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Embracer’s Gothic and Elex studio Piranha Bytes is reportedly facing closure
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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How many studios now have either been shuttered or massively downsized because Embracer scooped up half the midshelf games industry, made one really bad deal that fell through, and then laid waste to everything else they'd bought up just to get their fucking share price back up?
The corporate way! If only there were job protections in place for the workers...
I'm still wondering how burning the companies you bought makes anything better.
These are game factories. Your business, on paper, is making games. How make game if no factory?
When Infogrames bought Atari to wear its name like a cursed artifact, and later wound up hocking all the properties that made Atari, Atari, at least I understood that selling off IP is a source of revenue. This is just spending followed by not-spending. You gain nothing. You've obviously lost something. Specifically, you lost a thing that makes you gain things.
It's all about share price. Investors fucking love anything that brings up the bottom line in the short term, no matter what the long term cost, so reducing costs by shuttering studios and laying off employees makes their dicks hard and makes line go up. Right now Embracer needs to make line go up, because they had a really big deal in the works (which made line go up) and then it collapsed (sad face, line go back down, investors not happy or hard).
It is absolutely as irrational as it sounds. Welcome to end-state capitalism. Everything is in service to the whims of the capital holding class who know nothing about sensible long term management of companies, and care even less, because at the end of the day they just want to make the numbers go up until they can cash out for a profit and buy into the next rocket on its way up. That all of these rockets will ultimately plunge back down and crash in fiery explosions is completely irrelevant to them as long as they make money.