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.
While this looks like I game I would definitely give a shot. Other than the setting, it doesn’t really seem “Monkey Island-like” at all. Although with that title I hope there are some serious “The Haunted Mansion” themes.
I don’t get all the performance complaints about Act 3. The worst lag I ever had in the entire game was the first time I walked into the druid grove, dropped to 1-5fps for like 20 seconds and then it was more or less fine the rest of the game. One crash in 160 hours of playing, and I’m still on patch 0.2 atm.
That is the full release only. It’s also less than accurate to say 5 hours a day everyday, it was more like 10-15 hours a day with some days where I didn’t play at all.
Everyone in the games industry is vastly underpaid because of the glory of working on games. Game Execs are ruthless to gamble and exploit where they can. Crunch exists mainly in the games industry for a reason. You don’t hear of any other industry where office workers are getting early on-set PTSD symptoms from their job.
On top of that, if you are a woman, you will get a lot of people trying to either sleep with you or talk down to you like you are a child.
Very sad. Have enjoyed all their games. Just reached the end of Shadow Gambit and would have gladly stuck around for more. Hope the rest of the studio goes on to do more elsewhere.
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