Embracer Group to Acquire Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal for $300 Million

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Embracer Group has entered into an agreement to acquire Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal, and Square Enix Montréal for $300 million. The deal is expected to close by September 2022, pending approvals.

Go to post

 

[Grimlakin]

That's kind of a small deal all told. I hope everyone that works for those companies is getting a nice payout as well.

 

[Zarathustra]

I would love it if they use this to pump out a new game in the Deus Ex series, but no guarantees there.

The original Square enix plan was for there to be two additional titles after Mankind Divided, but they canned that after disappointing launch sales, which were mostly caused by the publisher forcing the game to have mixrotransactions at launch, resulting in bad press.

 

[GunShot]

This acquisition also shines ugly light on others in the industry's poor position in AAA gaming on their platform/future endeavors - Stadia, Meta VR/gaming, X Foundation, Amazon/Prime Gaming, Netflix Gaming, Apple, and Samsung.

It seems like an unwise missed opportunity (deliberately? ) for most of these behemoth companies not to pull the plug on this Square Enix's fire sale (well-established studios/locations and dev upcoming titles), especially for the ones that have no exclusive AAA games/studios but claim to cater to gaming (and its future) too?!

Riiiiiiiggght!

 

[MadMummy76]

I would love it if they use this to pump out a new game in the Deus Ex series, but no guarantees there.

The original Square enix plan was for there to be two additional titles after Mankind Divided, but they canned that after disappointing launch sales, which were mostly caused by the publisher forcing the game to have mixrotransactions at launch, resulting in bad press.

Yeah it was mostly self inflicted with their pre-order schemes and retailer exclusive bonuses.

 

[Zarathustra]

Yeah it was mostly self inflicted with their pre-order schemes and retailer exclusive bonuses.

View attachment 1594

Yeah, it was an excellent game, but Square Enix was too proud to own up to the fact that it was their unwanted shenanigans that killed initial sales, so instead they blamed the franchise and ceased developing further titles in it.

I mean, gee, it's almost as if customers don't like microtransactions, exclusivity schemes, forced bundles, etc. etc. like they have been telling us for years. Who knew?

 

[Grimlakin]

Yeah, it was an excellent game, but Square Enix was too proud to own up to the fact that it was their unwanted shenanigans that killed initial sales, so instead they blamed the franchise and ceased developing further titles in it.

I mean, gee, it's almost as if customers don't like microtransactions, exclusivity schemes, forced bundles, etc. etc. like they have been telling us for years. Who knew?

You have to remember when the retailers held the game developers purse strings. If the big retailers didn't carry the game it likely wouldn't move through in sales thanks to physical distribution. So the retailers started demanding exclusives. At first it was cool because it was X retailer got an exclusive so if you knew about it you got neat little thing and prompted "Where did you get that?" in big games. Now with digital distribution being a thing the exclusives are used as prods to encourage preorders. Some still try to have exclusive items in games or whatever...

Today if a company wanted to sell me something exclusive that would get me to pay a higher price for a game or even just pre order the game... give me MMO or MMOlight games with other players that are age group exclusive. (with some negligible way to verify age beyond a drop down box.) 30+, 18-29, and under 18 would be good broad categories I think.

I would pre order a half way decent game that did this JUST to encourage more people doing it. I have a feeling the weebs would focus on 18-29, many here would just go in the 30+ servers and be happy with it. And the fakers well they would be wherever.

To account for families if multiple accounts exist in an household let Parents invite their kids to play with them when they want to. No big thing it's just copying some data between databases and keeping it in sync. (or just using a bigger character DB that all servers use and well you get the idea.)

I get annoyed playing with the younger generations sometimes. Like if I were to play a looter shooter I would TOTALLY play on a 30+ server and not a under 18 server. Last thing I want is some twitch happy caffeine junkie kid ruining my enjoyment of the game with a mouth that simply can't stop saying bullshit.

 

[Zarathustra]

You have to remember when the retailers held the game developers purse strings. If the big retailers didn't carry the game it likely wouldn't move through in sales thanks to physical distribution. So the retailers started demanding exclusives. At first it was cool because it was X retailer got an exclusive so if you knew about it you got neat little thing and prompted "Where did you get that?" in big games. Now with digital distribution being a thing the exclusives are used as prods to encourage preorders. Some still try to have exclusive items in games or whatever...

Today if a company wanted to sell me something exclusive that would get me to pay a higher price for a game or even just pre order the game... give me MMO or MMOlight games with other players that are age group exclusive. (with some negligible way to verify age beyond a drop down box.) 30+, 18-29, and under 18 would be good broad categories I think.

I would pre order a half way decent game that did this JUST to encourage more people doing it. I have a feeling the weebs would focus on 18-29, many here would just go in the 30+ servers and be happy with it. And the fakers well they would be wherever.

To account for families if multiple accounts exist in an household let Parents invite their kids to play with them when they want to. No big thing it's just copying some data between databases and keeping it in sync. (or just using a bigger character DB that all servers use and well you get the idea.)

I get annoyed playing with the younger generations sometimes. Like if I were to play a looter shooter I would TOTALLY play on a 30+ server and not a under 18 server. Last thing I want is some twitch happy caffeine junkie kid ruining my enjoyment of the game with a mouth that simply can't stop saying bullshit.

That could be nice I guess.

The funny thing is that I was completely and totally addicted to online gaming already in the late 90's, but over time the death of community servers, official servers, automatic matchmaking, loot boxes/skins, micro transactions and streamers have made me all but stop playing games online.

I occasionally hop into an online game just to see if I still got it (I'm out of practice, but I can still keep up with the average online player despite starting to get old and slow) but I quickly remember why I stopped playing online.

The last good online gaming experience I had was Red Orchestra 2 from 2011 when it launched until late 2015 when we shut down our server, due to a combination of DDOS attacks and other issues. Ours (2.Fjg) was a good mature community and a great server while it lasted. It did attract a couple of sketchy folks I had to distance myself from though. Apparently the German theme attacked sone honest to god neo Nazis. I had never run into one of those before...

I played a little PUBG in late summer 2017 after they launched first person mode. It was fun for a week or two but after I won a few chicken dinners, it quickly got old. I signed in a few months back to see what it was like now, and they made the game infinitely worse than it originally was.

Since 2017 I've barely played anything online at all. I have caught up on my backlog of single player story driven AAA games, which had been fun, and it had been nice. I don't miss dealing with people at all.

It's funny that as gaming had become more and more social, I have gone in the absolute opposite direction. One of the things I appreciate the most about gaming these days is that I get some alone time and don't have to deal with people. I truly enjoyed the pandemic shutdown. Some good me-time!

I honestly have no desire to stream, communicate with people in game chats or anything like that. Just give me an immersive single player open world AAA FPS title and I'll get lost in it.