this seems soon-to-be the Embracer cut. this company fucking sucks man. hate this shit
VGC reported earlier this month that Free Radical was at threat of being closed just two years after it was established, as part of huge company-wide cuts at Embracer and its owned publishers.
Although Embracer has yet to publicly confirm Free Radical’s position, sources told VGC that Wingefors has now acknowledged in a company e-mail that the Nottingham, UK-based company could be closed on December 11, following the completion of a consultation process.
Borrowing money was cheap until it wasn't. When they bought the old Eidos stuff, everyone thought Square Enix was taking crazy pills. Now, given that everyone's cutting back right now, it looks more like they knew something Embracer didn't.
I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.
I honestly don’t think anyone was taken back by Eidos being sold off. The biggest mess Square Enix did was let IOI go while putting out The Quiet Man. Hitman 2? No! The Quiet Man, one of the worst games of the decade, YES! MORE PLEASE! Eidos hadn’t made a great game in a while but IOI had just put out a rather successful Hitman 1 season with large seasonal plans to keep it going. Now they are working on a James Bond game that everyone is excited about and Square is looking like an idiot. While Eidos will probably flop and flounder until they can get back their roots and build something substantial.
Really? I didn’t hear that people were shocked at thinking 300 million USD was that little of money for Eidos. It seems about right to me. Especially through Square Enix’s eyes where they had just put out GOTG which didn’t sell well enough to them.
Square Enix was going to close down or sell IO Interactive as they had pulled funding and were talking to other companies to sell them off. IOI employees triggered the MBO clause and made SE sell to them. This was only 2017.
2017 is ancient history compared to the current economic climate, and that sale came out of an attempt to make games episodic to their detriment. $300M seemed low considering the buyer makes that money back with probably 1.5 Tomb Raider games, and Deus Ex and all of those other Eidos properties are a bonus. Yes, the deal seemed crazy for Square Enix at the time.
They sold 9 million copies of Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I think I'm in the ballpark. And again, that's only Tomb Raider, when they're not blowing their money on a live service Avengers game that everyone knew was a bad idea.
Marvel’s Avengers was mainly Crystal Dynamics, not Eidos-Montreal. I don’t think another Tomb Raider would sell exactly as well as Shadow Of The Tomb Raider. Also, come to think of it, I don’t think Eidos-Montreal has the Tomb Raider IP.
Embracer got all of these studios and most of their IPs in the sale, the two biggest being Tomb Raider and Deus Ex. I focused on Tomb Raider because it's the most valuable one in that purchase and almost makes the sale worth it on its own, or it seemed to before the economy turned, but they got plenty more besides just Tomb Raider.
Hmm, that’s a good point, and looking back I didn’t realize it was 300 million for both Crystal and Eidos… that’s pretty cheap considering the IP attachment but I think Square Enix was also looking to shed a lot of their studios.
They bought everything up because loans were cheaper and this positions Embracer as a strong IP holder. They now have lots of IPs they own and while you might think “Well they got no one to make the IPs for them!” that might be true in-house, although they certainly have plenty of successful studios still they are busy they have their pick of IPs. Additionally, you can license out IPs for a lot of money with additional funding from the actual sale of the game while a third-party publisher foots the bill entirely.
Even simpler, just having that IP denies the competition access to it. In their eyes that creates value and at the end of the day that's all that matters to these companies holding IP. They can just sit on it.
And Embracer claims another victim. It feels like they aren't going to have many studios left when they finish their "restructuring" process. At least Wingefors was nice enough to acknowledge that the employees, who might be about to lose their jobs, are going through a slightly more challenging time than the executives who are deciding which studio is next on the chopping block.
Y’all just have no idea how complicated the process is. In 2004 it was OK to just “ship a working game”, - in 2023 you have to include all of the software stacks you have partnering contracts with, deploy an entire cloud infrastructure to deliver updates and short purchases, design and launch automated targeted ads campaigns, pay union-busting lawyers, accommodate for all the “fun” senile execs want to put in the game, pay handsome compensation to these senile execs, pay more lawyers to bury workplace toxicity-related incidents. At the end of the day, you have to sustain the company somehow when 95% of your workforce goes on a sick leave after a 3-month-long crunch period. All of that takes money, time and effort. And y’all don’t get a lot of time in-between autumn release windows.
Hey, we’ve been at it for 20 years, and we have just managed two months of 16-hour workdays without anyone dying, it looks like it might be one of those projects we actually manage to ship - what an important internal milestone!
PS: I don’t actually work at Ubisoft, I love my life too much - this entire comment is a satire
I got the Sands of Time on my GameCube somewhere around 2004. One of my favorite games, I have finished it at least 3 times. A really linear experience but brilliantly crafted, a classic.
I know this is meme but thankfully sonic actually had a good non-insider cast. Like, yeah it had the star-power pulls like Danny DeVito and Idris Elba but it also has very passionate (not that these two aren’t) actors like James Marsden and Neal McDonough. I’d feel more confident with the SEGA movies currently than I am feeling about the TLoZ movie at the moment lol.
I keep going back and forth on this game on how much I want it to resemble the original. If it’s too close it might not feel I’m playing a new game, but I also don’t want it to be so different that it loses what I enjoyed so much about the first one.
I think that’s the issue with this “janky” games. There are obvious problems with the game, but it’s very easy to lose the positives when you are attempting to smooth out the rough edges.
Another Embracer casualty. It's crazy how studios are getting gutted left and right because a single business deal fell through. I wonder how many studios Embracer is going to shut down before they finally finish "restructuring"?
I think it's way beyond that business deal by now. They're not responsible for the layoffs at Sony, Microsoft, EA, or Epic, after all. Something ended the money party that everyone in the industry staffed up for, and that something might be inflation reducing consumer spending, the crypto crash, higher interest rates making borrowing money more expensive, something else entirely, or a little bit of all of that.
Personally, I haven't seen an FPS made for me in a long time, so I was betting on a new TimeSplitters being it. The last two FPS campaigns I was into were Half-Life: Alyx in 2020 and Titanfall 2 in 2016. Those are slim pickings over a long timespan while the rest of the genre focused on live service garbage (though, to be fair, I still have yet to play Wolfenstein II). If that new Perfect Dark happens, I'm betting Microsoft spends $400M turning it into an extraction shooter multiplayer with a modern Call of Duty campaign, neither of which is what I want. TimeSplitters was likely only going to happen on a shoestring budget that couldn't afford to turn into the kind of game I don't want it to be, lol.
I personally haven't seen a FPS be unique or engaging since the last Bioshock... and before that was maybe the first Bioshock or FEAR lol
The MiLiTaRy Is CoOL vibe from COD, Battlefront and Halo never appealed to me, but Halo Combat Evolved on PC and Halo 3's multiplayer was at least fun.
I bet you they'll start pulling their games from stores in 2-3 years or release new ones exclusively to their own. The games will be made as difficult to run in wine/proton as possible. Probably they'll introduce some new graphics layer that's windows only and since they own huge game publishers, they don't have to worry about any other platform ever.
Psychonauts 2 happened because Microsoft bought Double Fine and said, “How much time/money do you need to finish your game?” And basically gave it to them.
Hell yeah, I’m happy they did! That game was an absolute delight to play, just like the first one. The people at Double Fine really knock it out of the park!
Literally watched an interview with Tim Schafer, they ran out of Kickstarter money and Microsofr saved the day. Look it up before calling me out please.
No one saved the day, they fund raised before, everyone does, many people found publishers if needed after running out of croudfunded money. There is no saviour here.
Was Kickstarted for all consoles, they ran out of money, Microsoft bought them and left everything as-is, just gave more money. Go watch the interview about it.
That’s cool but I don’t think the gameplay and level design will hold up very well to today’s standards. This was basically a Doom 1 type game, but with jumping and maybe full 3D? Or was it 2.5D like Doom where you couldn’t have floors over floors?
It was more advanced than Doom, but not quite Quake levels of 3D. You had verticality and rooms over rooms (or at least it was faked really well), but the enemies and such were still sprites. The level design actually does hold up pretty nicely, considering it wasn’t just random mazes, but more based on the “reality” of the setting. Tho I don’t think it holds up as well as JK2, personally.
The engine could truly have rooms over rooms, it just couldn’t render them in Dark Forces. Eventually (after Dark Forces) it was updated to make that possible.
I used to be pretty decent with the arrow keys, but once full 3D games like Quake 2 started being standard I had to switch to mouse. I remember I switched to mouse and arrow keys for a long time, then finally went WASD.
You actually could have floors over floors, but the game just wouldn’t render them both at the same time.
As for it holding up, Boomer Shooters are in vogue right now. There is a market for these games existing in an accessible way where the player doesn’t have to do a bunch of tweaks to get it running.
videogameschronicle.com
Aktywne