I would like to see investigations into embracer being opened for fraudulent acquisition of companies and IPs and therefore market manipulation. I‘m obviously not thinking they did commit a crime there but it should definitely be illegal. Or were all those companies on their last legs? I cant imagine they were.
I can’t give you an answer to the legality question, but some additional information I heard in a podcast: The acquisitions came at a time when money was cheap and people were playing a lot more video games because of the pandemic. Unfortunately, they miscalculated because money is now much more expensive again and the gaming industry has not been able to retain these players across the board. Only 4 games that have come out since then have brought in much more than the production costs, which then had to finance the remaining ~15 (all from my memory, but it should be in the order of magnitude). That didn’t work out and so now cuts have to be made to avoid burning even more money.
If you understand German, I can send you a link to the podcast, if you’re interested.
Thanks for clarifying though. I feel like this should still be illegal. As a CEO, you are expected to analyze and somehow predict what is gonna happen, by market observation, paying experts, etc. If your company goes bankrupt, you‘ll get investigated to see if you made obvious mistakes you shouldnt have made. Dont ask me where I know this from…
In any case, embracer destroyed so many companies due to their foolishness, they should definitely get this treatment and get dismantled if they were acting reckless - which isnt a big stretch imo.
Why are they spending all this money to aquire studios and IP just to cancel them? Presumably they need to release products to get a return on their investment, so why are they just sitting on stuff?
Volition surprised me by staying open as long as it did. It hadn't made a hit since Saints Row IV, and it had several high profile flops since then. I would have loved for Free Radical to finish making a type of FPS that doesn't get made anymore, but apparently they spent two years of that studio's life chasing Fortnite.
The ONE time people wanted Ubisoft to just reskin one of their games (Black Flag) they instead chase live service money while having WAY less features than a 10 year old game.
Bring dedicated servers back.
Can’t have persistent server capacity issues if I can throw my own hardware at it.
This also gets rid of match making, which is whatever. Just give me a server browser and I’ll find a few favorites and hang on those.
It can also keep working long after the companies give up on them too.
This also gets rid of match making, which is whatever.
In the real world, probably.
But it doesn't actually have to. There's nothing stopping you from letting users add multiple matchmaking servers, and even adding some basic rules to queue up in multiple (eg: primary matchmaking for 30 seconds, if no signal indicating good progress towards a match, fall back to also joining server two, etc). It would take a little thought to the base server you provide to handle everything gracefully, but if your priority is actually to give your players the best chance to have a long term ability to form their own communities and play the game reliably instead of to maintain an iron grip to squeeze every penny out, you could do it.
The tutorial was shit but I played the beta for 12ish hours. Had no intention of playing it but it ended up being super fun. Won’t buy it, not worth the 70€ price tag. Got ubi+ for a month, should be enough. It was a pleasant surprise.
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