Embracer has laid off a ‘sizable portion’ of Gearbox support studio Lost Boys Interactive | VGC
Embracer has laid off a ‘sizable portion’ of Gearbox support studio Lost Boys Interactive | VGC
The studio provided development support on the Borderlands…
Embracer should be forced to unpurchase their last purchases. It should not be okay to buy up a bunch of studios just to start shutting them all down.
think about this the other way, if your favorite dev gets bought, all their funding members gets good pay out and can keep working on the games you like "until" the parent company don't think it works and shuts it down. Then those funding member either peace out and fund new studios with new IPs(sometimes multiple stuidos spawned after a big studio has massive layoff.) Those new studio will then get funding and absorb those that lost their job and becoming the funding member of those new studios.
It's a healthy cycle for the industry really. Let the investor dump more money to the developers I don't mind. I don't even mind if we lost some of our loved franchisees, as we've all survived that with EA's acquisitions during the 90-00s. And guess what, that massive buying and fucking with existing studios indirectly spawn off the indie boom that comes a couple years later in the early 2010s.
Have the trust in the developers that have passion to bring you the games you like.
The Indie Boom is happening because development tools are easier than ever to use. Not because publishers keep closing down studios.
Its kinda like how a lot of indie developers in Japan started making games on PC98 computers, they were easy to make games for at the time.
Whats stupid is the publisher purchased the whole studio with its IPs, and then they decide to just shut down the studio but keep the IP, because they only wanted the IP all along. At that point why not create new IPs or buy just the IP from the studio at that point, and let the developers keep their job at the studio theyre already at?
Embracer is massive. They have development studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, Square Enix Montreal, and intellectual properties such as Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, Legacy of Kain. They have 129 studios at last count.
They were buying up like 6-12 studios every six months at one point. Not really surprised to see them bleeding now.
They've just bought and bought and bought. Who could've guessed they'd collapse under their own weight? What's that? Basically everyone but them?
Apparently before they started the buying spree their claim to video game fame was... a karaoke game.
Truly destined for greatness.
They knew what they were doing. They now own a shit-ton of valuable IP. They don't care about the studios unless they're profitable. They're going to shut down the studios one by one like EA has been doing for decades, and maybe make some new games based on the IP that they inherited.
Probably a good thing I never heard back from them for my interview.