Not a surprise. Anything this company touches is sinking. These giant gaming conglomerates don’t make an iota of business sense. The whole point of a conglomerate buying a whole bunch of similar businesses, aka horizontal integration, is so these businesses can share the same knowledge, infrastructure and supply lines and benefit from economies of scale to lower costs. Like an oil conglomerate using their own tankers to transport oil for all their subsidiaries. But in the gaming industry there is barely any overlap between two studios where synergy can happen. Except for the business admin, promotion and advertising side. But that is a tiny fraction of the costs of big budget production. The biggest cost is on the production side and every studio needs their own set of directors, producers, designers, artists, programmers etc. Another goal of horizontal integration is capturing market share, but with games you run the risk of cannibalizing your own sales especially how Embracer is doing it since most studios in their portfolio are from the same region in the world making games for similar markets.
EA and Ubisoft tried this before and failed miserably and they sold or shuttered almost every studio they bought. The only one who does a good job at it is Sony, but even they don’t have as many studios as Embracer and they rely on Chinese digital asset sweatshops.
Don’t forget their spectacular Arkham Knight port that was so good, it was delisted from Steam and Rocksteady had to come back and start the port over.
I hope the take away from this is that no matter if a game is live service or not it needs to run, not nickel dime players, and be good. Or it will bust.
If they wanted to focus on live service, I’m surprised they made a trilogy of games. In the meantime a bunch of other devs just kept adding content to the one game their players play.
Not good for Payday’s fans to compete within their trilogy for attention.
I’ll get a steam deck as soon as I can detache the controller and put it on my TV like the Switch. While the Deck is probably amazing, it’s what I need to get one, additional to the gaming PC. I always feel chained in, when my controller is made from one part only.
I’m sorry for them, but I promised myself not to buy anything from LoG after the shitshow that was Armello.
They promised an update to bring cross-play to the game, went silent for years, and when it finally arrived, it broke the game to the point that it was more frustrating than fun to play. I waited for a fix for months, and it never arrived. I’m not sure they ever fixed it (to my knowledge, they haven’t), but even if they did, the fact that they took a game I rightfully bought (the premium edition no less, because I really liked it), broke it to the point of becoming unplayable, and left it in that state for months, is inexcusable.
Hate to see that. Recently played through time splitters future perfect with my friend and had a great time on the Xbox backwards compatibility. Hopefully the time splitters rewind project makes good progress and releases at some point.
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