What will Embracer sell next? | This Week In Business

15.03.2024 - 19:05 / gamesindustry.biz / Matthew Karch

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

After six years of purchasing a variety of developers and publishers, Embracer Group this week confirmed its first sale. The company divested Saber Interactive, plus a number of the studios within that part of the group, to Beacon Interactive, a company formed by Saber co-founder Matthew Karch.

STAT | $247 million - The sale price for Saber Interactive

The deal will have come as no surprise – and not just because word of the sale began spreading earlier in the week. Embracer's struggles have been well documented by this point. The group's ongoing restructuring efforts aim to reduce a net debt of more than $1.5 billion, which it has accomplished so far by laying off more than 1,400 people in the space of nine months, and closing three studios: Saints Row developer Volition Games, reformed TimeSplitters team Free Radical Design, and Campfire Cabal, which had yet to release its first game.

All of the above only reduced Embracer's debt to $1.4 billion by the end of 2023, and the Saber sale just knocks another $205 million off that. But this is just the first of such deals that are expected in the coming months.

"As part of the restructuring program, Embracer still has a few larger structured divestment processes ongoing that could strengthen our balance sheet and further reduce capex." - Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors in the report released alongside the company's most recent financial results

So with Embracer already eyeing up ways to get the weight of its bloated group under control, let's take a look at the potential sales candidates that remain. While it can be hard to keep track of what has been acquired over the years – so hard that there's a Wikipedia page dedicated to it – I've broken things down according to the 11 operational groups that Embracer owns.

Very Important Disclaimer: I'm not a business analyst, and the following should in no way be construed as advice or a forecast. This will be an overview of Embracer's business and why it may or may not sell certain parts of it. If you do, for some reason, want advice from me, it would be: don't buy more things than you can afford to operate.

Internal studios: Alkimia Interactive, Appeal Studios, Ashborne Games, Black Forest Games, Bugbear, Experiment 101, Gate 21, Grimlore Games, Gunfire Games, Handy Games, Kaiko, Massive Miniteam, Metricminds, Mirage Game Studios, Nine Rock Games, Pieces Interactive, Piranha Bytes, Pow Wow Entertainment,