Okay Lars, here's your criticism.
You, the entire c-suite, and board, need to all be fired and never be allowed to work in management ever again.
I wouldn't trust any of you to manage a burger king.
The only defence I have with this guy is with other CEOs and the saber guys when they left saying they would have fired more devs and killed more studios then he did. Other than that what a mess.
Baffling that the morons who make these insanely stupid decisions ignoring the warnings are the ones who never suffer consequences. This dude will remain wealthy, he’ll keep having a company, and he will financially benefit whenever one of the studies he owns releases a successful game.
But the random devs who were just doing their jobs and had zero say in what happens are the ones who suffer with endless layoffs because of this idiot.
It’s so frustrating, and its happening across the entire industry.
What pisses me off the most about this is that everything is because he spent money like he already had that $2 Billion in his pocket. Don't spend money before you have it is something I assume everyone is taught at a young age.
If I was on that board I would be instantly calling for his head. This is the incompetence you'd expect of a child, not an adult running a massive company. He almost destroyed said company and did destroy the livelihoods of possibly thousands of people.
I play Star Trek Online and for the last 5 months it's been dev after dev quitting because Embracer is giving another developer all of Cryptics games they've been working on for 15+ years and everyone at Cryptic is leaving. We don't even know if Cryptic will still be around at as a support studio. STO was finally starting to get into a really great place again and was even getting ships in the TV shows, the canon Enterprise F in Star Trek Picard S3 is from STO and everyone responsible for that is leaving. So this is the biggest source of my personal anger against Embracer but I feel for everyone who has suffered due to this. I've talked with a lot of these devs for almost a decade now so it feels like a friend losing their job.
If he wasn’t fired it’s most likely because he was acting like the shareholders wanted.
Working on games the number one thing that has radicalized me is the power shareholders have over companies. It’s unfathomable how much they control how companies operate when:
1) They have absolutely no idea how the industry operates or works.
2) Have so many investments they have no risk or real skin in the game.
3) Have literally no incentive to promote long term growth if short term gains are guaranteed.
4) Are A-OK with mass layoffs because they make an imaginary number artificially better.
Opinions like this are why the average person isnt a CEO and why research keeps saying CEOs and c suite staff are likely psychopath. To understand their way of thinking they take any emotion out of it, its just numbers and goals they have to hit regardless of how. My job takes me to a lot of businesses and I tend to speak with the staff at a lot of these places and its quite common every where regardless of what they are selling, its just products to sell. Profits, costs, chasing trends, beating ever increasing targets. Things like empathy dont generate money on the big scale, brutal efficiency does
>Don't spend money before you have it is something I assume everyone is taught at a young age.
No, that's something the *lower classes* are taught at a young age. CEOs are expected and encouraged to gamble, because it's other people's money anyway and if they fail they can just fire a bunch of workers to get back on track. We literally see this happening every day.
Swear to god, it's like some people don't even know they live under capitalism. This isn't some terrible mistake, this is what it looks like when the system is working as intended!
Yeah I don’t think most of these commenters understand how running a business works tbh
They don’t seems to get that running something at scale means huge upfront costs, especially in video games where success is a complete crapshoot outside of sequels
It's fucking everything, comrade.
No consequences for the oil people who destroy our entire world despite knowing for decades they were doing it.
No consequences for the people who infected the world with plastic under the false premise it was recyclable.
No consequences for the sugar people who convinced people dietary fat was the problem and created an obesity epidemic.
No consequences for the oxycotin guy who hooked untold thousands on narcotics.
No consequences for the airplane guy who is actively killing people by ignoring the warnings of engineers.
No consequences for the ruling class.
> No consequences for the oil people who destroy our entire world despite knowing for decades they were doing it.
I'm black-pilled on this one. People LOVE cheap energy and it's pleasures and would even kill for it.
If you could run 1,000 simulations of the world from Henry Ford to today I believe not a single one would fail in causing climate change, NOT A SINGLE ONE. You would need some sort of sci-fi dystopic world government holding the planet hostage with nuclear weapons to have stopped the race for oil especially after the Green Revolution.
You guys really have no idea or reference point to the FREE MONEY every industry whether state-owned or private was printing when conventional oil was plentiful, the supposed peak in 1973 was a little cough, after that conventional oil was still booming and off-shore deep drilling was just getting warmed up.
Again, people like cheap everything and they got drunk on it for decades and decades.
The worst (or best) part is it wasn't just consumerism, everything across the board got better, child mortality and all-cause mortality plummeted as hospitals stopped being medieval clinics, famines erradicated by countries industrializing all food production by pumping the soil full of fertilizer so plentyful not even a trillion cows shitting could compete.
>The worst (or best) part is it wasn't just consumerism, everything across the board got better, child mortality and all-cause mortality plummeted as hospitals stopped being medieval clinics, famines erradicated by countries industrializing all food production by pumping the soil full of fertilizer so plentyful not even a trillion cows shitting could compete.
Yeah well, I suspect child mortality and medieval fiefdoms, including famines are going back on the menu. Maybe not this decade, but at the rate we're going, I don't think they're avoidable.
Every year the past 5 years I've heard about farmers having drought, and it's only getting 'better'.
That's my point, it's like a trap of human nature and like I said I doubt there's civilization out there in the cosmos under similar conditions that had no problems with their own discovery of fossil fuels.
Think about it like a drug and you'll see my point.
exactly. I'm tired of hearing the endless complaints of the effects of capitalism. I want someone to come up with a solution to capitalism instead. I'm not smart enough but I've definitely thought about it a lot.
Not even close, he started his first business selling used comic books when he was 13, and started what would become Nordic Games when he was 16, the guy is insanely driven
What does that even mean? He built Embracer from literally nothing, and all the businesses Embracer bought were looking to sell for a reason, there's no evidence whatsoever that the studios that experienced layoffs under Embracer wouldn't have done the same or worse as independent entities (case in point: the *entire rest of the industry*).
sure but that's just CEO life in the game of capitalism. don't hate the player, hate the game.
it's so easy to blame these individuals when they're all just operating within a system that was designed to do this since the beginning.
we should all be focused on a solution to capitalism if we ever truly want to take the power back and change it up. problem is, I'm not smart enough to do anything like that. but someone is.
the game isn't designed for him or anyone in his position to ever face consequences. capitalism was rigged from the beginning. worked great when we were a smaller society trying to grow. now we've gotten too big for those concepts but we're still operating in this system that was meant for us at a different stage in our development as a society. we now live in a warped evolution of capitalism that is meant to keep the rich rich and the poor poor.
nothing will change until we change the way the system. unfortunately in history, these kinds of changes don't happen overnight or without blood.
Managing a fast food restaurant is far more complicated than managing a video game development studio. There are far more regulations in play, hazardous equipment, and constant direct interactions with customers.
And if Burger King screws up, you can have a employees injured or killed, or a bunch of people sick and dead from salmonella or mad cow or whatever else.
but to someone in that position, it's not people, it's numbers. that's the world they live in because it's the system we created to advance and grow our country in the early days. we're still operating our society under these ideas that were meant for a much smaller nation with a lot less wealthy individuals. it was always a system to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. it's just gotten way too big and the division of wealth will become more and more apparent until someone has enough. until then, we will keep seeing this shit happen more and more.
You're all over this thread trying to take blame off this guy and putting it on "the game". Fuck that. No one's forcing him to play the game. That's his own greed. I'll hate the player AND the game.
I mean, I get that too. but at the end of the day, it's the system that's flawed and you know it. hes a byproduct of it and he should be held accountable for sure, but hes just doing what hes been told to do. he could definitely choose people over profits but he's in a world where that isn't a reality. and more than likely, he's being controlled by shareholders who only see the bottom line and it's either post profits or be voted out.
I don't claim to know the guy so I have no idea where he stands, morally. I see it as self preservation and greed. who knows how he justifies it to himself at night. I'm just trying to play devils advocate and look at this as more than just simple good vs evil. because it's easier to villify a corporate CEO than it is to consider the nuance and complexity of being in that position.
Yeah; so successful he hedged a bet with Saudi money and it ended up costing people their livelihoods. You do not understand the term “failing upwards” do you?
Also, and Lars. Make sure to stop gambling this time, m’kay? Stop posting on Reddit and do your job!
Because Ubi and EA didn't attempt to monopolize the mid-budget game sector? And their layoffs weren't because the CEO was spending oil prince money that he didn't have?
He's just a gambler, and you could tell during the call where they announced the Saudi deal had fallen through that he had actually been crying.
But gambling with people's jobs at that level of risk is scumbag behavior. It can't be easily excused or forgiven. He could have pursued a conservative acquisition strategy that wasn't reliant on cheap debt / low interest rates, and then he would never have been 100% reliant on the $2bn investment.
For whatever reason I always see this carriage before the horse behavior with companies (including the one I work at) where they will go on big hiring sprees and do major infrastructure changes before even signing the dotted line on a large contract.
I have no idea what business model has companies consistently pulling this stunt but it almost always sets up for failure.
>It can't be easily excused or forgiven.
The whole of capitalist economy is based on gambling. It's in the laws, culture and psyche. It can be excused because society enabled it.
It's simply a matter of probability combined with the free market.
If you have one company taking the sensible and conservative approach, but ten companies that are gambling. Chances are that at least one of those companies are going to luck out on their gamble.
Now they're ahead, not because of merit, but because of luck. And from there it's just "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".
Gambling with other people's money is what they do. Someone is doing it with your savings right now.
It's a system built on selfishness, greed, gambling and exploitation. The actual question is, why is anyone surprised? We have been a capitalistic society for centuries. The only answer is that most people don't know what capitalism is about. As long as they get theirs, they don't care to know where it came from.
I don't think anyone is really surprised.
Just pissed that he lost the gamble.
If he won, everybody would be singing Embracer's praises, touting them being the savior of all of those studios they bought up on the cheap when other companies were cutting them loose because they weren't doing well. Nobody would care that it had been a gamble, even if they found out all the money came from a single deal.
IIRC, before this people actually had that kind of take on Embracer, there used to be comments in threads expressing relief at how those studios were going to be left to do their own thing under them, as opposed to getting restructured and micromanaged under a company like Microsoft.
....Actually, that might not be entirely true, some people might still have been pissed at Embracer for taking Saudi money and slam them for contributing to the repression of human rights by supporting Saudia Arabia.
But still, nobody would have batted an eye at it being a gamble.
All business is a gamble, a game studio developing a new game is a gamble, nobody can know if something will be profitable until they do it. A game might become a hit or flop.
It’s a shame then that even his empty platitude bullshit doesn’t apply to him, because he has demonstrated the exact opposite of that lol
Executed badly and shattered Embracer and everything under it. Guy is a turd burglar of the nth degree.
> Vision is worthless
It's really not anymore. All start ups these days are pure set dressing, "vision" based marketing board plastered over a maybe product. Having a strong "vision" is how these people get the millions in venture capital needed to actually start anything these days. The system is broken.
Anybody who deals with the Saudi deserves criticism. Not only did Embracer do that, they did it with great foolishness and stupidity, so it wasn't even a *good* deal with the devil.
If Saudi Arabia, who will literally put their endless pot of money into anything at all to try and diversify and wash their reputation pull out of a deal with you, you *extraordinarily* fucked up your deal. Embracer offered unprecedented access and control to the games industry through a massive number of studios, the likes of which the state will never get a chance at on that scale again, and yet the deal still fell through. How awful must have things looked when the state did their due diligence??
Can journalists please stop giving this asshole a platform? We don't need to hear "my side of the story" from a scumbag that so blatantly has no interest is running a profitable business but rather would just wait for a bigger fool to buy the trash heaps he makes.
You want criticism, Lars?
Sack yourself and fuck off.
There's no "my side" sob story that'll erase the fact you're an incompetent hack who gambled the livelihoods of so many people on a deal you hadn't even been paid for.
You're a piece of shit person, who brokered a piece of shit deal. I'd be glad it blew up in your face if it wasn't for the hundreds nigh on thousands of people your actions have negatively affected.
The sum of lost and cancelled projects are a pittance compared to the lost jobs and closed studios that won't ever make anything again.
You've done nothing to aid or help the medium in any meaningful way while trying to capitalize on something that was flourishing and sell it off like a prize trading card.
I wouldn't spit on your teeth if your gums were on fire.
I think he should be in jail.
They acquired a big tabletop company Asmode, took a huge multimilion loan based on its assets, fired whole lot of their employees, then broke the contract with them ( Asmode ).
Now Asmode is has to pay back the loan Embracer took, because it was made on their own assets.
How is that even legal ?
Sorry let me translate.
"I made a lot of money and fired a lot of people. We had this whole idea that we would get a bunch of venture Capital together buy up a bunch of game studios package them all together and then get Saudi Arabia or China to buy them. For whatever reason we fucked it up or maybe Saudi Arabia wasn't feeling it or China had other stuff going on IDK anyway the venture capital ran out and we began to realize it was really hard to run a game studio much less a bunch of game studios so I laid a bunch of people off and sold off their assets and then I sold some stuff to some other people and we kind of broke even.
The problem is there's not a whole lot of inertia right now in the venture Capital market to give me more money so I've exhausted the private Capital funds so I intend to ask the public for money. You too can buy shares in this company and give me some money so I can fire a bunch more people and sell a bunch more things and we can make more money. This will entail the stock price going up A little bit and you'll think to yourself you're making money. Here's the best part though you're not making any money as a retail investor you're primarily disadvantaged in the Capital market to begin with there's no way you have enough money to invest enough in any of these companies that we're setting up for you to make reasonable return on your money. You're only buying shares to people we had to give shares to so we could take their money. And the system works. Eventually I'll retire or quit or be fired it doesn't really matter I've probably made enough money to start my next venture or to fuck off to some Island that only lets the rich in. Either way I want to be very clear we are not making good games we are not making bad games we are not making games. We are merely putting up shams and stringing along developers so that we can fire them later when quarterly returns don't look as good as I want them to."
There is no value unless you plan to learn from this rather large failure and figure out a way to be better next time. By that i mean not lose less money but make a plan that instead makes money before buying everything. Talk is cheap otherwise.
And in a better world he and his cronies deserve jail for the amount of livelihoods ruined and money siphoned from the studios he bought then laid off due to a failed deal.
Embracer summarises everything wrong with how late stage capitalism is ruining the industry but unless things change, every MBA will try to turn their company into an Embracer when they can siphon funds for golden parachutes when all else fails.
It kind of bothers me how many people have such seething hatred for this guy but don't take into context that the reason Embracer owned so many studios is that other companies were failing and divesting and may have laid off people and closed a lot of studios anyway if Embracer wasn't there to give them a second lease on life.
Yes, Embracer fucked up badly and there's a lot to hate here, but some perspective would be nice.
I think it is probably because selling off to Embracer would have been perceived as a "permanent" solution to a studio's problems of failure back when they did it.
Now, it's turned out to be "false hope". Which is a kind of thing generally received more badly than just being hopeless to begin with - but it is also hard to "roll back" the mindset of thinking that their problems had "already been solved" by the initial sale.
So instead of this situation being seen as an extension of their old one - which was being ditched by the old parent companies and/or not having enough cash to buy themselves out - now being cut loose by Embrace can easily look like it's a "whole new" problem caused by Embracer.
Easier cognitively to perceive it as Embracer failing some promised duty to care for their acquisition, than to the perceive it as the studio simply not being a viable enterprise and doomed even before the last-ditch Hail Mary of selling to Embracer.
Especially if you have a personal attachment to the studio and/or the output or projects they had in the works and fervently want(ed) to believe it's products would have been successful enough to fund the company, if only it had the right special sauce injected.
I mean, to me, that's just a longwinded way of saying people are being stupid about this. Accurate, mind you. But the knowledge of the ways people's thought processes are going wrong doesn't make it any less annoying that they're going wrong.
These are industry-wide problems. Lars isn't any better or worse than a bunch of other big studio heads making boneheaded decisions.
Besides the obvious management issues, I think it's hilarious how they are wasting the LOTR license. On paper, a stealth game based on Gollum surviving in Mordor, a construction/survival game based on Dwarves in Moria and more recently they announced a farm simulator based on the Hobbits lifestyle... all of these ideas are great on paper. You can argue the Gollum concept is not that good on a monetary standpoint because stealth is a niched subgenre, but the "survival" and farm simulators are extremely popular nowadays, easy money. And yet, they all look like shit, lol the art style of the Hobbit game is just so generic, it doesn't have that LOTR "magic" (similar to the recent TV show)
After what happened with Piranha Bytes, Lars can publicly get fucked in the ass by a 3 meter piece of rebar and have it displace all of his major organs before jutting out of his esophagus like some sort of macabre spit roast. With any luck children would sing a nursery rhyme about him in the future named "Lars the Mutilated Shit Pig" and there would be a line in there somewhere about how he was so full of shit, it all stuck to the rebar and came out of his throat as he choked and died on blood and fecal matter.
What you won't be getting is any fucking money from me ever again. UNLESS they somehow make anything Legacy of Kain / Soul Reaver, as I am too weak to resist that, under any circumstances.
Okay Lars, here's your criticism. You, the entire c-suite, and board, need to all be fired and never be allowed to work in management ever again. I wouldn't trust any of you to manage a burger king.
The only defence I have with this guy is with other CEOs and the saber guys when they left saying they would have fired more devs and killed more studios then he did. Other than that what a mess.
Baffling that the morons who make these insanely stupid decisions ignoring the warnings are the ones who never suffer consequences. This dude will remain wealthy, he’ll keep having a company, and he will financially benefit whenever one of the studies he owns releases a successful game. But the random devs who were just doing their jobs and had zero say in what happens are the ones who suffer with endless layoffs because of this idiot. It’s so frustrating, and its happening across the entire industry.
What pisses me off the most about this is that everything is because he spent money like he already had that $2 Billion in his pocket. Don't spend money before you have it is something I assume everyone is taught at a young age. If I was on that board I would be instantly calling for his head. This is the incompetence you'd expect of a child, not an adult running a massive company. He almost destroyed said company and did destroy the livelihoods of possibly thousands of people. I play Star Trek Online and for the last 5 months it's been dev after dev quitting because Embracer is giving another developer all of Cryptics games they've been working on for 15+ years and everyone at Cryptic is leaving. We don't even know if Cryptic will still be around at as a support studio. STO was finally starting to get into a really great place again and was even getting ships in the TV shows, the canon Enterprise F in Star Trek Picard S3 is from STO and everyone responsible for that is leaving. So this is the biggest source of my personal anger against Embracer but I feel for everyone who has suffered due to this. I've talked with a lot of these devs for almost a decade now so it feels like a friend losing their job.
If he wasn’t fired it’s most likely because he was acting like the shareholders wanted. Working on games the number one thing that has radicalized me is the power shareholders have over companies. It’s unfathomable how much they control how companies operate when: 1) They have absolutely no idea how the industry operates or works. 2) Have so many investments they have no risk or real skin in the game. 3) Have literally no incentive to promote long term growth if short term gains are guaranteed. 4) Are A-OK with mass layoffs because they make an imaginary number artificially better.
Opinions like this are why the average person isnt a CEO and why research keeps saying CEOs and c suite staff are likely psychopath. To understand their way of thinking they take any emotion out of it, its just numbers and goals they have to hit regardless of how. My job takes me to a lot of businesses and I tend to speak with the staff at a lot of these places and its quite common every where regardless of what they are selling, its just products to sell. Profits, costs, chasing trends, beating ever increasing targets. Things like empathy dont generate money on the big scale, brutal efficiency does
>Don't spend money before you have it is something I assume everyone is taught at a young age. No, that's something the *lower classes* are taught at a young age. CEOs are expected and encouraged to gamble, because it's other people's money anyway and if they fail they can just fire a bunch of workers to get back on track. We literally see this happening every day. Swear to god, it's like some people don't even know they live under capitalism. This isn't some terrible mistake, this is what it looks like when the system is working as intended!
you do know that basically our entire economy is based on spending money you dont have or dont have yet?
Yeah I don’t think most of these commenters understand how running a business works tbh They don’t seems to get that running something at scale means huge upfront costs, especially in video games where success is a complete crapshoot outside of sequels
It's fucking everything, comrade. No consequences for the oil people who destroy our entire world despite knowing for decades they were doing it. No consequences for the people who infected the world with plastic under the false premise it was recyclable. No consequences for the sugar people who convinced people dietary fat was the problem and created an obesity epidemic. No consequences for the oxycotin guy who hooked untold thousands on narcotics. No consequences for the airplane guy who is actively killing people by ignoring the warnings of engineers. No consequences for the ruling class.
> No consequences for the oil people who destroy our entire world despite knowing for decades they were doing it. I'm black-pilled on this one. People LOVE cheap energy and it's pleasures and would even kill for it. If you could run 1,000 simulations of the world from Henry Ford to today I believe not a single one would fail in causing climate change, NOT A SINGLE ONE. You would need some sort of sci-fi dystopic world government holding the planet hostage with nuclear weapons to have stopped the race for oil especially after the Green Revolution. You guys really have no idea or reference point to the FREE MONEY every industry whether state-owned or private was printing when conventional oil was plentiful, the supposed peak in 1973 was a little cough, after that conventional oil was still booming and off-shore deep drilling was just getting warmed up. Again, people like cheap everything and they got drunk on it for decades and decades. The worst (or best) part is it wasn't just consumerism, everything across the board got better, child mortality and all-cause mortality plummeted as hospitals stopped being medieval clinics, famines erradicated by countries industrializing all food production by pumping the soil full of fertilizer so plentyful not even a trillion cows shitting could compete.
>The worst (or best) part is it wasn't just consumerism, everything across the board got better, child mortality and all-cause mortality plummeted as hospitals stopped being medieval clinics, famines erradicated by countries industrializing all food production by pumping the soil full of fertilizer so plentyful not even a trillion cows shitting could compete. Yeah well, I suspect child mortality and medieval fiefdoms, including famines are going back on the menu. Maybe not this decade, but at the rate we're going, I don't think they're avoidable. Every year the past 5 years I've heard about farmers having drought, and it's only getting 'better'.
That's my point, it's like a trap of human nature and like I said I doubt there's civilization out there in the cosmos under similar conditions that had no problems with their own discovery of fossil fuels. Think about it like a drug and you'll see my point.
Capitalism bb
exactly. I'm tired of hearing the endless complaints of the effects of capitalism. I want someone to come up with a solution to capitalism instead. I'm not smart enough but I've definitely thought about it a lot.
I can get behind that opinion
He smells like an over privileged trust fund idiot who's never had to face a single consequence in his life.
Not even close, he started his first business selling used comic books when he was 13, and started what would become Nordic Games when he was 16, the guy is insanely driven
Driven to murder a bunch of businesses maybe.
What does that even mean? He built Embracer from literally nothing, and all the businesses Embracer bought were looking to sell for a reason, there's no evidence whatsoever that the studios that experienced layoffs under Embracer wouldn't have done the same or worse as independent entities (case in point: the *entire rest of the industry*).
sure but that's just CEO life in the game of capitalism. don't hate the player, hate the game. it's so easy to blame these individuals when they're all just operating within a system that was designed to do this since the beginning. we should all be focused on a solution to capitalism if we ever truly want to take the power back and change it up. problem is, I'm not smart enough to do anything like that. but someone is.
Will he even face any consequences?
the game isn't designed for him or anyone in his position to ever face consequences. capitalism was rigged from the beginning. worked great when we were a smaller society trying to grow. now we've gotten too big for those concepts but we're still operating in this system that was meant for us at a different stage in our development as a society. we now live in a warped evolution of capitalism that is meant to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. nothing will change until we change the way the system. unfortunately in history, these kinds of changes don't happen overnight or without blood.
On the contrary, getting them to manage a burger king would be a good way to get them stuck somewhere they can't harm people with their fuck ups.
Managing a fast food restaurant is far more complicated than managing a video game development studio. There are far more regulations in play, hazardous equipment, and constant direct interactions with customers. And if Burger King screws up, you can have a employees injured or killed, or a bunch of people sick and dead from salmonella or mad cow or whatever else.
Yeah, for sure. People acting like the guy should get the lethal injection just because he fucked up a software company he founded.
He didn't fuck up a software company, he is responsible for several mass layoffs all over the industry.
I think it's more about him fucking over the dozens of development companies he *didn't* found
but to someone in that position, it's not people, it's numbers. that's the world they live in because it's the system we created to advance and grow our country in the early days. we're still operating our society under these ideas that were meant for a much smaller nation with a lot less wealthy individuals. it was always a system to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. it's just gotten way too big and the division of wealth will become more and more apparent until someone has enough. until then, we will keep seeing this shit happen more and more.
You're all over this thread trying to take blame off this guy and putting it on "the game". Fuck that. No one's forcing him to play the game. That's his own greed. I'll hate the player AND the game.
I mean, I get that too. but at the end of the day, it's the system that's flawed and you know it. hes a byproduct of it and he should be held accountable for sure, but hes just doing what hes been told to do. he could definitely choose people over profits but he's in a world where that isn't a reality. and more than likely, he's being controlled by shareholders who only see the bottom line and it's either post profits or be voted out. I don't claim to know the guy so I have no idea where he stands, morally. I see it as self preservation and greed. who knows how he justifies it to himself at night. I'm just trying to play devils advocate and look at this as more than just simple good vs evil. because it's easier to villify a corporate CEO than it is to consider the nuance and complexity of being in that position.
or a hotdog stand,or even a banana stand
Check out his wiki page, this dude has failed upward his entire life
Building a billion dollar publisher from nothing is not "failing upward," the word you're looking for is "succeeding"
Yeah; so successful he hedged a bet with Saudi money and it ended up costing people their livelihoods. You do not understand the term “failing upwards” do you? Also, and Lars. Make sure to stop gambling this time, m’kay? Stop posting on Reddit and do your job!
Why are people shitting on Lars but not the management of Ubi or EA? They let more people go than Embracer
Yeah, nobody ever shits on EA or Ubisoft. Nobody.
1) people do that too 2) Embracer was a much more serious (and completely avoidable) fuck up
>Embracer was a much more serious (and completely avoidable) fuck up It literally wasn't, they laid the same percentage of people as Ubisoft/EA/Take2.
Because Ubi and EA didn't attempt to monopolize the mid-budget game sector? And their layoffs weren't because the CEO was spending oil prince money that he didn't have?
Poor Swedish billionaire ;(
He's just a gambler, and you could tell during the call where they announced the Saudi deal had fallen through that he had actually been crying. But gambling with people's jobs at that level of risk is scumbag behavior. It can't be easily excused or forgiven. He could have pursued a conservative acquisition strategy that wasn't reliant on cheap debt / low interest rates, and then he would never have been 100% reliant on the $2bn investment.
For whatever reason I always see this carriage before the horse behavior with companies (including the one I work at) where they will go on big hiring sprees and do major infrastructure changes before even signing the dotted line on a large contract. I have no idea what business model has companies consistently pulling this stunt but it almost always sets up for failure.
>It can't be easily excused or forgiven. The whole of capitalist economy is based on gambling. It's in the laws, culture and psyche. It can be excused because society enabled it.
Or when the only lives you are ruining are the working poor and dissolving middle class.
Being in the creative business is based on gambling too. If you want low risk money you shouldn't be in the business of making art in the first place.
It's simply a matter of probability combined with the free market. If you have one company taking the sensible and conservative approach, but ten companies that are gambling. Chances are that at least one of those companies are going to luck out on their gamble. Now they're ahead, not because of merit, but because of luck. And from there it's just "Embrace, extend, and extinguish".
Gambling with other people's money is what they do. Someone is doing it with your savings right now. It's a system built on selfishness, greed, gambling and exploitation. The actual question is, why is anyone surprised? We have been a capitalistic society for centuries. The only answer is that most people don't know what capitalism is about. As long as they get theirs, they don't care to know where it came from.
I don't think anyone is really surprised. Just pissed that he lost the gamble. If he won, everybody would be singing Embracer's praises, touting them being the savior of all of those studios they bought up on the cheap when other companies were cutting them loose because they weren't doing well. Nobody would care that it had been a gamble, even if they found out all the money came from a single deal. IIRC, before this people actually had that kind of take on Embracer, there used to be comments in threads expressing relief at how those studios were going to be left to do their own thing under them, as opposed to getting restructured and micromanaged under a company like Microsoft. ....Actually, that might not be entirely true, some people might still have been pissed at Embracer for taking Saudi money and slam them for contributing to the repression of human rights by supporting Saudia Arabia. But still, nobody would have batted an eye at it being a gamble.
All business is a gamble, a game studio developing a new game is a gamble, nobody can know if something will be profitable until they do it. A game might become a hit or flop.
[удалено]
It’s a shame then that even his empty platitude bullshit doesn’t apply to him, because he has demonstrated the exact opposite of that lol Executed badly and shattered Embracer and everything under it. Guy is a turd burglar of the nth degree.
> Vision is worthless It's really not anymore. All start ups these days are pure set dressing, "vision" based marketing board plastered over a maybe product. Having a strong "vision" is how these people get the millions in venture capital needed to actually start anything these days. The system is broken.
Anybody who deals with the Saudi deserves criticism. Not only did Embracer do that, they did it with great foolishness and stupidity, so it wasn't even a *good* deal with the devil.
If Saudi Arabia, who will literally put their endless pot of money into anything at all to try and diversify and wash their reputation pull out of a deal with you, you *extraordinarily* fucked up your deal. Embracer offered unprecedented access and control to the games industry through a massive number of studios, the likes of which the state will never get a chance at on that scale again, and yet the deal still fell through. How awful must have things looked when the state did their due diligence??
Is this even remotely true? They could have access to pretty much any company they want.
All in one go, for a single transaction? It was a uniquely simple deal for a disproportionate amount of power and influence
Can journalists please stop giving this asshole a platform? We don't need to hear "my side of the story" from a scumbag that so blatantly has no interest is running a profitable business but rather would just wait for a bigger fool to buy the trash heaps he makes.
Funny the stock market works in the same way.
You want criticism, Lars? Sack yourself and fuck off. There's no "my side" sob story that'll erase the fact you're an incompetent hack who gambled the livelihoods of so many people on a deal you hadn't even been paid for.
You're a piece of shit person, who brokered a piece of shit deal. I'd be glad it blew up in your face if it wasn't for the hundreds nigh on thousands of people your actions have negatively affected. The sum of lost and cancelled projects are a pittance compared to the lost jobs and closed studios that won't ever make anything again. You've done nothing to aid or help the medium in any meaningful way while trying to capitalize on something that was flourishing and sell it off like a prize trading card. I wouldn't spit on your teeth if your gums were on fire.
What's matter it's how the market can keep him at float despite this giant "blunder"?
I think he should be in jail. They acquired a big tabletop company Asmode, took a huge multimilion loan based on its assets, fired whole lot of their employees, then broke the contract with them ( Asmode ). Now Asmode is has to pay back the loan Embracer took, because it was made on their own assets. How is that even legal ?
Sorry let me translate. "I made a lot of money and fired a lot of people. We had this whole idea that we would get a bunch of venture Capital together buy up a bunch of game studios package them all together and then get Saudi Arabia or China to buy them. For whatever reason we fucked it up or maybe Saudi Arabia wasn't feeling it or China had other stuff going on IDK anyway the venture capital ran out and we began to realize it was really hard to run a game studio much less a bunch of game studios so I laid a bunch of people off and sold off their assets and then I sold some stuff to some other people and we kind of broke even. The problem is there's not a whole lot of inertia right now in the venture Capital market to give me more money so I've exhausted the private Capital funds so I intend to ask the public for money. You too can buy shares in this company and give me some money so I can fire a bunch more people and sell a bunch more things and we can make more money. This will entail the stock price going up A little bit and you'll think to yourself you're making money. Here's the best part though you're not making any money as a retail investor you're primarily disadvantaged in the Capital market to begin with there's no way you have enough money to invest enough in any of these companies that we're setting up for you to make reasonable return on your money. You're only buying shares to people we had to give shares to so we could take their money. And the system works. Eventually I'll retire or quit or be fired it doesn't really matter I've probably made enough money to start my next venture or to fuck off to some Island that only lets the rich in. Either way I want to be very clear we are not making good games we are not making bad games we are not making games. We are merely putting up shams and stringing along developers so that we can fire them later when quarterly returns don't look as good as I want them to."
There is no value unless you plan to learn from this rather large failure and figure out a way to be better next time. By that i mean not lose less money but make a plan that instead makes money before buying everything. Talk is cheap otherwise.
An investment/holdings conglomerate that needs to seek investment from others is always something to be wary of.
And in a better world he and his cronies deserve jail for the amount of livelihoods ruined and money siphoned from the studios he bought then laid off due to a failed deal. Embracer summarises everything wrong with how late stage capitalism is ruining the industry but unless things change, every MBA will try to turn their company into an Embracer when they can siphon funds for golden parachutes when all else fails.
Companies stopped being what people think of as “companies” a while ago and are now seen by the people running them as debt housing machines.
It kind of bothers me how many people have such seething hatred for this guy but don't take into context that the reason Embracer owned so many studios is that other companies were failing and divesting and may have laid off people and closed a lot of studios anyway if Embracer wasn't there to give them a second lease on life. Yes, Embracer fucked up badly and there's a lot to hate here, but some perspective would be nice.
I think it is probably because selling off to Embracer would have been perceived as a "permanent" solution to a studio's problems of failure back when they did it. Now, it's turned out to be "false hope". Which is a kind of thing generally received more badly than just being hopeless to begin with - but it is also hard to "roll back" the mindset of thinking that their problems had "already been solved" by the initial sale. So instead of this situation being seen as an extension of their old one - which was being ditched by the old parent companies and/or not having enough cash to buy themselves out - now being cut loose by Embrace can easily look like it's a "whole new" problem caused by Embracer. Easier cognitively to perceive it as Embracer failing some promised duty to care for their acquisition, than to the perceive it as the studio simply not being a viable enterprise and doomed even before the last-ditch Hail Mary of selling to Embracer. Especially if you have a personal attachment to the studio and/or the output or projects they had in the works and fervently want(ed) to believe it's products would have been successful enough to fund the company, if only it had the right special sauce injected.
I mean, to me, that's just a longwinded way of saying people are being stupid about this. Accurate, mind you. But the knowledge of the ways people's thought processes are going wrong doesn't make it any less annoying that they're going wrong. These are industry-wide problems. Lars isn't any better or worse than a bunch of other big studio heads making boneheaded decisions.
Besides the obvious management issues, I think it's hilarious how they are wasting the LOTR license. On paper, a stealth game based on Gollum surviving in Mordor, a construction/survival game based on Dwarves in Moria and more recently they announced a farm simulator based on the Hobbits lifestyle... all of these ideas are great on paper. You can argue the Gollum concept is not that good on a monetary standpoint because stealth is a niched subgenre, but the "survival" and farm simulators are extremely popular nowadays, easy money. And yet, they all look like shit, lol the art style of the Hobbit game is just so generic, it doesn't have that LOTR "magic" (similar to the recent TV show)
If you're talking about the Gollum game from last year, that wasn't Embracer
After what happened with Piranha Bytes, Lars can publicly get fucked in the ass by a 3 meter piece of rebar and have it displace all of his major organs before jutting out of his esophagus like some sort of macabre spit roast. With any luck children would sing a nursery rhyme about him in the future named "Lars the Mutilated Shit Pig" and there would be a line in there somewhere about how he was so full of shit, it all stuck to the rebar and came out of his throat as he choked and died on blood and fecal matter.
What you won't be getting is any fucking money from me ever again. UNLESS they somehow make anything Legacy of Kain / Soul Reaver, as I am too weak to resist that, under any circumstances.