While Embracer currently has the rights to make The Lord of the Rings video games, the Gollum Game was outside of their umbrella. Daedalic Entertainment developed it and published it with help from their parent company Nacon.
It truly is insane how many subsidiaries and IPs are under their umbrella. And yet nobody really ever hears about Embracer. I'd heard of them once or twice in industry news, but never really knew how many things were under their belt. Truly grew too big for it's own good.
Embracer Group owns the rights to both Tomb Raider and Lord of the Rings; it acquired Tomb Raider when it purchased Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal from Square Enix in 2022. That year, Embracer Group bought the licensing rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by buying rights holder Middle-earth Enterprises. Early this year, Embracer announced that it has five mystery Lord of the Rings games in development by external partners.
They fucked around and are finding out. This obsession with growing as fast as possible, going to find a way to make money later, is a cancer on the corporate world and it needs to stop. It hurts the employees and the communities around them, and it's hurting gaming as well.
How many franchises will be affected, if not completely destroyed by these fuckers incompetence?
The trouble is that, as always, leadership fucked around and now workers are finding out.
Leadership overextended while money was cheap, now money isn't so cheap and the bills are gonna start coming due so they need to cut some "dead weight" which is largely gonna mean cutting workers to save on salaries and other liabilities.
And as always this is gonna make them look profitable enough to stay above water for a couple years until interest rates come down and money is cheap again. And that's when the cycle starts over.
The worst part is there will be no accountability for that leadership because this isn't a sign of incompetence. It is a sign of a system working as intended.
This mystery deal that fell through is a convenient precipitating event to point to, but this was always the going to be the eventual outcome of the way these companies operate.
You can see it happening...well everywhere but especially in tech and adjacent companies over the past couple years. Maybe next time it'll be another industry, but at some point folks are gonna get addicted to free money again and get all shockedpikachu when it stops being so free and they need to pay it back.
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