I didn’t only write the above because Saints Row underperformed. It crashed to an extent that the CEO had to explain it to the investors. The critics hated it too, so there was no critcs’ darling excuse either. As a result Volition was moved from Deep Silver to Gearbox.
Volition caught a downward trend. It’s easy to interpret this as a last chance for the studio. Since then the situation at Embracer got worse. It’s not unthinkable that their budget for last chances gets cut.
I hope I’m wrong though… I’m not a friend of firing people.
The line in Embracer’s press release that says they’re going to focus on internal IP could at least be OK news for some of their Asmodee properties. But it is likely going to suck bigtime for software devs under their umbrella.
You may be right. My main point is just that the biggest factors in whether and which studios get shut down are things that we can’t really see: P&Ls, burn rates, and projects in development.
After reading a little more about Embracer’s situation, it’s just wild that they had a bunch of Lord of the Rings games in development… all at external studios. Like… what? They just really wanted to make those licensing dollars?
Dan Houser has enough clout, I would think, to attract good talent around himself and good funding. It will be interesting to see what he develops.
Brace yourselves for some buzz phrases:
“This evolution of our company continues to empower our studio leaders with more creative ownership and financial accountability to make faster and more insightful decisions around development and go to market strategies,” Wilson said.
“These steps will accelerate our business, drive growth, and deliver long-term value for our people, our players and our communities.”
Wow this sounds like bad news for the rest of EA. Am I wrong in thinking EA Sports games are what keeps the company afloat and super profitable. What the heck does the rest of EA make that’s as big a hit? Apex Legends I guess? Some iterations of Battlefield?
Hunh. I always thought EA Sports was a separate division within EA anyway. Both orgs are still under CEO Wilson, so meh.
It’s just an internal reorg. Those happen all the time, and they basically never have any practical impact to anyone outside the company, nor anyone inside the company doing actual productive work. The only people who care are the VPs whose roles got reshuffled and can pretend they got a promotion or extra responsibility.
(In a past team we used to have an informal pool going on how long until the next reorg somewhere between our team and the CEO. On average it was maybe once every three months.)
Nothing else is anywhere near as big a hit. Just Fifa Ultimate Team is probably pulling in $2 billion / year (though EA stopped releasing numbers a couple of years back).
The biggest non-sports things they appear to have are Sims 4 DLC and Apex Legends. (Seriously. That’s what their 2022 annual report says.)
Well, we finally know how much Embracer paid for the LotR license rights.
I don’t understand how they got it for that amount of money when Amazon paid as $200m+ just so that they can make a show based on the appendix of the books. You’d think Bezos would have easily spent some more fuck-you money, so I can only assume it was not offered to Amazon?
Are all of these LotR rights owned by the same people? Or are they parceled out like the different LotR properties?
The article states that television series rights were bifurcated from the stuff Embracer picked up. So Embracer can’t make a tv show.
Rough week at Niantic…
Niantic is shuttering its Los Angeles studio and is moving away from in-house game development
So they’re not going to develop the games, and they also don’t own the IP for their hit game nor their upcoming games. Just what business do they think they’re in? Being a middle-man?
AR platforms apparently.
Skullgirls is being review bombed after the team switched out some Nazi-esque outfits in in-game artwork, removed gallery art with panty shots of the game’s characters and references to police brutality. Oh, and getting an 18-point combo no longer blurts “Barely legal!”
A little surprising for a 10 year old game to get changes, but the devs–which, it’s important to note, are a different team than the one which originally created the game, as that studio imploded after accusations of toxicity against the lead designer–say the changes better reflect their values and the vision for the franchise, and they seem to have anticipated the backlash and went ahead anyway.