Embracer pulls a drive-by on Volition

Here. A link.

Welp... this maybe isn't the most surprising news, but you hate to hear anyone getting laid off in this damn crazy day and age. I don't know. We could talk for hours about the misfires of Saints Row or Agents of Mayhem, but at this point, that's a kicking a horse so long dead the skeleton's been pretty well picked over by buzzards. But while they were around, the devs did a lot of amazing shit, and I respect that.

So long, Saints and Mars guerillas and Descenters. You had some kind of magic.

This sucks, and the timing of the announcement makes me side-eye Embracer a whole bunch. There's some very storied franchises coming out of Volition, so I guess we'll put them in the annals next to Looking Glass or something now.

I'm also thinking especially of Jess and soon-to-be-husband Chip, this year's been awful for them on the job front.

The worst part (as both Chip and Jess have observed) is that they clearly did it on the final day of the month to avoid having to pay health insurance fees for everyone they unceremoniously laid off. Absolutely ghoulish behavior, fuck everyone at Embracer.

And here I thought they did it because all eyes were on Starfield. But yes, absolutely ghoulish, fuck everyone at Embracer indeed

Volitions going down is sad but not surprising but yeah absolutely rancid the way they went about it.

You're only as good as your last big win. That is true in music, movies, video games, and boxing. Volition going down after the Saints Row reboot flopping is no surprise. At least there will always be Saints Row the 3rd and the decent Prototype ripoff Saints Row 4. Reboot is about to become available on PS Plus next week. I might download it and check it out.

It's pretty unsurprising considering Volition's poor performance over the last decade or so (this may be on them or on the publisher but it's very weird to take your hit franchise and deliver games that are associated with the franchise but definitely not what people wanted from it) but it sucks when people lose their jobs regardless.

I continue to be utterly baffled by Embracer group. When they were buying up all these studios and all this IP I thought to myself "well, they must have some kind of plan but I don't see it" and that plan appears to have been "get acquired by Saudi Arabia." When that fell through the plan seems to be "oh shit, downsize, downsize!"

They've put out some decent games but it's a hodgepodge and they don't have an identity OR a core franchise to build around. Every large publisher these days has one or more core franchises they are built around and Embracer was like "nah, we'll just put out some (pretty good) PS2 remakes and a bunch of random stuff and it'll be fine."

This is just a perfect example of the lower rank employees paying the price for the executives being absolute idiots.

It's a bummer. I remember hearing about them in the late 90's, but Red Faction is when they really caught me. Red Faction: Guerilla and Saints Row 3 are games I'll be replaying for the rest of my life, honestly.

The past decade has been rocky, but I'm still sad to see then go. They're a few hours south of me, but that's an area with no other local prospects for the devs unless they start their own thing.

It's almost as if a company owning twenty other companies is a bad idea.

Depends on the umbrella corporation and the companies underneath it. Seems to be working for Berkshire Hathaway. The videogame business is extremely hit driven, has long production schedules and ever increasing expenses. Not an easy nut to crack. I think everyone predicted something like this was bound to happen with Embracer. Brings to mind the old Microsoft tactic of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish." It's the hug of death.

With Volition specifically, why did they ever attempt a follow up to Saints Row, a series that only ever aped Grand Theft Auto and spun Rockstar's madcap writing antics up to another level of zaniness. Instead of using all the latent creativity present, they went with the safe option to reboot a tired old series. Safe, boring, failure. Oh well. I hope the suits learn from this and try again in a smarter way that doesn't result in hundreds of layoffs.

Presumably they attempted it because Deep Silver demanded it.

There is an interesting premise at the heart of new Saints Row but nobody at the controls committed to it. Volition were ultimately on patch work for the last year and I'm not sure I would've trusted them with another project.

As shit as the situation is, I can't think of a scenario where Volition's reputation is rebuilt.

@heavyweather: Microsoft (and they're not the only company guilty of this) at least has the money that they can afford to purchase companies and screw them up. They are trying to buy Activision in part because they just had a bunch of cash lying around and needed something to do with it. Even if Call of Duty immediately tanks it won't bring Microsoft down with it. EA, which is also guilty of this, has had its sports brand and some other tentpole franchises like Battlefield that have kept it going even when it screws acquisitions up. Embracer doesn't seem to have anything like that.

Saints Row built its own identity outside GTA, but even if it hadn't there is actually a pretty big GTA shaped hole in the market right now. GTA releases so slowly that you can afford to be pretty similar and still do good business.

The problem is they made Agents of Mayhem, which I played to completion and was...not very good (the randomly generated dungeons were the definition of drudgery) and then they made this new Saints Row that was a buggy mess and also seems to have characters that everyone hates.

They didn't ride the Saints Row franchise into the ground they tried to reinvent it as stuff nobody wanted. It's as if EA said "next year's Madden is going to be all about running an NFL laundry room and keeping the uniforms clean between games!" The problem wouldn't be that football games don't sell anymore, it would be that nobody wants that spin on football.

It seems like the best things you can do as a games dev studio is stay small, stay as financially independent as possible for as long as possible, and have sustainable goals. Obviously, that's not 100% a guarantee for success considering examples like Mimimi just called it quits, but at least that's on their own terms and reasons, and not due to a business daddy deciding they don't love them anymore. The difference between losing a job because you aren't making a rich asshole 0.0000005% richer compared to quitting because you are ready to move one is huge, and it's not hard to decide which I'd prefer to do.

@tartyron: This only really works if you have at least one major hit. Most studios that close we never hear about because we don't even know they exist. Most games sell basically nothing, and one of the (supposed) purposes of publishers is to spread the wealth around a little so that the hits can sustain studios that would have closed with one flop (and most games are flops.)

There's no guaranteed path to success. Mojang sold out but other than Notch leaving the people who worked there probably still have jobs. Rare has had its ups and downs but has been around for a long time.

People with mortgages and families might value stability over creative freedom etc... and corporate jobs are still more stable than indie jobs despite the big profile closures.

@bigsocrates: totally fair points. And I work for the government, so clearly I put a super premium on stability. It’s more just in that situation, I’d much rather have gotten my ass kicked by the market directly instead of being a point of data on a larger companies spreadsheet. And there has got to be a more sustainable model then constant hits or die.

@tartyron: I think that this is one of the promises of Game Pass and one of the reasons that you see so many developers are so enthusiastic about it. If you get your small or medium game on Game Pass you are basically guaranteed enough money to be able to make the next one regardless of what audiences think of it (or at least that's how it seems to work from the outside.)

Now there are questions about whether Game Pass is sustainable (both PS Plus and Game Pass have raised prices) and of course there are far more games coming out than a service like Game Pass needs, but it certainly seems to have been good for a lot of small or medium studios that make good games that might not otherwise find a market.

But in the end all art has the same problem of supply outstripping demand. More people want to write novels or record songs than there is demand for those, and entertainment has always been hit driven because of how word of mouth works etc... Patreon is another option that has worked for some but honestly government funding and a social safety net are the only ways to make these things work with any kind of guarantee.

I dont like for people to lose their jobs obviously, and say what you will about Embracer becoming a huge monopolizing conglomerate, but honestly, this is what the system looks like when it works. Volition made a terrible Saints Row game (and I mean TERRIBLE Saints Row game, full of bugs on release, uncreative gameplay, terrible story, terrible characters, and gave a tone deaf response to fans), right after failing with Agents of Mayhem, another game that traded in Saints nostalgia and brand recognition. The consumer said, "I don't want this", "I hate this", "This is not my Saints Row" and others who didn't jibe with the direction they decided to go didn't buy the game. The consumer actually spoke with their wallets, and this is what happened to the studio that failed. I'm glad that the system works. I liked some of their previous games, but I can't really feel how some of you feel. That being said, I hope that the workers land on their feet.

@mistersims: The one issue with this narrative is that we don't really know WHY the game was terrible. Was it terrible because Volition just made bad choices? Were they given too few resources? Were they given bad directives or unhelpful meddling from management?

"Studio makes bad games, get closed" is a tidy narrative but these things can be much more complex. A lot of publishers have a history of forcing companies to make games a certain way and then punishing the studios when consumers reject that.

Look at Insomniac and Fuse. Insomniac is a top tier studio, but when they tried to make Fuse interesting EA forced them to make it bland and it flopped hard. They took some of those ideas and put them into Sunset Overdrive, which was not a huge commercial hit but was received well by critics and is more or less a cult classic. Then they went back to Ratchet & Clank and on to Spider-Man and they were enormous hits.

The point being that the system isn't working well if management forces a studio to make a game in a way that doesn't work and then the lower employees get fired because of it.

Yeah, and on top of that, Volition had no role in Embracer attempting to make a media deal with the Saudi government for $2 billion over the rights for The Lord of the Rings, and when this clear example of putting all of tone's eggs in one basket fell apart, things got dire.

@zombiepie:Yes. Even setting aside the numerous issues of dealing with the Saudi government (Bobby Kotick rightly gets a lot of hate for threatening to kill someone over the phone but there's no evidence he ever actually had someone killed and dismembered) the business model makes no sense to me.

When Microsoft went on a studio buying spree you could answer the questions why and how.

Why? They are trying to build Netflix for games and they are a platform maker so even without that they want exclusives.

How can they afford it? They're Microsoft and they can easily afford to take the loss if things don't work out.

Embracer didn't have the clear business plan OR the unlimited money, apparently. They just expanded rapidly and then hoped for a big deal. Even if the Saudi Arabia plan had gone through...how would Volition or a lot of the other studios even factor in? Why did they ever need to get so big?

It's always sad to see a legendary studio get shut down, but sometimes in cases like this i assume the key members had already left which is why they found themselves in such a sorry state.

You have to feel bad for the current team losing their jobs of course, but similar to Blizzard it feels like the Volition we knew died long ago. Thankfully their best games are still in a playable state, and if they aren't going to do anything with Saints Row for a while a remake of Red Faction could be pretty cool, someone should do that, what does a new Geo-Mod look like.

There are now rumors that Embracer is looking to sell or spin off Gearbox. They must be pretty desperate because they bought them not long ago and I don't think the studio has really underperformed. It looks like my years of wondering "what is Embracer's business model exactly" have an answer. Sell out to the Saudis, and if that falls through, PANIC!

I wonder who would buy Gearbox. I think that Sony is the best bet. Microsoft is still trying to close on Activision and staying quiet until that happens and the only other company that really makes sense is EA and I don't think they're looking to acquire that portfolio.

@bigsocrates: My dark horse pick here is either Epic or Tencent grabs Gearbox.

@peezmachine: Those are definite possibilities. Tencent I can really see. Epic, I feel like they haven't bought a lot of studios just to buy them so it seems less likely to me, but they certainly have the money.

Thanks to PS Plus, I played the Saints Row reboot for the first time, because I was never going to buy it. And from what I've played, the game isn't terrible or bad, but it isn't very good or great either. It's right in the middle. Even though I could've gone crazy with the character creator, which is one of the best things about the game, I decided to just go with the default skin, which is the woman model they used to advertise the game.

I see what Volition was trying to do. Because there hasn't been a mainstream GTA campaign in many years, because of Rockstar using most of their team to support GTA Online, Volition tried to capitalize off of this by making a basic GTA type of campaign instead of the wild, zanny, stuff they did in Saints The 3rd and Saints Row 4. The problem is, its too basic, to a fault. The missions are okay, but nothing about them really stand out. Some of them kind of capture the Saints silliness, like the murder island missions, but even those are tame. In a way, Volition is a victim of their own success because of those past crazy Saints games. The storyline is okay, but again nothing special. Its about a group of criminals from different gangs who are friends living in a beat up apartment that is too expensive and they need to pay rent, until reasons causes them to reform the Saints. The characters are likable, but not memorable, if that makes sense. I won't even address the stupid "Woke" backlash from bigots because the Saints games always had a diverse cast.

I can see why this game outside of the nonsense didn't do well. It's a very basic "one of those" and on top of bugs and glitches, which for the most part seem to be fixed now, I see why many people were disappointed. Pity. I plan to finish it, because the campaign so far has kept me interested, but I likely won't change my mind about it being just meh... One thing I will say about the game that is positive, is how very good the driving mechanics are. Some of the best in a sandbox game, reminding me of Sleeping Dogs.

I'm also thinking especially of Jess and soon-to-be-husband Chip, this year's been awful for them on the job front.

hdstreamz.uno

krnl download