Gaming Giant Embracer Group Is Splitting Into Three Companies

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group announced plans on Monday to split itself into three distinct games and entertainment companies: Asmodee Group, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends. These will be separate, publicly listed companies, according to Embracer, which says the move will allow "each entity to better focus on their respective core strategies and offer more differentiated and distinct equity stories for existing and new shareholders." [...]

The three new companies will be broken down as follows:

- Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends: This company, which will be renamed from Embracer Group, is described as a "creative powerhouse in AAA game development and publishing" that will retain ownership of the Dead Island, Killing Floor, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Tomb Raider, and The Lord of the Rings IPs.
- Asmodee Group: a new arm dedicated to publishing and distributing tabletop games. The existing catalog includes established titles like Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Azul, CATAN, Dobble, and Exploding Kittens. Asmodee is also developing licensed tabletop games based on The Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars franchises. Embracer anticipates the spinoff and share listings will take place "within 12 months."
- Coffee Stain & Friends: described as a "diverse gaming entity" that will focus on indie, mid-market, and free-to-play games. Properties sitting under this new company include Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Wreckfest, Teardown, and Valheim. The share listings are projected to become available in 2025.

acquired and sp(l)it out again

[RalfM]

Asmodee was only acquired at the start of 2022, which makes for a pretty turbulent few years for them. The games industry feels a bit like the tech industry during that mid-noughty's period where you could stay at your desk and work for three different companies over 6 months.

Corporate speak

[jacks smirking reven]

Everyone take a guess as to what this fucking sentence actually means.

"each entity to better focus on their respective core strategies and offer more differentiated and distinct equity stories for existing and new shareholders."

Mine is: "Two of these are going under soon, guess which ones and cash out while you can"

You are correct

[sbszine]

They dumped all the debt on Asmodee and are IPOing it to transfer that to the public.

Re:

[kubajz]

When people decide about buying or selling stocks, they want to make comparisons - how does this company compare to Blizzard? To Electronic Arts? Trouble with companies that do several things at once (AAA titles, boardgames, free-to-play games) is that you cannot easily compare them, which makes it harder to see if they are over- or undervalued. And if there's not much synergy between, say, AAA and free-to-play studios, games and marketing, it may be easier to split off into separate entities and help inves

Re:

[jacks smirking reven]

I mean sure but that also applied to every corporate vertical; Samsung, Berkshire, GE, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Hyundai, Siemens, Bosch, Sony, I could go on and on and on, these are all conglomerates with various amounts of integrations across sometimes many related and sometimes very different industries (if I invest in Samsung am I investing in cell phones, microchips or heavy container ships? The answer is yes. If I invest in Yamaha am I investing in motorcycles or high end grand pianos? Yes. )

So wh

Old name "Coffee Stain Studios" was misleading ...

[UnknownSoldier]

The old name of Coffee Stain Studios [wikipedia.org] was actually a single studio not multiple so it was a little misleading / confusing.

The new name Coffee Stain & Friends makes this a little clearer.

Not often I think a corporate break-up is good.

[WolfWings]

But honestly this splitting makes sense even at a glance AND looking more closely? Like they tried to become another Devolver Digital and realized they just weren't cut out for that and are splitting things up into manageable and functional sections again.

The mega-huge licensed-IP stuff is wildly different from the mostly indie stuff that "does well but not LOTR well" and coffee stain always seemed like a PR-based side-hustle acquisition.

Likewise them acquiring a tabletop game company never made any sense a

Embracer was a scam

[rsilvergun]

Their goal was to buy up a ton of companies and then sell them all in one big package for a huge profit. We had any sort of antitrust law enforcement that wouldn't even be possible. When interest rates went up that was the basically the Doom of it. Nobody was going to get the cash to buy out all their recent acquisitions. As a result tons of games have gone unfinished in a whole bunch of people lost their jobs and whole studios are basically dead. Entire franchises are basically over.

You really need to

Triple A

[dohzer]

So many AAA tiles. Somehow I've played none of them.

Re:

[thegarbz]

You're out of touch. It's all about AAAA games now.

I wish I was joking. https://www.ccn.com/aaaa-game-... [ccn.com] Mind you at this point it looks mostly like the number of As in the game is an indication of how big of a turd it will be. So far there's been one self proclaimed AAAA game on the market and it is ... no I'm not going to call it a shitshow. A quick look on some questionable porn sites show that even some people out there get pleasure from playing with shit, whereas Skull and Bones has appealed to precis

Re:

[keltor]

They were using AAA+ starting about 2010 to describe games like Wow that continuously generated revenue. And at least AAA+ had some meaning in where these letters came from (aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) but honestly, these things never meant anything because there was JUST AAA and nothing else.

No one here to R & S?

[Saffaya]

I find the lack of Rock & Stone in this thread ... Disturbing.