I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough. I will not start another playthrough.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The trend for a long while was to have an in-house engine to save on costs, but many of them, including the RPG companies we've been discussing, have moved off of those engines and onto Unreal.
Back of the napkin math says they more than broke even on their $80M investment into the game post-launch. I enjoyed the game at launch (which I know wasn't necessarily the norm), and I largely enjoyed the expansion. Unfortunately, this is what I have to scratch my FPS campaign itch these days, but it's still a pretty good one of those combined with a pretty good RPG. It would especially be nice to see them up the ante on the RPG aspects, because next to Baldur's Gate 3 this year, you don't get anywhere near the same sense of freedom and creativity.
It never in any way implies that it's transferable or applies to other games.
Right, but the lawsuit is over the fact that it never says otherwise either. Pay to win is neither here nor there. It could be just for cosmetics, and the suit still stands. To be clear, I'm not a lawyer, and I've never played any of the games this is in reference to. Pay to win just doesn't seem to be a part of this at all.
If you ask me, a lot of the systems they built for open worlds like Elder Scrolls and Fallout make far less sense when you're an interplanetary space traveler, like waking up a person at your home base to give you a tour of your new club, because they're on a day/night schedule where they walk between their room and the living room. And it's not like open worlds or even Bethesda-esque RPGs haven't been built in Unreal before.