Embracer Group is Buying Square Enix Montréal, Eidos Montréal and Crystal Dynamics for $300 million

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polonyc2

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Embracer Group has announced that it has entered an agreement to purchase Square Enix Montréal, Eidos, and Crystal Dynamics, amongst other assets...the studios are responsible for numerous AAA titles, including the recent Tomb Raider reboots, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, the Deus Ex series, and many other popular titles...according to the press release, the total purchase price amounts to USD 300 million on a cash and debt-free basis, to be paid in full at closing

With these studios comes control of a catalogue of games including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, and Legacy of Kain...as the press release notes, "The acquisition also includes the continued sales and operations of the studios' more than 50 back-catalogue games"...

https://www.ign.com/articles/embrac...re-enix-montreal-and-more-tomb-raider-deus-ex
 
Just read about this - that seems like a decent deal with how much some of these studios have been selling for.

I wonder if Square Enix is trimming its 'Western Fat' so they'd be more affordable for Sony to take in as a first party studio.
 
Square Enix is selling several of its development studios in order to invest more in blockchain, AI and cloud gaming

As part of the deal, Eidos Montreal plans to revive Deus Ex and use new Unreal Engine 5 technology, the studio said during the acquisition conference call
 
SeymourGore said:
Just read about this - that seems like a decent deal with how much some of these studios have been selling for.

I wonder if Square Enix is trimming its 'Western Fat' so they'd be more affordable for Sony to take in as a first party studio.
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I was thinking the same thing. There has been a rumor for weeks now that Sony is in the process of a major acquisition. I thought it was going to be Square Enix. I think Sony would mostly be interested in Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts in regards to existing IP.
 
polonyc2 said:
Square Enix is selling several of its development studios in order to invest more in blockchain, AI and cloud gaming

As part of the deal, Eidos Montreal plans to revive Deus Ex and use new Unreal Engine 5 technology, the studio said during the acquisition conference call
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Yes, maybe someone will actually finish Mankind Divided!
 
Well, Wasn't expecting this news this morning. But interesting. We'll see how this pans out in the next 2-3 years. With new TR and Deus ex releases.
 
Blockchain bullshit that Squeenix was hot for is incoming.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com...cquisition-will-help-it-invest-in-blockchain/

In an official statement, Square Enix said the deal will let it focus on investments in blockchain, AI and the cloud.

“The transaction will assist the company in adapting to the changes underway in the global business environment by establishing a more efficient allocation of resources, which will enhance corporate value by accelerating growth in the company’s core businesses in the digital entertainment domain,” it said.

“In addition, the transaction enables the launch of new businesses by moving forward with investments in fields including blockchain, AI, and the cloud. The move is based on the policy of business structure optimization that the company set forth under the medium-term business strategy unveiled on May 13, 2021.”
 
polonyc2 said:
Square Enix is selling several of its development studios in order to invest more in blockchain, AI and cloud gaming

As part of the deal, Eidos Montreal plans to revive Deus Ex and use new Unreal Engine 5 technology, the studio said during the acquisition conference call
Click to expand...
I guess a galaxy brain move by their CEO that wants to make NFTs.
 
"Investing in blockchain, AI and the cloud" is the same as saying "We're investing in Computer Technology" anytime between 1977 and 1989.......................every company today is investing/investigating blockchain technology, and leveraging AI and "The Cloud"....its like this:
2d90385bced70b3029ef0a059e888baf--web-images-mauve.jpg
 
This liberates the IPs Squenix has been ignoring. Their constant claims of "didn't meet expectations" is bullshit and usually is the result of poor marketing or consumer-hostile "features" like microtransactions. It seems like they've been trying to sabotage their western studios.
 
Perhaps this means those IPs will get a chance to shine under better management, rather than get confined to the profiteering dustbin for Square Enix if they intend to turbo-boost circling the drain with "blockchain play to earn" exploitative garbage.
 
jfreund said:
This liberates the IPs Squenix has been ignoring. Their constant claims of "didn't meet expectations" is bullshit and usually is the result of poor marketing or consumer-hostile "features" like microtransactions. It seems like they've been trying to sabotage their western studios.
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I don't think sabotage is the right word, Asian and Western markets and mindsets towards games are very very different.
This here basically sums up their position on this.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-new...dios-should-not-imitate-western-games-3207008
“But interestingly, if Japanese developers try to imitate Western games, they cannot make good ones. The designs of the monsters, and the visual and audio effects, are all still somewhat Japanese. And players around the world know that this is what makes Japanese games good.”
But it isn't just the monsters, the settings, the story, or the dialog, they have fundamental differences in what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of P2W, freemium, loot boxes, and the like, what is normal there is met with utter hatred here.
"We all have phones" anybody?
 
raz-0 said:
I expect it to go as well as their foray into feature length animated movies.
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Hey, now, I thought The Sprits Within was a fantastic movie. It just didn't do well financially since it had the "Final Fantasy" name attached to it, and that comes with expectations.
 
Seems cheap. Tomb Raider is nearly garunteed to sell. If you keep the budget in check, no reason that shouldn't make some money.

Legacy of Kain seems ripe for not only a revival, also remakes. Plenty of money to be made there. (Square actually had a LoK game which went pretty far into production, about 13 years ago. But, it was cancelled. Gamepay and visuals seemed solid. But the screenplay and tone of thedialogue was awful. You can see clips of it on youtube.)

Deus Ex honestly seems like the most difficult the big 3 names there. But....I'd like to think that should sell well, provided a decent game is delivered.
 
I read this and was wondering if this would be good for Deus Ex. Seems like it is a good thing? Hoping it works out well for these studios.
 
Lakados said:
I don't think sabotage is the right word, Asian and Western markets and mindsets towards games are very very different.
This here basically sums up their position on this.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-new...dios-should-not-imitate-western-games-3207008
“But interestingly, if Japanese developers try to imitate Western games, they cannot make good ones. The designs of the monsters, and the visual and audio effects, are all still somewhat Japanese. And players around the world know that this is what makes Japanese games good.”
But it isn't just the monsters, the settings, the story, or the dialog, they have fundamental differences in what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of P2W, freemium, loot boxes, and the like, what is normal there is met with utter hatred here.
"We all have phones" anybody?
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In terms of design that's one thing, that's fine. However being a developer and a publisher is different - you can still be SquareEnix the publisher with Western studios under your belt, while having Japanese studios, both with different creative visions and letting them thrive each with what they do best, adapting as needed. Some other JP dev/publishers have done this far better, from Capcom and Sega, to even Koei and BandaiNamco (among smaller publishers) - that can bring niche titles globally with a quality translatiion maintaining the Japanese character and developer intent , releasing on PC etc.. Steam "Golden Week" sales going on show that this can be successful!

However, this CEO the one who ironically is talking about " “I believe that playing is a sign that one is a person,” Matsuda continued. “As it is said that people are creatures of play – homo Ludens – and without entertainment, I believe the mind would die. " in the article there? Is also Mr. NFTs, Blockchain, AI "Play To Earn" - LITERALLY turning gaming from "play" into "investment/speculation" with a profit motive and expectation of return. Fucking sickening and I can with every fiber of my being hope that it fails because quite honestly all the "blockchain , NFT, play to earn " and related garbage has to fail, or WE lose out with gaming. Anyone who is old enough to watch the march of "progress" for monetization has seen it get worse and worse, more and more exploitative - unless there is such a massive rebuke that is felt at every level up to the shareholders and execs. So this is what needs to happen. This also includes all the current practices infesting gaming from gatcha garbage, "f2p", item mall exclusives (cosmetic or otherwise), lootbox-types, and more.

I hate that SquareEnix, a company that in the past has managed some phenomenal games is resorting to this. Even worse perhaps than Konami going from the "up up down down left right left right B A Start" people to "pachinko parlors, screw the rest". I hate watching how Final Fantasy XIV keeps pushing out tons of fucking cosmetic item mall nonsense when its a subscription MMO and I have zero faith in any of this to turn out well so long as those in charge chase the kind of speculative buzzwords that turn gaming into another job and offer nothing of value. Its better that these IPs are going elsewhere and can only hope the developers there realize that making quality titles (as noted above) sequel, remakes, revivals and more, will work if they don't get bogged down with too much monetization focus and other nonsense. Make games, support them well, sell them for a reasonable price and avoid nonsense like exclusivity, and other practices andy you'll thrive.
 
Armenius said:
Hey, now, I thought The Sprits Within was a fantastic movie. It just didn't do well financially since it had the "Final Fantasy" name attached to it, and that comes with expectations.
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I mean it was pretty, but not terribly good. It didn’t give ff fans anything they wanted and was too anime formula for American mass appeal at the time. Cgi animation was taking off. Out pixar-ing Pixar sounds like it should be great.

Planning to be steam but with nfts too sounds great. They just don’t understand the business and are going to make a service nobody wants. Or at least most of tier planet doesn’t want. It’ll also cost way more than they grasp to get even the basics done.

I mean the content of their movie wasn’t awful. It was decent but niche. But i I was referring to their complete lack of understanding of that business nearly bankrupting the whole company.
 
polonyc2 said:
Square Enix is selling several of its development studios in order to invest more in blockchain, AI and cloud gaming

As part of the deal, Eidos Montreal plans to revive Deus Ex and use new Unreal Engine 5 technology, the studio said during the acquisition conference call
Click to expand...
Damn, I wish they would use id tech engine instead. Semms like the new unreal engine has issues.
 
stonewalker said:
Damn, I wish they would use id tech engine instead. Semms like the new unreal engine has issues.
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The last Deus Ex game had a host of engine related issues. As did some previous ID tech engines, like the version Rage used with the horrid texture pop in. I'm sure UE5 will have issues at first as it is a new engine, but Epic seems to be the most responsive to improving and fixing things as of late.
 
I'm usually not in favor of these types of acquisitions but I'm cautiously optimistic about this considering how SE has let their western studios/IPs languish and seems to have abandoned Deus Ex all together(which is my favorite SE IP). I just hope they do justice to the DE and Tomb Raider series.

Also lol at the buzzword salad coming from SE.
 
Ebernanut said:
I'm usually not in favor of these types of acquisitions but I'm cautiously optimistic about this considering how SE has let their western studios/IPs languish and seems to have abandoned Deus Ex all together(which is my favorite SE IP). I just hope they do justice to the DE and Tomb Raider series.

Also lol at the buzzword salad coming from SE.
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Corporate speak: The art of saying as little as possible with the most words possible.
 
from something I read, they sold Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal b/c the Marvel Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy games lost the company 200 million
 
illli said:
from something I read, they sold Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal b/c the Marvel Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy games lost the company 200 million
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They deserved to lose money on Avengers with their "as a service" and mtx crap. That, unfortunately, may have affected sales of Guardians, even though it was much better received.
 
jfreund said:
They deserved to lose money on Avengers with their "as a service" and mtx crap. That, unfortunately, may have affected sales of Guardians, even though it was much better received.
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It certainly did effect GoG sales. I believe it was just a clone of Avengers and I was surprised that it got such high praise here. I have it a chance and found a great game. I am done with SE at this point. The games these developers were putting out were way better then anything SE has put out in the past decade. Right now the only game I care about is DQXII.
 
HeadRusch said:
"Investing in blockchain, AI and the cloud" is the same as saying "We're investing in Computer Technology" anytime between 1977 and 1989.......................every company today is investing/investigating blockchain technology, and leveraging AI and "The Cloud"....its like this:
View attachment 469546
Click to expand...
Databases were so much better when they still made them with genuine Bakelite.
 
Flogger23m said:
The last Deus Ex game had a host of engine related issues. As did some previous ID tech engines, like the version Rage used with the horrid texture pop in. I'm sure UE5 will have issues at first as it is a new engine, but Epic seems to be the most responsive to improving and fixing things as of late.
Click to expand...

UE4 and UE5 are designed with long deferred rendering pipelines. The visuals are amazing but it takes a toll on the input latency and overall framerate. UE4 is stressed to hit 60FPS on modern consoles (in all honest I don't know how devs do it), and 30FPS is really the target for all of its R&D. Even loading an empty scene with just the sky and a sphere runs at like 90FPS on my 3080 in the editor viewport.

You can use the old forward rendering pipeline, change the Post Process settings disable certain engine features to push it faster, but starts to take a huge toll on the visual quality.
 
KazeoHin said:
UE4 and UE5 are designed with long deferred rendering pipelines. The visuals are amazing but it takes a toll on the input latency and overall framerate. UE4 is stressed to hit 60FPS on modern consoles (in all honest I don't know how devs do it), and 30FPS is really the target for all of its R&D. Even loading an empty scene with just the sky and a sphere runs at like 90FPS on my 3080 in the editor viewport.

You can use the old forward rendering pipeline, change the Post Process settings disable certain engine features to push it faster, but starts to take a huge toll on the visual quality.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, deferred rendering is the only way to do certain types of visual effects and presentation with rasterization. The sooner we can move to full ray tracing, the better. No more hybrid rendering models.
 
SeymourGore said:
Just read about this - that seems like a decent deal with how much some of these studios have been selling for.

I wonder if Square Enix is trimming its 'Western Fat' so they'd be more affordable for Sony to take in as a first party studio.
Click to expand...
Sad news if true. It will be a real loss for gamers if SE stops developing for non-Sony platforms. That said, I guess nowadays most first party console games on non-Nintendo platforms are still finding their way onto Steam. Still this move will be a kick in the shin to Switch owners, SE really opened up again on Nintendo platforms in the last decade and has been doing a lot to help fill Nintendo's first party droughts and I am sure that is going to stop as soon as this happens.

I guess that this is the result of MS's acquisition of Activision/Blizzard. The days of third party developers seems to be ending and it seems like companies are gobbling up every third party that is in their orbit now before somebody else does.
 
So Eidos Montreal WON'T be making anymore boring Tomb Raider games now, correct?

They made Shadow, the worst of the reboot line so far, IIRC

Crystal Dynamics will only be making them from here on out?

Because instead of saying "Embracer got the copyrights to the x franchises/IP", it's sounding like the studios are effectively on their own?

I have all the Deus Ex games, never played any of them (thanks Steam card farming 👍)

The only other Square Enix game I ever liked I can recall was Parasite Eve
 
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gvx64 said:
Sad news if true. It will be a real loss for gamers if SE stops developing for non-Sony platforms. That said, I guess nowadays most first party console games on non-Nintendo platforms are still finding their way onto Steam. Still this move will be a kick in the shin to Switch owners, SE really opened up again on Nintendo platforms in the last decade and has been doing a lot to help fill Nintendo's first party droughts and I am sure that is going to stop as soon as this happens.

I guess that this is the result of MS's acquisition of Activision/Blizzard. The days of third party developers seems to be ending and it seems like companies are gobbling up every third party that is in their orbit now before somebody else does.
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Yeah that makes sense. SE is fairly large though it seems like they've been slimming down over time and heavily rely on Final Fantasy. As long as they keep doing them on PC that would be good, but I do wonder how viable it would be for many studios. Locking yourself out of one console can be problematic for sales. Longer term this might mean less ambitious projects.

Eventually we'll probably see more studios pop up though. We saw a similar thing in the 2000s. The independent studio model fell apart with dozens of studios falling under Ubisoft, EA Games, Microsoft and more.

staknhalo said:
So Eidos Montreal WON'T be making anymore boring Tomb Raider games now, correct?

They made Shadow, the worst of the reboot line so far, IIRC

Crystal Dynamics will only be making them from here on out?

Because instead of saying "Embracer got the copyrights to the x franchises/IP", it's sounding like the studios are effectively on their own?

I have all the Deus Ex games, never played any of them (thanks Steam card farming 👍)

The only other Square Enix game I ever liked I can recall was Parasite Eve
Click to expand...

Crystal Dynamics is making a new Tomb Raider. Ironically they made the awful Avengers game, but Edios Montreal made the great Guardians of the Galaxy.
 
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Flogger23m said:
Crystal Dynamics is making a new Tomb Raider. Ironically they made the awful Avengers game, but Edios Montreal made the great Guardians of the Galaxy.
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Right on Unreal 5 too, but what I'm unsure of is are they all now acting siloed off as independent companies from each under Embracer? Or the same as under Square Enix and basically just satellite offices of one larger company? That's what I'm unsure of. Cause claiming each company got their old IP back vs Embracer obtaining the IP makes it sound like the former, but that doesn't really make sense just from how these companies usually operate. I would like the former, just surprising for a change if so. Just have to wait and see I guess.
 
staknhalo said:
Right on Unreal 5 too, but what I'm unsure of is are they all now acting siloed off as independent companies from each under Embracer? Or the same as under Square Enix and basically just satellite offices of one larger company? That's what I'm unsure of. Cause claiming each company got their old IP back vs Embracer obtaining the IP makes it sound like the former, but that doesn't really make sense just from how these companies usually operate. I would like the former, just surprising for a change if so. Just have to wait and see I guess.
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Honestly the Tomb Raider engine looked good and ran good. Newer builds of UE4 and apparently 5 have that annoying stuttering thing. I am not sure if it will be worse than using the previous engine. What Modern Warfare 2019 does is compile shaders with each patch or driver update. I thought it was odd at first but perhaps this was a smart idea if it ensures smoother gameplay.

Deus Ex Mankind Divided looked great in some ways, bad in others. That engine had performance issues though. Perhaps that would be a worthwhile jump to UE5.
 
staknhalo said:
Right on Unreal 5 too, but what I'm unsure of is are they all now acting siloed off as independent companies from each under Embracer? Or the same as under Square Enix and basically just satellite offices of one larger company? That's what I'm unsure of. Cause claiming each company got their old IP back vs Embracer obtaining the IP makes it sound like the former, but that doesn't really make sense just from how these companies usually operate. I would like the former, just surprising for a change if so. Just have to wait and see I guess.
Click to expand...

From the press release it sounds like Crystal and the other studios Embracer picked up in this purchase are operating under their own division, currently called "12th operative group" (the name will likely change to something else soon-ish as Embracer loves changing names). So that means those IPs were assigned to the division itself, giving Crystal (and, presumably, any other studio within that division) the opportunity to work on them. It's hard to parse out exactly how Embracer operates but, I believe, each division runs relatively independently. Given the wording of the announcement about Crystal having those IPs back it's possible that CD will be the primary studio under that division.
 
Flogger23m said:
Yeah that makes sense. SE is fairly large though it seems like they've been slimming down over time and heavily rely on Final Fantasy. As long as they keep doing them on PC that would be good, but I do wonder how viable it would be for many studios. Locking yourself out of one console can be problematic for sales. Longer term this might mean less ambitious projects.

Eventually we'll probably see more studios pop up though. We saw a similar thing in the 2000s. The independent studio model fell apart with dozens of studios falling under Ubisoft, EA Games, Microsoft and more.



Crystal Dynamics is making a new Tomb Raider. Ironically they made the awful Avengers game, but Edios Montreal made the great Guardians of the Galaxy.
Click to expand...
SE seems to just want to do 18 more versions of old Final Fantasy games. The have the fan base, so it might work for them. I'm thrilled that they won't be able to screw over Crystal Dynamics or Eidos Montreal anymore.
 
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