Not surprising really. They’re just getting rid of all the woke IPs because nobody buys this political crap anymore. It should be telling that they chose to destroy Volition rather than try and sell it off, that’s how bad the market value is for the Soy Saints.
Edit: Pissed off the wokies I see, cry harder into your soy lattes boys, woke is finally going broke.
Well, you’re right there. I did care about the franchise and I’m sad to see it go. But I’m not sad that the assholes who turned it into political propaganda are now without a job. But hey, I bet you’d be equally pissed off if someone turned your favorite piece of franchise into trans hate/deadname simulator featuring Ronald Crump eating hamburgers while telling you that sex before marriage is a sin.
The whole Embracer situation is so weird to me. I hadn’t heard about them until the news broke that they were buying some of the Tolkien licenses and had already been buying a whole bunch of game studios. Cut to a couple months later and Embracer can’t get rid off all these studios fast enough apparently bleeding money left and right.
Where did they suddenly come from? Or was I just out of the loop on them?
Can’t remember the exact details, but I think it was something along the lines of them acquiring all these ips with loaned money, banking on a big merger that eventually fell through.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
Thank you for the great comment, that was super informative. I didn’t know Nordic Games became Embracer. That explains it a bit why I thought they came out of nowhere.
Honestly, I'd completely forgotten that Embracer had bought out Gearbox. Curious to see who ends up acquiring them, if anyone actually does. Also have to wonder just how many studios Embracer is going to end up selling off or shutting down by the end of this.
My hope is that people leave and make a new studio and some new IP’s. These large publishers buying everything and then running into the ground due to endess growth is tiring.
This is gonna be true of every studio embracer owns. They just don’t have any cash to keep the business running. Every studio is gonna get shut down or, if possible, sold.
I do not know a single person IRL who has purchased this game (across multiple platforms). We all played and love to this day, Skyrim, FO3, FO:NV (my friends like FO4, it wasn’t for me personally, I found the story incredibly boring…the dogshit performance on release also never helped). So I am wondering what their gamepass numbers are vs. full purchases. Steam (the numbers cited in the article) would be purchases, but I would be interested one day to see the split of gamepass to purchase users
I'd bet a sizable portion of steam numbers aren't purchases either. AMD was running the promo such that anyone buying AMD hardware from like July onwards got a free copy.
Actually a very fair point, and something that I do in fact find interesting is that it hasn’t breached FO4’s numbers. That game burned me so fucking hard lol. I bought that pile of shit at full price (last game I ever purchased at launch), and it ran SOOOOOO bad. Like less than 20 fps in any city bad. I tried to push through the framerate/bugs to get to the good and for me it just never came. I dropped that game after 1 playthrough and I have 0 desire at all to ever pick it up again. I have replayed skyrim (heavily modded at this point) and FO:NV (FO3 didnt work right on my W10 machine, i wonder if it works now with W11 and compatibility mode. I would replay that for sure), but I think with FO4 the charm had worn off. Playing a game that felt like oblivion [Not in a literal sense, but in the “its a bethesda RPG” sense] (with shitty quest writing) in the modern day at sub 20 fps for the price of $60 was one hell of a wakeup call.
So all of that is to say, I find it surprising that their new flagship has not beaten FO4’s numbers. Perhaps they burned a lot more people than just me?
I'm playing Starfield on gamepass. Fallout 4 was similarly a wakeup call for me: I had pre-ordered it and was mostly disappointed by it. I occasionally try replaying it, but that disappointment sticks with me to this day. This is coming from someone whose first major gaming experience on PC was with Oblivion (which I still play to-date).
So yeah - I'm with you on not buying Starfield new because of FO4's poor showing. I am enjoying it well enough that I may buy it someday (kinda wish I had gotten a GPU bundle including it just because I've been ready to upgrade for a long time), but I'm not in any rush to do so. I just knew I wasn't going to be as interested in it as I was with other Bethesda games of the past.
As an aside, I hope FO3 works better for you these days. A year or two back, Bethesda patched the Steam version to remove the Games for Windows Live requirement, which had foiled many attempted replays of mine (particularly when I made the move to Linux). Now it runs perfectly well.
With the Switch 2 rumours and 8 Deluxe ending it’s DLC soon I imagine it won’t be long before MK9, maybe even a launch title for the Switch 2 depending on when it launches
True Mario kart 8 is peak Mario kart. I feel like they’re either going to keep adding content to it or do something new with the franchise like double dash did.
This is the mobile game rather than one for console. There could be one for Switch 2, but they haven’t even finished the DLC pass for 8 yet so it’s likely a ways off.
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