Embracer Group Lays Off 97 Staff, Axes Next Deus Ex Game

Sad. Seems like all they know to do is cut the good parts or the good ideas.

What a horrible industry to work in.

Ouch. Would’ve loved a new Deus Ex game. Job security in the industry seems to be at an all time low

I can’t keep track of how many layoffs or closures Embracer has done in the last six months. I hope everyone there has updated and polished their resume, because that ship keeps on sinking. Hope everyone affected these last few months have landed on their feet on way or another.

Man I hate growth driven business. A deus ex game would easily pay the people making it.

I don't know or care what reasons they have for killing off multiple of my favorite franchises, I simply hate this company now. What an embarrassment.

@MsJubilee

Not any different then any other industry. Most of the West has no meaningful worker protections, no laws that prevent mass lay-offs of require the company to justify them, and the laws they do have favor shareholders and owners in every situation.

Citi Group laid off 20,000. Tata and Macy's both laid of 2000. Wayfair is letting close to 2000 go soon. That's all just this month.

None of Japan's top 10 game developers have seen layoffs in ... a while. Most kept their support staff (building maintenance, ect), at full pay and benefits, even when they shut down for COVID and they had nothing to do.

Nintendo famously had it's executives take over $30M USD in pay cuts to prevent lying people off. Contrast that to Microsoft, who are laying people off the same week they become the most valuable company on earth and are seeing record profits.

It's really sucks when this stuff happens. But what industry you work in doesn't really matter. What matters is if the person you work for is willing to fire you without hesitation if it means their shares go up a quarter of a point, and has no cultural or legal pressure not to do so.

You don't treat an entire industry like this (especially a very, very lucrative industry) without consequences. I hope unionization is hot on the heels of all this BS.

I hate every news story like this but this one hurts. While I've only played the one game, I own two copies of Human Revolution and I adore it. The original release had problems but the Wii U version of the Director's Cut is secretly one of the highlights of that entire system. All the DLC, fixing the bad boss battles, quality Wii U controller integration. After all this time, I'm still mad SE sabotaged the Wii U version's chances of success (which was already not great via being on the Wii U) by telling everyone it would cost more than on other consoles. (their loss, I bought it used years later)

Genuinely one of my favorite games of the era, maybe top 5 for the Wii U as a whole for me. Nothing's ever gotten me to appreciate a stealth game more than playing this game as one. And I've been meaning to play Mankind Divided for a long time, and I'm sure someday I'll get around to the original as well. But seeing the series now potentially dead, for no good reason, is just unfair.

That is a real shame. Horrible to read news about job losses. I know these sitiations can be complex but it is a largely an industry that is profitable. Suggests bad financial management?

Anyway, good luck to those who lost their jobs and hopefully they find new ones to pay the bills ASAP.

I loved Deus Ex on the WiiU. It was rated highly but didn't get the attention it deserved in part due to the WiiU's poor sales. Shame a new game won't come. A chance of a port of Human Revolution to Switch 2?

Something about the past 3 years makes me think Embracer group doesn't really know what it's doing. It doesn't help to be lean if you don't produce any products.

I have long been, and will probably die as the last, massive proponent of Embracer Group. Because Lars is a man who understands money (to a point), but isn't motivated by it. What he's motivated by is a respect for gaming history, the craft of the medium, and wanting to see it grow in places that have otherwise been forgotten about by the rest of the world. Gaming revolves around a small handful of cities, but Lars was the first man to try and bring a bunch of discard also-rans, nameless support studios, and just plain weirdoes together to try and bring western gaming back to what it was. What it needs to be. @Link-Hero No executive of Embracer has recieved any raise or extra bonus throughtout this entire process aside from the legally mandated "restructure consultants" that have been brought in to make these cuts per EU law.

He's just... a bit overly trusting of the wrong types of people. He over extended on a verbal agreement, and now they're hemoraging hard just trying to keep the tower of cards from falling over. I think the Game Archive not having it's funding and growth at least paused is a bit poor for optics, but Embracer is going about all this in the most above the board way possible. They are giving people notice months ahead of time (Free Radical). They are laying off as few people as possible (Rainbow). They are letting projects go WAY longer than most others would in hopes that they'll be able to salvage the work and keep people employed, even if what they're working is a known failure (Saints Row 5)

The only one I haven't figured out yet is Black Forest. That's 50-ish cuts I do not understand, but it is a drop in the bucket to the massive, all at once waves of kick-outs other companies do.

Yes, I know they still messed up BIG time by over extending themselves on Gearbox and Freemode if only because they bought too hard into Randy's sales pitch. but just because I like Lars and THQNordic, doesn't mean I have to like every part of the company. Randy's still skeve, Koch Media's still incompetent at managing teams, and Limited Run are still an insult to physical collectors everywhere. That's the double edge to Lar's promise that if they joined up with Embracer they could keep doing what they were doing. Embracer did NOT want to consolidate, cut, or even really change anyone that joined them. They wanted to get better together, but their ambitions got ahead of them.

It's a mess, but hey, at least people are landing on thier feet. Volition is already back up and running... mostly, as a support studio for Xbox. https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/volition-veterans-form-new-studio-shapeshifter-games Sure the article still goes out of it's way to paint Embracer as the bad guy, but getting a studio like that up and running again this quickly is no easy task. They had help and guidance, and while it was probably mostly Phil looking for easy PR to offset the storm of bad press the Blizzard layoffs created, the fact that it's a re-born Volition specifically tells me somebody higer up the chain was looking out for them.

@Bobb They're referring to the mystery new 7th IP that they were already working on when Embracer bought them from Square-Enix. I assume it was deemed to have "the most growth potential" and was prioritized. Part of the reason Embracer got what is now "CDE Entertainment" for so cheap is because S-E only gave them 6 IP, plus the misc mobile licenses Square-Enix Montreal had. This is why LRG's Gex 2026 Gex Re-Run Trilogy has a big black Square-Enix logo on it.

current developments in videogames are very pessimistic. bigger and bigger corps swallowing franchises and then killing them off for good while consoles are developing towards extinction.

I'm still sorta optimistic that its gonna work out in a way. Like Jeff Goldblum would say "Gaming erm ... finds a way".
I guess at some point the big corpos are gonna implode with the tendency of indies gaining a new audience on markets not lucrative enough for the big players. Then later big players might get back at the companys that rise from that indie-wave, but first, everything might have to escalate. Maybe Microsoft is gonna be in a good position with their subscriptionservice and swallowed companies. Maybe not. Who knows if they're actually turning Gamepass into profit. But right now consoles like the PS5 might not see more than two generations it seems.

I KNOW this has been said since the PS3 but right now we're finally at a turningpoint where I can't see classic consoles are recovering that fast.

Not sure though if this applys to the Switch as its truly a hybrid between classic console and something special.
And like always these apocalyptic prophecies always lean on a current state of the industry so just like 10 or 15 years ago I can't foresee all the developments that are gonna happen until the PS7 generation but as development for the PS5-gen is already way too elaborate while offering barely anything worth the hassle. And this is gonna explode with every future console generation again and again.

I wonder if they had released a deus ex on the switch it could have brought some revenue. Seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult. Even just re releasing them on it.

What a waste of money, they bought these IPs and studios only to killed them one by one. Embracer, EA, and Microsoft are three of the worst companies ever when it comes to buying studios and then killing them. I don't get why many small studios want to get bought by them, these three companies only know one thing in the industry and that is to end career. They don't know how to evolve their IPs or studios unlike Nintendo, Atari, Sega, and Sony, you know the actual gaming companies.

Kinda weird watching the once booming video game industry you've loved for 30 years die in front of your eyes one article at a time.

@HeadPirate I think you need to differentiate between North America and Europe when speaking of worker protections in 'The West', workers are quite robustly protected in Europe, both by the labour law and the unions. Even they latest layoffs at Ubisoft, which is headquartered in Europe, affected primarily Canadian employees.