Ares42

@bigsocrates: Yea, I already said that you could absolutely call them reckless. They took a bet on early acquisition and when their planned business fell through they were forced to quickly sell it again. They didn't bet their own company, the company they bought didn't have to shut down. They ended up having to reign in their own company because they had planned for a business negotiation to finalize (which is completely normal). But this is still just a borderline bad business decision that could've easily turned out fine, and in my opinion it doesn't warrant the "Embracer is ruining gaming" narrative we've seen develop lately.

@bigsocrates: You keep stating that their business plan made no sense, but any arguments wether it did or didn't make sense are pure speculation. We can't confirm anything about what their plans with these acquisitions were. For all we know if the deal had gone through they had a spectacular plan that would've made them super successful down the road.

If you don't agree that it makes sense for a company to assume that an already established business partner has a shared interest in keeping their business going there's not really much more to discuss here.

@bigsocrates: If you look at what they bought post re-branding 90+% of it is still in the same exact field they had been working in, with the two exceptions being the bigger (more publicized) Gearbox and Square deals.

I'm not gonna deny that they pulled the trigger early, but they were working with a business partner that had already invested heavily in the company so they had ample reason to believe that the new deal they were negotiating would eventually go through. They weren't just buying willy-nilly hoping to find an investor after the fact.

@bigsocrates: The Saudi company they had a deal with (Savvy Games Group) is by and large an investor group, with a special interest in growing a gaming industry in Saudi Arabia. They would almost certainly not be interested in buying a bunch of studios all over the world, even if packaged into a single umbrella company.

Embracer (pre re-branding) has been going for two decades at this point, and for the first 15 years or so it was very much focused on trying to pick up "hidden gem" studios lost in the middle. The idea that they weren't trying to run a business has basically no merit.

Yes, they started aggressively expanding when they suddenly caught the interest of bigger investors, and you could call them reckless. But there's little to no evidence that they were just trying to pump and dump companies.

@bigsocrates: They were trying to establish themselves as a mid-tier publishers, and had a great investor deal. But to be a successful publisher on that level you need a diverse portfolio, so they started acquiring assets. Then the investors pulled out un-expectedly and everything fell apart. The way people have turned this around into "Embracer bad" is really strange. Embracer was an attempt to support "AAA-indie" studios, and its sudden failure has basically nothing to do with their actual projects/products.

Negative reviews are basically what reviews are for. By and large people only look up reviews for things they already want to buy, so a positive review doesn't really do much but confirm their hopes for the game. Negative reviews on the other hand allows you to avoid things that looked interesting but ultimately don't deliver on their promise.

The last game I can think of that I bought because it was getting good reviews was Stardew Valley, but I pass on buying games due to bad reviews probably at least every other month.

It all makes sense when you realize the game lost the game director and lead designer in the middle of production. The two Joes that are in charge of it now were former team leaders that had very limited experience directing a game.

I already enjoy card games, but I would absolutely LOVE it if they weren't all about paying way too much to keep up on cards. Every card game I've quit, I've done so because I didn't want to deal with whatever inane card collection system they were using.

People forget that videogames are big business, and we're talking BIG business. We're used to thinking that you hire as many people as you need and you do your best to accomplish what you wanted, but that's not how big business works. Big business starts at the other end with the question, how much money could we possibly make, and then ask how can we accomplish that.

A good analogy is high-end sports. When they build a stadium they know they will always have an overflow of demand, and for every extra seat they squeeze in the profits will increase over time. So they don't think about how big they want the stadium to be, they think how big can we possibly make it. It doesn't matter how much it costs because the return on the investment is always far bigger.

That's exactly what's going on with AAA games these days. The big games are multiplying their investment several times over, so the only question is "how much more can we invest in these games ?". The demand for these ultra high production-quality titles is just so high that investors are just throwing money at them, telling the developers to "make it bigger", and hoping for an even bigger pay-off.

@efesell: Yea, I never really invested in it myself, but from what I read even people going hard into stealth is finding it very challenging to remain stealthy.