Nintendo's shares have hit a record high as expectations around Switch 2 continue to grow, and amid speculation Saudi Arabia is set to further invest in Japanese video game stock.
Game of the Year 2023 – Biggest Disappointment
30.12.2023 - 21:04 / thesixthaxis.com
2023 has been another great year for games as a whole with some exceptional experiences that have been a pure joy to play, but as always there’s been some jarring disappointments that hit hard, and we’ve seen the impact of slowing economies around the world on executives making business decisions.
When a game becomes so widely panned and underperforms so much that a company completely gives up on actually making games, you know something’s gone very badly wrong. On paper, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum could have been a good game, with Daedalic Entertainment finding a little niche within the wider Middle-earth tale that they could try to flesh out and fill in.
Disappointingly, the game came up short on pretty much every level. From a narrative perspective, it was too shallow in how it represented the push and pull of the competing Gollum and Smeagol personalities, and featured utterly average stealth action and mediocre graphics. But as it launched, it also brought game-breaking bugs that made it impossible to complete.
This was simply a crushing game release that, after issuing a public apology, saw Daedalic’s internal development division shut down, focussing its efforts toward game publishing as a subsidiary of parent company Nacon.
After half a decade of seemingly unending growth and acquisitions, Embracer Group has made an about-turn in 2023, with the behemoth gaming conglomerate shutting down studios, laying off developers and looking to sell on subsidiaries that it had only just bought in the last couple of years.
All of this is thanks to the company’s executives banking on a $2 billion funding deal that fell apart at the last moment, reportedly with the Saudi PIF’s Savvy Gaming Group. This shook the company’s plans to the core. Now they’re looking to sell off Gearbox, they’ve shut down studios like Volition (after Saints Row massively underperformed) and a reformed Free Radical Design who had been working on a Timesplitters revival, and have been making cuts that have already affected close to 1000 employees.
It feels like the Embracer boom is now at risk of turning into a bit of a bust, built on the foundations of cheap loans and investments, and with buyouts backed by the promise of future share values. Now they’re cutting costs and seeking a more sustainable approach… but shouldn’t sustainability have been the aim from the offset? Not just a mad dash to grab as much IP and as many studios as possible?
The frustrating thing is that they’ve been able to report growing revenues and had game launches that have sold millions of copies. Dead Island 2, Payday 3, Remnant 2 and plenty of others have at the very least covered the money that had been invested in them, if not outperformed expectations in some
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