The boss of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has addressed player concern about bugs (not those bugs) as the studio continues to release new content and new premium warbonds.
Embracer CEO says restructuring is over, no other studios for sale
02.04.2024 - 12:15 / gamesindustry.biz
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Lars Wingefors, the CEO of Embracer Group, has declared an end to the group's lengthy restructuring process that resulted in the loss of 1,400 jobs and the closure of three studios.
In an investor call following last week's $460m sale of Borderlands developer Gearbox, Wingefors told investors: "Now we are ending the restructuring program [at the] end of March and we're now looking into the future."
He added that the divestment of Saber Interactive and Gearbox were "two very important milestones" in this process.
Rock Paper Shotgun reported that he also said Embracer was not planning to sell any more of its businesses.
"We are getting approached... on a weekly basis by companies that would like to acquire certain assets within the group," Wingefors told investors. "And I've been very clear that they're not for sale, because they're a very important part for the group and for the shareholders of the group going forward."
It is not clear whether this means an end to the layoffs that have hit Embracer over the past year. GamesIndustry.biz has reached out for comment and clarification.
When asked about the Gearbox sale, Wingefors emphasised that any divestments have been based on negative cash flow for the Embracer Group rather than a sign of faith in the developers themselves.
"It's important to understand why we acquired Gearbox and what the plan [was] when we acquired Gearbox," he said. "Gearbox is one of the best developers in the world, but they had ambitions to entertain the world and grow their business significantly, both by publishing other game titles as well as creating more titles on their own. That was a very ambitious growth business plan over the coming six years we agreed into. They were in the middle of that, which meant we had a significant growth CapEx [capital expenditure], which created a negative cash flow.
"It also added a lot of business risk into the pipeline, because yes they had a lot of good success with Borderlands but obviously we had a number of titles that had not been released yet and not been proven yet. Now in the current environment, we decided this is the best outcome because we needed to reduce our CapEx significantly and reduce our business risk. We're not making this deal because we're unhappy with the development team of Gearbox, but in this current environment this is absolutely the right decision for us to take."
He reiterated that Take-Two Interactive reaped most of the benefits from Borderlands since it held the publishing rights to Gearbox's franchise, and that the economic upside of the studio's future pipeline for Embracer was "fairly limited."
Going forward, Wingefors said Embracer "would like
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