Embracer freezes acquisition drive as its restructure program comes to an end

Nearly a year later and having just sold off Gearbox to Take-Two, Embracer has ended its monumental restructuring efforts.

CEO Lars Wingefors confirmed its status during a recent investors call (spotted by RockPaperShotgun). The program first started in mid-June 2023 following the collapse of a $2 billion deal reportedly planned with Savvy Games.

Said program resulted in nearly 1,400 jobs being cut over a six-month period. Studios like Eidos Montreal and Nimble Giant lost staff, while projects were canceled and other developers like Volition and Free Radical got closed entirely.

More recently, Embracer has sold off studios to other publishers as a means to make money. Saber Interactive, 3D Realms, and Slipgate (among others) were recently sold to a private firm for a deal valued at $247 million.

Those studios, according to Wingefors, were sold off because they had “negative cashflow.” As such, the only way to keep making money was to sell them off to someone else.

Embracer’s next move? Get good at making games

After yesterday’s $460 million Gearbox deal, Embracer is still holding onto some studios like Star Trek Online’s Cryptic, along with publishing rights to the Remnant games and Hyper Light Breaker.

With the restructure ended, Wingefors was adamant the remaining studios were “not for sale. They’re a very important part of the group and the shareholders of the group going forward.”

Also ended, at least for now, is Embracer snapping up studios like it used to pre-2023. Wingefors argued it was “way too early” to have that conversation, and that for now, the company is focused on sketching out its future in games.

“We are in the late phases of the consideration of the future of the group,” he explained. “Our focus right now [is] to increase profitability and cashflow generation, by simply making better products and games.”

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