Embracer, the embattled publisher which announced a significant restructuring earlier today, has been talking a little bit about how it intends to turn its business around. You may recall the European titan had been expanding aggressively, but today it confirmed that it’ll face significant layoffs, closures, and cancellations as it attempts to get its balance sheets back in the green.
One way it aims to steady the ship is with Lord of the Rings games, as it owns the rights to the popular fantasy property. “We know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world,” said newly promoted interim executive Matthew Karch. “And that's obviously something we're going to be doing.”
The suit admitted that Lord of the Rings has a much bigger draw than some of the other titles its teams have been cooking up. “[Lord of the Rings is] a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on,” he explained. “Working together we have those opportunities and we're super excited to see that working relatively quickly.”
Of course, it’s going to need to do much better than the recent Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which is one of the worst reviewed games in recent history. But Daedalic Entertainment developed that, and it was announced prior to Embracer’s acquisition of the Lord of the Rings rights back in August 2022, meaning that it only earned royalties on the release.
Nevertheless, earlier this year it announced that it had five Tolkien titles in development, including an MMO adaptation from Amazon. The question is: do you have an appetite for this much Lord of the Rings? And does the franchise have the potential to be one of the biggest brands in gaming? Embracer is certainly hoping so.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 45
Good lord that face is the stuff of nightmares. Maybe they should have turned the gollum game into a horror.
I'm no expert but even I know that this won't work out
I don't know how to feel about this.
On the one hand, I can never have too much Lord of the Rings.
On the other, it they just do it for the sake of doing it and to milk the IP, well... look at that screenshot.
What an apt choice of words
'we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings'.
The phrase 'all your eggs in the same backet' comes to mind.
Still don't know how they bought the Lord of the rings ip.
Haha good luck with that 😂
I'd love a new game in the style of EAs Return of the King. That'd sell gangbusters
Forget LOTR and give us a new Tomb Raider game already.
All they need to do is make games that are worth the IP. Not cheap rushed rubbish like Gollum and that Dwarf game. Make a AAA game that isn't designed to just nickel and dime players
@BearsEatBeets The phrase should be changed to 'all their rings on one finger'. Keep your mind out of the gutter.
as long as Crystal Dynamics keeps working on Tomb Raider
Wow, this sounds even worse than I thought. Embracer now seems like 2010-2016 era EA on steroids.
They just don’t understand main stream appeal. LOTR can be massive but Potter, Marvel and Star Wars will always have a bigger appeal to the masses. LOTR games need to be VERY VERY good to sell huge numbers. The shadow ones were very good and didn’t sell Potter numbers. Just saying.
LOTR is great, but I can't see the casuals flocking to it to the same extend as they did for Marvel a few years ago. It's too deep and religious at heart.
They're doing great
Nothing quite like the hubris of a clueless big corporation.
After the success of Hogwarts Legacy you can't really blame them going down the same route (licensing already well known brands)
Well they’re certainly off to a strong start with Gollum.
@Triumph741
Plus I feel like you need a real understanding of the WWI Western Front to really appreciate what Tolkien was trying to describe with the series’ locations since he heavily based it on his experiences.
He served on the Western Front. And his depictions of Mordor in the novels sounds almost exactly what the Somme looked like after a few months of fighting between Britain and Germany.
I've seen some video analyses of the game saying that Gollum isn't a character deserving of his own game, that Gollum would never sneak into such and such a place, it's very out of character and doesn't represent the books. Regarding the former, why not? There is a lot that can be done with the character, but giving him a bird pet is not one of them. In relation to the latter, it's been a long time since I've read the books, but I recall that sneaking places he shouldn't is absolutely Gollum's thing.
This game sounds buggy, glitchy and full of extremely poor design choices.
@OrtadragoonX It says in the article that the Gollum game was neither published nor developed by anything or anyone under the Embracer Group umbrella.
As a huge Tolkien fan, no.. Leave LotR alone. It's already taken so much abuse these last two years alone. The idea now that the powers at be want to tackle the "fourth age" my suggestion is DON'T. There is no fourth age, Tolkien and his son (the only two that really respected the source material) are dead. Leave LotR alone! Make something new, you're doing more damage than good.
And they're off to a flying start.
Dumb suits buy up a bunch of studios after hearing that there's easy money to be made in gaming. They start releasing duds and realizing nobody is buying and are now panic selling. I wonder how it must be to treat livelihoods as investments and paychecks? Scumbags...
Did they publish Gollum because if they published gollum then its a pipe dream at best.
***** off, Embracer
Should someone stop giving them drugs??? A bit of modesty should be here. Big words ALWAYS ends bad...
Sadly Embracer isn't a case of empty suits moving spreadsheets and not understanding gaming. Lars, the CEO and founder has been a gaming guy from the start and I think really cares about gaming and keeps trying to build business around gaming......but....keeps failing. He's gone bankrupt in 2 previous gaming related companies and Embracer has been far bigger scale with far far more money thrown at it on far bigger promises. I honestly wanted to see them succeed, because it's a publisher/holder that was founded by and run by someone who really does seem to be in the industry for the right reasons of actually caring about the industry...he just......doesn't seem to actually be very good at it and keeps getting way in over his head in the directions he goes. I really don't like the sound of this completely hopeless tailspin of a salvage plan, because really do want them to be able to be stable. I just don't see it happening from here.
It sure as hell isn't going to be the biggest game franchise on any planet when junk like Gollum is put out.
I always try to give games/devs the benefit of the doubt in a lot of situations since they're people too, but Gollum is just a terrible game to 2023 standards, in both the AAA, AA and indie space.
@Deadlyblack It's still not Embracer Group that's behind that game. Embracer bought the rights in august 2022 (as it says in the article). The Gollum deal was done before Embracer entered the LotR "scene".
@shgamer Honestly, it doesn't matter if it's Embracer, Square, Nintendo or Sony, if a game is a terrible mess, it's a terrible mess
I think they need to focus on increasing quality first.
I miss LOTRO sometimes. Unsure if I’d play it now, so many mmo’s out there already. Would be more interesting to have a Dark Age of Camelot deal where you have 3 or more factions, PvPvE
Nah things arn't good at Embracer. I read it as newly promoted intern.
For him to come out and say 'Lord of the Rings is a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on,” is going to shatter morale at those other studios. Mad.
Expect a firesale of some studios at some point then
Open world action rpg like elder scrolls. Simple
Is this game development team a subsidiary of Grove Street Games?
LOTR deserves to be meteoric in the gaming sphere, but it 100% isn't embracer group who will achieve this.
They already did it with Gollum!!! It’s huge, everyone knows about it hue hue
What the.... The devs for this game is on a ego trip, very obviously, this is beyond unhealthy at this point smh 😲😲
This is my whole reason why I think some devs need a psyc evaluation check before they make a game honestly, some of them have lost it...
The licensing to the movie characters likeness was not sold to them so they have to go from scratch and cannot rely on look alike characters or voice actors.
This makes the LotR IP much trickier than Marvel or DC or SW. if you have a guy in black armor and a red laser sword everyone knows it is SW. Same with the superheroes.
The beauty of LotR is its mostly eloquent redressing of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon fables. However, there is no “‘monster name brand IP.” The movies are 20-ish years old now. The general public will not remember that a particular ranger is Aragorn on sight.
A well designed Zelda style adventure with puzzles and exploration would be a no brainer for a LotR game.
@BearsEatBeets exactly what I was drawn to.
"Exploiting Lord of the Rings"
No. Get passionate talented teams working on any of your hoarded, precious ip's, and create great games.
If they try to pump out a bunch of LotR in double quick time it will be absolutely horrendous.
They are off to the worst possible start if that's the case. Don't have to play many games to realise Gollum is absolute garbage.
I am very doubtful about any future LOTR games released by them, after the trainwreck that was Gollum.
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