Eat the rich in Minecraft
Eat the rich in Minecraft
They’ve got the look spot on, but everyone’s miscast and none of the jokes land.
Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.
It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.
Well this is concerning. If they’re not getting any more funding from 505 to make Control 2 and Condor then, uh, who’s funding Control 2 and Condor?