Eidos-Montréal Gets Struck By Embracer Malaise: 97 Employees Fired & New Deus Ex Game Canned

As seen in the above statement Eidos-Montréal provided to the public, 97 employees at the studio have been let go. While the statement points to "global economic factors," the studio is owned by Embracer Group, which eliminated thousands of employees in 2023 and even fully shutdown multiple studios it previous revived or bought outright. For example, in 2023 alone they:

• The complete closure of Volition Games (Impacting ~230 employees)
• The complete closure of Campfire Cabal
• Laying off 26 employees at Beamdog weeks after the studio released Mythforce
• Laying off 18 employees at Cryptic Studios (~14% of the workforce maintain Star Trek Online and Neverwinter)
• Laying off 10 employees at Crystal Dynamics
• Laying off 35 employees at Digic
• Laying off 32 employees at Zen Studios and Pinball FX team
• Undisclosed number of layoffs at Gearbox

The news of almost 100 jobs being terminated at Edios-Montreal have coincided with multiple reports that a new entry in the Adam Jensen Deus Ex series (i.e., Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided) was cancelled. According to Jason Schreier, the game had been in development in two years and maintained almost all of the people that worked on the previous games and especially Eidos-Montreal's Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. This confirms an earlier report that Schreier made in 2022 that a new Deus Ex was one of three major projects for the studio:

So, it's devastating news for yet another studio that got "Embraced." Personally, I was a big fan of Eidos-Montreal's Deus Ex games even if they were flawed in some critical ways. The second game obviously had issues with its marketing, but there's no denying how ahead of the curve it was in tapping into cyberpunk milieu while honoring one of the most important games ever made.

Every single time when an Embracer-led studio has layoffs the announcement seems to lead with "global economic context", "industry challenges", or some other nonsense like that to deflect blame from Embracer. Embracer have nobody else to blame on this. This is all their own doing. They bought up a huge portion of the industry with no plan other than to hope either cheap means of getting more money would continue or they would be able to secure substantial funding from a single source. When neither of those things happened, their entire plan fell apart and now we're seeing the consequences of that. The entire company was built on a bad gamble and the people suffering the consequences are, as always, the people furthest away from those who actively chose to make the gamble in the first place.

I just don't even know what to say anymore. It's every week at this point. I guess the only hope is that this is some end of fiscal quarter nonsense and that the layoffs will slow down soon.

Yeah it's sad that all these people are losing their jobs through no fault of their own, but you have to appreciate Embracer really carrying on the spirit of THQ after buying the company's former assets.

The games industry practice of buying studios only to gut them and then close them has a terrible human cost and can't possibly be good business but it happens over and over and over and while I somewhat understand the forces at play those forces all suck.

Meanwhile Embracer's only hope for stabilizing is a big hit and it keeps shutting down projects and downsizing its studios. It's clear that it can't survive by AA games alone or exploiting its back catalog (which it's not doing nearly as much as it was a few years ago) so what's the plan to keep this from continuing?

@bigsocrates: The plan for Embracer is to invent a time machine and go back to when they thought they would be able to flip their newly-purchased assets to a Saudi fund, and make sure it actually goes through that time.