CEO discusses performance of Remnant 2 and Payday 3
Everybody’s favourite bulk-buyer of studios and licenses Embracer Group have announced that they’ve laid off 900 people over the last three months, as perrestructuring plans revealed this summer- around five percent of their total workforce.
According to the report, Embracer’s “soft free cash flow” - “free cash flow” essentially describes the amount of money a company can distribute to investors and creditors as dividends and so forth, without breaking itself - is “more or less only driven by an imbalance between investments into ongoing development and completed development within the PC/Console Games segment, which we are now addressing through the implementation of the restructuring program”.
Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors commented in the report that “over the past two years, our internally developed games have had [a return-on-investment] over twice as high compared to externally developed games”. Even in the wake of Embracer’s restructuring, he went on, the company “will still be investing more than the value of our released games, laying the foundation for future organic growth in the PC/Console Games segment”.
Wingefors had a bit to say about the fortunes of specific Embracer releases, spanning internal and external development studios and publishers. Apparently, Gunfire and Gearbox’s fantasy procedural Gears of roguelikeRemnant 2has done rather well, selling over two million copies. Starbreeze’s heistshooterPayday 3has “seen a mixed reception and performance”, which is no surprise given that game’stechnical issues at launch. Embracer expects it to be a financial success eventually, but “below management expectations”.
Wingefors also hailed the “successful release” ofDead Island 2,Risk of RainReturns,Teardownon console, a new update forSatisfactory, and Remnant 2’s Awakened King DLC, though the report doesn’t go into detail. There’s a lot more inthe full thingabout the state of affairs across mobile, table-top and Embracer’s wider entertainment operations, if you’re curious.
Embracer’s restructuring has seen the companyshutter Saints Row developer Volitionand lay off staff atMythforce developer BeamdogandStar Trek Online developer Cryptic. The company are reportedly on the verge ofclosing Timesplitters developer Free Radical, and arelooking into selling Gearbox. Embracer’s earnings report doesn’t confirm this latter claim, but does mention that the company are thinking about divestment and that there has been “notable inbound interest” in Embracer’s assets.
Update: I’ve tweaked the headline to make it clearer that Embracer are reporting layoffs that have occurred in the course of the previously announced restructuring process, rather than that they’re revealing new layoffs today.
