Their piece of shit CEO, Lars Wingefors, was in discussion with a gulf national fund on a huge $2 billion investment.
He never got anything legally binding, but before securing the investment he went on a massive spending spree.
The national fund got cold feet and Wingefors had to cut up all of Embracer to account for his mistake.
You would think such a childish error would result in immediate dismissal and essentially a permanent blacklisting from executive positions (not only in the gaming industry).
Nothing like that happened, I believe the Embracer board is full of his friends and family. He just went with it.
This is the kind of stuff that shows that polemics around hard works and meritocracy are at least partially propaganda to keep the plebs in line.
Embracer is also splitting into three separate companies to shed the tainted Embracer name, all still owned and run by Wingefors of course.
Asmodee Group (for board games) and Coffee Stain Publishing (for indie games) are the only two with official names last I heard. The unnamed third is the big one and Embracer’s direct successor, but I guess they’re delaying naming it to minimize bad press associated with the new name.
They’ve gotten drunk on the hype of AI (LLM in disguise); I can’t wait for them to make a costly mistake that wakes them the fuck up. Or dissolve into a formless mass of corporate sludge.
In the tech industry (likely every industry but I wouldn't know) we could make a 200 level course in college that covers tech that's been over hyped. A few choice hits like:
Crypto
Blockchain
Quantum
Cloud
WS-I
LAMP
XML
P2P
WORA
OOP
Now some of those went on to become useful concepts, but all hardly lived up to the hype of transforming the industry forever. There's just no shortage of people who lack any kind of set of morals that will, without any knowledge in the domain, jump on some train and hype it to get some quick cash before the thing derails in a fit of coming to terms with reality.
I mean, at least it's been this way since I've been in the industry.
Yeah, there is always new Kool-Aid for executives to consume. I just wish more research, discourse, and testing were done before these concepts became either a scam or a true innovation. Of all the things that you’ve mentioned, there are only a few things of which I have no knowledge of; as a lay person, my familiarity with some of these tech developments is due to the major media coverage some got. I’ll have to look into the unfamiliar tech innovations.
The most agonizing debate is one you agree with, but not nearly to the extreme degree of the position you’re responding to.
There are some nuts out there that literally only buy a certain gun because “it’s in Call of Duty and it’s cool.” Worse, this demographic are not likely to be responsible gun owners - they are not buying for any perceived need. They don’t lock their guns correctly, or keep ammo separate. Those guns are the type most likely to be stolen for use in a mass shooting (or used by their owners). Arguably, those guns are designed to appeal to this exact crowd, not serve as a functional tool or hobby item.
That said, there are much better targets for gun legislation than “scary looking black guns” or Call of Duty’s choice of theme.
If and only If this law suit leads to the banning of advertisements across all media, I’d be 100% for it. But that isn’t the purpose, it’s purpose is a cash grab for a law firm.
I feel really bad for the developers and their frustration with their publisher/management they must have to have dealt with, and the long haul in front of them that still exists.
If I was working there I would have quit and try to find work somewhere else. That crap they must have gone through and still have to deal with is just too much.
What about it is misinformation? It's practically just Steam's own announcement worded differently. Everything in it is verifiable and supported by the Steam blog post.
First off it’s confusing as hell where they try to paraphrase or summarize for what Valve already said plainly if you bypass this blogspam article and just go to their support page where they spell everything out neatly that any 32-bit games will remain in your library and accessible, albeit that your OS may not place nice. This article almost makes it as if they’re removing stuff from your library, which Valve clearly says they’re not doing. The summary AI bot would do a better job sourcing the Valve blog update than this writer did.
Is it possible you might be looking at this old support page from when MacOS first dropped support for 32 bit apps but Valve was still supporting the 32-bit client for older MacOS versions? The current page is this one. I doubt they'll be removing games from your libraries at any point, but the new article makes it clear that they aren't supporting the 32-bit Mojave Steam client or 32-bit games on Mac anymore and make no guarantees that they'll continue to work when the client stops getting updates.
After February 15th, 2024, we will no longer support macOS 10.14 or earlier and we are unable to guarantee continued functionality of 32-bit macOS games after that date.
This article almost makes it as if they’re removing stuff from your library
But it doesn’t remotely imply that? Here are the words/phrases it uses to describe what will happen:
Steam will halt support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14
existing Steam Client installations on those operating systems will no longer receive updates of any kind, including security updates
some games will effectively stop functioning on macOS
The Steam store will stop considering games that offer only 32-bit macOS binaries to be Mac compatible at the end of 2023.
At no point does it say or imply that anything will be removed from your library. In fact, it explicitly says how you can ensure that those games you own will remain playable:
In order to ensure continued operation of Steam and new 64-bit games purchased through Steam, users on these older versions should update to a more recent version of macOS.
Why would they include that if they’re trying to tell people the games will be removed from their library?
As someone who has played the game from day 1, and almost every day since, it’s a shame that this game that already is on auto drive will be crippled even further. If you have a bunch of friends who just wanna chat and don’t wanna play something competitive it fills all those roles.
I guess we should expect even less changes and content going forward… I know the level creation was just created to allow the community to provide free content so I wonder what else they can do to continue this or if the game will just die off.
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
Its’s complicated, but basically, Amazon also spun off Lumberyard into the fully open source, O3DE engine.
I am not sure if they still hold any particular rights to anything exclusive to Lumberyard, but yeah, O3DE is basically Lumberyard from some years back, that got handed over to a non profit, and has since been developed by that non profit for… 5 ish years? More?
The other wild thing is that… somehow, Cloud Imperium / Chris Roberts of Star Citizen… also got a version of Lumberyard/Crytek, or something like that?.. Before Amazon then later spun it off as O3DE.
So… the crytek engine has very weird family tree, at this point.
I did pro game dev for like a decade and worked on AAA titles as an outsource, learning a lot of their tricks. I am now back in uni to learn programming and make indie games for the rest of my life.
gamedeveloper.com
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