Be Glad You Don’t Work Under Embracer Group

Back in the heady 80s, of Filofaxes, yuppies, and telex ticker tape, I was a salesman for numerous container shipping lines, serving Europe and the American Midwest, which is where I cut my teeth in the cut and thrust of aggressive sales tactics. I thoroughly enjoyed the work – company car, expenses, and travelling around the UK and Europe – until the lay-offs began and I became a casualty. Then, for reasons that I still cannot fathom, I signed up with a life assurance company as a commission-only, highly trained lethal weapon, selling life policies to people who either couldn’t afford it or didn’t care. As a result, I burned out after nine months and very nearly ended up on the scrap heap.

Well, the old saying, it’s not what you know, but who you know, came to my rescue when my brother introduced me to an Australian company that immediately took me on as their only sales manager to sell a unique emergency medical device, at which I was very successful. A couple of years later, in 1989, I was offered the chance to take over the entire manufacturing and sales operation under license, and thus began the rather scary but thoroughly fulfilling adventure of working on my own. It was from those days that I vowed never to work for The Man ever again and I have maintained that position ever since.

What Is The Embracer Group?

It’s a Swedish video game holding company that was spun out of Nordic Games Group, which acquired THQ (later becoming THQ Nordic) which has made dozens of games such as Destroy All Humans and Wreckfest. Since 2017, Embracer Group has been on a spending spree and it’s reported that the group has spent over $8 billion in acquisitions and its portfolio has reached nearly 140 internal game studios, including the IPs of Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Borderlands, and many other much-loved video game titles. However, in June this year, it was reported that a $2 billion partnership, apparently with Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group, had fallen through which changed the entire Embracer landscape completely. Only last year it was reported that the holding company had spent over $2 billion on 20 different acquisitions, but it appears that their spending spree has finally ended and perhaps gone the other way – read lay-offs and company closures.

In my introduction, I alluded to my experience of being laid off and in one case I was ordered to ‘leave the office in an orderly fashion‘, which illustrates how surgically such dismissals are often carried out. As of June this year, Embracer Group was said to employ around 17,000 people under its umbrella, but now, terms such as restructuring and downsizing are being used – euphemisms for employee lay-offs and studio closures.

One of the most significant closures has been Volition, developer of the Saints Row franchise which was closed down in August, and one wonders what will happen to Saber Interactive, Dark Horse Media, Deep Silver, Crystal Dynamics, Square Enix Montréal and Eidos-Montréal, which Embracer acquired from Square Enix nearly a year ago.

The Sword Of Damocles

Why am I writing about the Embracer Group? Because I know how it feels to live under this kind of uncertainty, despite the Embracer Group’s CEO, Lars Wingefors’s bullish statements, it’s been devastating for studios in the group through lay-offs, studio closures, and game cancellations. If I were an employee in this group, I would be urgently looking for employment elsewhere and regard Embracer as the big bad wolf who gobbled up too much and can no longer stomach the aftereffects.

Yes, Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame could be drowning.

What surprises me is that the likes of Amazon and Microsoft haven’t stepped in, especially since Amazon Games has secured the rights to publish the next and much anticipated Tomb Raider which is being developed by Crystal Dynamics, an Embracer Group company that has also seen some drastic lay-offs.

For legal reasons, I will not share my real feelings about the Embracer Group’s abysmal track record and will have to sit back, like many others, and watch as this corporate nightmare of greed unfolds in the ensuing weeks and months.

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