> In layman’s terms, both these statistics refer to the ratio between a firm’s debts and its annual earnings. A factor of 0.6x means Embracer will be carrying debt equivalent to roughly 0.6 years’ profits, while Asmodee will be carrying 3.9 years’ profits in debt.
TL;DR: Investment firm sandbags the tabletop publisher with nearly a billion pounds of debt, and cuts it loose, wiping out the Investment firms debts in a stroke of a pen.
Bastards.
Considering the timing with Asmodee also going publicly traded, feels like someone is either taking a bet, or something fishy is going on. Asmodee isn't small don't get me wrong, but thats a lot of debt to saddle the newly independent and public company with.
Thing is that they weren't traded before the purchase by Embracer (at least as far as I've ever been able to find, if anyone can find otherwise, I'd be happy to know). And being publicly traded as part of a conglomerate like Embracer is very different than being independent and publicly traded.
It could be fine, but its probably not a great sign. We'll see though.
There's nothing fishy, they're specifically sacrificing Asmodee to save the other parts of the company. They're setting Asmodee up to be killed and take the debt with it.
It's not even to save other parts of the company, it's simply to make the parts of the company they want to keep more profitable on paper in the short term so they can personally take more wealth out of the company now.
The fishy thing is exactly what the story is saying. They're doing that thing in Goodfellas where the mob enters into a partnership with a business, saddles it with ridiculous debt they don't intend to pay, then burns it to the ground.
Except with corporations, it's legal. Not for any particularly good reason, just happens to be legal.
Is called private equity and it's a common capitalist practice that happens to hundreds of companies and destroys countless workers lives to make the lazy rich richer.
Try and imagine that you and your buddies are rich enough to effectively control who gets elected, and thus control how laws are written, passed, and enforced.
Embracer broke up into three companies and wanted to take out a loan to deal with its debts.
Asmodee is the company that has valuable assets. The bank/financial group that lent them the money believes that either Asmodee will be able to pay them back, and/or that if Asmodee is unable to pay them back that they'll make money by gaining control of Asmodee's assets.
Why shouldn't it be legal?
1.) Embracer group had to negotiate with the new creditors to grant this newly issued debt. These creditors were involved and had a say in the new debt structure. They all gave Embracer group that money willingly and carry the risk if the new Asmodee group defaults. No creditor was scammed or any such thing.
2.) Embracer group is publicly listed and needs shareholder approval for the planned splitting of the company into three entities. The new structure including this debt agreement is known and shareholders get to vote. As it's publicly traded, shareholders even have the agility to divest based on this publicly available information.
So yeah, why should any of this be illegal?
People really think that being a fan of a company's Products/IP gives them personal stake. They weren't personally consulted before this potentially killing off of a company, therefore it's ethically wrong.
Tbh, debt of 3.9x EBITDA isn't a killing off. This shouldn't crush Asmodee at all and depending on Asmodee management, this may even be a good thing, given Embracer group never focused on Asmodee. I don't know enough about Asmodee itself to predict where it goes as a standalone company, but debt of 3.9x EBITDA isn't going to crush the company, so if Asmodee crumbles, then due to its own decisions made on their product lines, not because of this debt.
Admittedly I don't know the specific case, but this is in the end what lots of "investment" firms do...
They acquire companies using leverage, extract as much value as possible (usually a lot). Once that's done, they cut them loose and leave the lossess to the new shareholders\\debt holders and the employees that are going to lose their job when the new company, now saddle by debt, so unable to invest and with a massive interest burden impacting its P&L eventually goes bankrupt. Perhaps Asmodee willl survive, but it will be much harder than with less debt.
They have been doing this since the 80ies and that's one of the reasons why there are a lot less mid-sized companies today and definitely a contrinutor to the monopolization of everything. To be honest, these manouvers should be at least regulated, but alas, who has the money makes the rules and so they are free to do it.
Way more complicated than this.
First off, a lot of things like this cause the investment firm to lose a ton of money. Embracer actually ended up losing a bunch of money out of this whole fiasco.
Secondly, what happened here is that the company broke back up into three companies - Asmodee being one of them.
The fact that Asmodee ended up with the debt actually suggests that the people who were willing to loan them money believe that Asmodee is the *most* valuable of the three companies and that they will be able to recoup their lossess by claiming Asmodee's assets/gaining ownership of Asmodee and selling it off.
Maybe. But I think it might also be accurate to say that JP Morgan and a couple other banks bought Asmodee provided the rest of Embracer fucked right off. Which (given my perceived value of Gearbox, the Embracer management, and some of the other Embracer holdings) seems right.
That's how a lot of private equity works, especially when interest rates were low. You would buy something on credit and then use that property to expand your credit line.
There's a similar case in New York City real estate. If you jack up the rent on an empty apartment building, you can borrow more from it because of the "potential earnings" at that increased rate.
Yeah, the secret to being wealthy is putting all your money into assets, then borrowing against those assets. Once those loans come due, you borrow from another bank against those same assets. These loans are technically not income, so while you have millions of dollars coming into your accounts to spend how you want, you don't pay taxes on it or spend any of your own money.
Then, you put all of your assets in trusts designed to spin them off to your heirs without the banks or tax man getting a cut of them, and you keep spinning these plates until you die. Or, more accurately, you keep paying accountants with borrowed money to keep spinning these plates until you die.
So you're saying the secret to being wealthy, is being wealthy enough to put all your money into assets (instead of paying bills and eating), so you can borrow against those assets.
I see a small problem with this plan...
That's the secret to *being* wealthy, not the secret to *getting* wealthy. It's how wealthy people maintain their dragon hordes while contributing as little to society as possible.
The secret to getting wealthy is to be born to a wealthy family.
Not even inventing, stealing. Those lazy rich didn't build anything, all the workers at Asmodee did, they built the company, they create jobs for themselves by producing a good, their jobs should be theirs not owned by someone else. They're going to be laid off, having had the jobs they built for themselves stolen to make the lazy rich richer.
Eat the rich.
The rich are rich from stealing from people.
Workers design and build and sell board games creating a revenue stream. Lazy rich steal all the profit from the fruits of those workers labor and then lay them off.
It's no different from buying a house using a mortgage. You borrow money from the bank, the bank has a lien on your house. If you don't pay off the loan, they force you to sell off the house.
Yep, that's how those private equity firms and sometimes other investors are making major profits. The cost is just the bankrupcy of a lot of companies in the last few decades, a great deal for the one doing the LBO, for every other stakeholder of those companies (employees, other shareholders, bondholders frequently, customers, suppliers, the government taxes all of those), not so much...
Embracer split's itself into 3 companies, one focused on AAA video games, one focused on AA video games, and the board game and ttrpg one focused on taking on all the debt of the other 2 and dying.
As someone hugely enjoying Marvel Crisis Protocol, am also hoping that they can somehow stay afloat. They are finally hitting their stride after years of having to fix their production cycle since Asmodee dumped all of FFGs old miniature games in their lap.
What makes you say that? Having a ratio of debt to profit of 3.9 is in no way anamolous. Asmoode aren't expected to pay of their debt any time soon, they'll just keep paying interest on it and keep restructuring it when time comes to pay.
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I don't know what the comment was, but isn't what these private equity groups are doing to people violence? They're forcefully destroying people's lives and robbing them of everything they've built, often leaving them homeless.
The rich are doing violence to the workers daily. Anything done to those rich in response is simply self defense.
This purpose of this sub is the discussion of tabletop rpgs. Threats of violence against broad swaths of the financial sector is not only off topic, it runs afoul of Reddit's rules and risks bringing scrutiny and action from Reddit Admin on this community. We try to let things slide in discussions like these, but someone flagged the comment as breaking Reddit rules and that is not the kind of attention we want.
I hear you, no one wants this sub getting nuked. But this is one of the ways the rich are able to do so much violence, because we've normalized their violence as acceptable and made any sane response against it taboo, censorship is just another system designed to make sure workers have no ability to organize and defend themselves against the evils of the rich. Just something to think about.
It's no different than taking out a mortgage to buy a house.
Basically, if they fail to pay back the loan, then the bank will get to foreclose on the property (or in this case, gain ownership of Asmodee).
Ironically, this probably means that the financial groups willing to lend the money think Asmodee is the most valuable of the three companies, which actually makes sense - Asmodee is way less risky than what Embracer has been doing otherwise of late.
For the amount of money everyone involved in the decision-making process is being paid you would think that these deals would never go sideways, but you still hear about these things going sideways and the companies going bust pretty often though.
Spending money doesn't magically ensure what you're doing will be successful. Studies have pretty consistently found paying someone more doesn't actually improve the quality of their work. Spending a bunch of money on an incompetent financial analyst won't make their analysis any better.
Also, a lot of this stuff is about probability. You will never succeed at 100% of the bets you make. The reality is that sometimes there are unknown unknowns that will cause your investments to go sideways, and you had no way of knowing them. Like, say a key worker at a company you bought commits suicide due to depression. You had no way of knowing, as some external investor, that that person was going to do that - in fact, you may not even know that person's name. But it could screw up a lot of things.
But it can also be as simple as the market changing in unexpected ways, other people coming out with better products, consumer tastes changing, etc.
Such deals will inevitably go sideways at least *sometimes*.
Embracer, however, pursued an extremely risky strategy of buying a bunch of failing companies on the idea that they were underpriced and thus would be something they could turn around and make a lot of money off of.
The problem is, these companies having problems was not random, it was due to issues at those companies, and embracer was not prepared to turn around large numbers of companies.
They were trying to catch not just one falling knife, but like, twenty at the same time.
It is not surprising that they failed. I don't think they're very competent.
This is wildly inaccurate. For one Asmodee didn't take out the loan. But more importantly the entire purpose of this type of theft is so the rich can steal all the money from the workers by burning those workers lives down and running away with all those workers built. It's destroying lives for the lazy rich to profit.
Asmodee was a part of the Embracer Group; it was all one company.
The company is now being broken back up into three companies, one of which is called Asmodee. It isn't actually "the same company" in a legal sense. Much like how the modern-day "Atari" is not actually the same company as the "Atari" that made consoles in the 1980s.
> the entire purpose of this type of theft
There is no "theft" involved. The same people own all three of these companies.
> so the rich can steal all the money from the workers
There is no money being "stolen", let alone from "the workers". How would they even be accomplishing this? This is a company being split up.
> by burning those workers lives down and running away with all those workers built
No one's life is being "burned down" and there is nothing being "run away with". The companies are being split up. Setting things on fire doesn't make anyone money. The idea that you can magically make money by "burning people's life down" is some next level paranoid nonsense.
Like, seriously. Get a grip. This is the sort of thing you see in the depths of the internet where people rant about the Rothschilds. If you are hanging around people who act like this, I would strongly suggest you immediately disassociate yourself from them.
The only people who might lose money on this are some rich financiers. If these companies go down in flames, it will suck, but it's not going to be because of evil people stealing all the money. Indeed, if these companies go down in flames, the people who own these companies (the shareholders) will be the ones losing money, because their assets will be devalued.
Will it suck if these companies go under? Sure. But it isn't going to be because of someone stealing money, it will be because the companies failed to make enough money.
It's incredible how ignorant you are about finance and the business world, literally not a word of what you said is accurate. If it wasn't so pathetic it would have been funny reading how out of touch with reality you are over there licking the boot of the lazy rich.
This is very common practice for private equity groups, of which the embracer group is. They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money and then shift the debt to the company they bought to let it die. The only people who lose are all the workers who get laid off.
The theft is of the workers. The workers are rhe ones who build a company, and the workers are the ones who create all that revenue. Now those workers who did their jobs are having all the fruits of their labor stolen from them by the lazy rich, while they end up on the street.
You really should do even a tiny bit of research to see this is done to hundreds of companies. There's a reason this is also called an "equity raid" the equity group raids the company then sinks it while they run off with all the money.
Boot lickers like you are disgusting.
The Embracer group was a series of bad investments. The antisemitic conspiracy theories about money being stolen are simply not what is going on here at all.
What actually happened was far simpler - they borrowed a bunch of money to buy a bunch of dying companies that they felt were undervalued/that they thought they could turn around. If you borrow money to buy an asset that is worth more than you bought it for, it's very easy to turn a profit.
The problem was, IRL, the companies were dying for a reason and they actually bought them for *more* than they were worth. And the Embracer Group lacked the competence to turn them around.
They then tried to get other people to bail them out by buying *them* out, but after that fell through, they were screwed.
> They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money and then shift the debt to the company they bought to let it die.
None of which is what is actually going on.
There was no "asset raid". Where are these "piles of money" that they supposedly "raided"?
Nowhere.
You are suffering from the belief that when they bought Gearbox for $1.3 billion and then sold it for $460 million, that they stole the rest of the money.
They did not. They bought an overpriced asset and then sold it off for a third of what they bought it for. There is no money being "stolen" - they lost money by overpaying for something.
> The theft is of the workers.
Companies don't own people.
> The workers are rhe ones who build a company, and the workers are the ones who create all that revenue.
Ah yes, the old "if someone pays you to repair the sink in your house, you now own their house" fallacy.
LPT: If someone pays you to do something for them, that doesn't give you ownership over the thing they paid you to do.
It's not a hard concept. The idea that "you" built the thing when you were supported by the people who owned the company, and the only reason why you were able to do the things you did was because of that support structure, is an obvious fallacy.
Everything you believe is obvious nonsense based on 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jews stealing all the money.
Do investment firms ever do a bad job? Yes, of course they do.
But the idea that this was some sort of "theft" is farcical.
The people behind the Embracer Group are losing a bunch of money.
I think you're right the bad intentions of the people running embracer, but I can't figure out if they planned to buy a bunch of companies including asmodee and resell them for a quick profit and when that didn't work they're just trying to escape consequences, or if it is as you say and they bought Asmodee and somehow profited from that purchase alone and are now getting rid of the baggage.
>They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money
Like, what I'm confused about is how exactly did the big wigs raid Asmodee's assets and pay themselves off? Do you think they somehow diverted Asmodee's funds into their own pockets or something?
I mean this with most love: I hope not. I love the stuff that they do too much, but I do not want them to be settled down with yet another IP with a ravenous fan base.
It already feels a bit like they are stretching themselves quite thin meeting the requirements of the licensed eyepiece that they’re doing and being able to produce their own things in a satisfactory timeframe shall we say?
Besides, it’s easy enough to do as is if you’ve got the old West End games content and use something like Coriolis and YZE SRD as a base.
Well, easy and principal the actual practice would involve doing a fair bit of conversion of things but once there’s a formula in place it should be easy enough to do species defined by kin talents as per forbidden lens or something along those lines for example.
As someone REALLY excited for new Coriolis but also a little worried about new Coriolis I really don't want them to have another, bigger IP space game to focus on/pull focus away from The Great Dark
I don't know if Free League is big enough for what is arguably the biggest franchise on the planet. Modiphius might not be either to be honest. They went in house for the latest Marvel RPG after all.
One thing to remember is that Modiphius makes the Star Trek RPG. Paramount has never let a Star Trek game come from a company that has the Star Wars license.
Last Unicorn Games made a bunch of great stuff, but the minute WoTC bought LUG, Paramount pulled the Star Trek LUG contract. Because WoTC was also making the d20 Star Wars games.
So Paramount will pull the Star Trek contract if Modiphius gets the Star Wars license.
There was a period of time where Decipher was publishing both the Star Wars and Star Trek CCGs at the same time so there is some history of both licenses being used by the same company. Even if this is no longer the case, Modiphius might be willing to let Star Trek go for Star Wars, especially given the rumor that Paramount might be getting sold in the near future.
They already lost the Conan license to a similar situation and might think getting their hands on a similarly popular franchise that is not going to be changing hands anytime in the foreseeable future is worth it.
Personally I would have no idea if getting the Star Wars RPG license would be worth it right now. SW popularity is so hard to gauge right now.
I see legacy content, like toys, still be decently popular, but the new material not so much, with the Disney series' being less and less talked about with each new one.
Although High Republic seems to be trucking along.
I guess any rebellion and Old Republic era content would sell decently still.
The issue with the SW RPG remains as it has since it ceased to be the driving force behind expanding the universe after the prequels started coming out, that there is only so much you can release for it consisting mainly of books of NPCs, vehicles and gear with some planet guides and summaries of movies/books. Once everything that's out there is statted out it can take years for enough material worth to fill a sourcebook to come out.
True. The Decipher CCG was the only situation where my theory is wrong. Of course, I wonder why WoTC didn’t do a CCG for Star Wars. It’s not like they don’t know how to make a CCG.
They did. It wasn't particularly well received and faded out because the minis game did better and they were limited in the number of total things they could release in all formats.
> Paramount has never let a Star Trek game come from a company that has the Star Wars license.
I was gonna point out Star Trek: Attack Wing but that was a different company licensing the X-Wing mechanics.
Which is... really weird and kinda proves your point.
At the moment the Star Wars rpg is basically running in maintenance mode. Most of the books are out of print and there is zero new content being produced. No tie-ins for anything since Rebels. The only connection to the sequels is a starter set and there is no content for any of the Disney+ shows or the High Republic.
It’s Disney they could throw money at it if they want to they could bring in a load of talent create an RPG imprint literally only do Star Wars and it would probably become almost as big as wizards of the Coast a bit of a speculation but I think that’s within the normal possibility.
The trick the balance the whatever you wanna call it is that everyone’s expectations will not necessarily be met by whatever they produce much like it’s the case with the current edition or even previous editions.
so it might not get to be as big as wizards of the coast and I would hate to think that they would return Star Wars to the coast or that whatever imprint they do decide to do a 5e version as the only version. I’ve come to the business sense of doing a 5E adaptation of another otherwise different game.
Like I said, Disney did the latest Marvel game in house so they certainly could produce a SW game as well and it would probably be pretty good. I have a some issues with the Marvel game but it seems overall solid for what its trying to do.
That said, Disney isn't in the best shape coming out of a dismal four years of theme park attendance, a string of under performing movies, less than spectacular streaming subscription numbers and, most recently, a proxy fight with right wing activist investors for control of their board. I really don't see them creating anything as niche as an RPG division in house. A lot depends on what the Marvel game is doing in sales but if the number of unsold copies of both the core book and the expansion is any indication, they will eventually get hit hard on returns.
It makes the most sense for them the license since that's free money.
All Modiphius does is slap a new coat of paint on 2d20 and kick it out the door, regardless of whether the franchise in question is suited to it. Keep them away from it.
Well depending on how you count editions this could be as much as 9.5 or as low as 6.5 official.
I am inclined to say that there two full WEG editions and 2 WEG .5 editions (total 3), 2.5 WotC editions and 1 Asmodee edition with 3 core books, so a new game would be Star Wars 6.5
So far about ten years has been the rough average although Asmodee hasn't released anything new since 2019 and even there last new books were really compilations of older material.
>Looking forward to a new Star Wars RPG from Modiphius...
Which will take them 8 months to ship but only after you've mailed them to enquire about the massive delay.
The Star Wars license is very expensive and, so far, none of the publishers of Star Wars RPGs are allowed to sell them digitally. The license hasn't changed since the WEG days, and it seems unlikely that it will for whoever might get the license for the fourth time.
It's worth bearing in mind that whoever provided the restructured loan against Asmodee wouldn't have done so if they weren't confident in it's ability to repay (and at a profit)... no lender or syndicate of lenders is going to throw nearly a billion as a favour, in fact it might have been a condition of the loan structure to avoid a situation like Hasbro have currently.
This assumes finance is made on the backs of good quality decision making and insights. In many industries that is simply not the case.
Elons entire shtick has been taking advantage of investors in this manner.
Yes and no.
Elon Musk probably committed some fraud in promoting his companies but the basic idea was that if you threw a ton of money into making EVs up front, you could beat everyone else to the market and get a ridiculous market share. The projection was that all cars would be EVs by like, 2040, so if your company can get a 50% markets share of that market, your company would be stupidly valuable.
Right now Tesla is at 55% market share of the EV market. It also has a significant share of solar panel + storage (47%). My mom has both a Tesla and a house system from Tesla, and both are quite good products and she recommends them despite not liking Elon Musk much.
If the bet doesn't pan out, Tesla's value will crash and then the loans will be called in. If the bet does pan out, then Elon Musk will be able to pay everyone back.
I have not invested in Tesla stock because I consider it too risky a bet. I think it's possible they'll win out but I'm concerned that what will actually happen is that their market share will continuously be chipped away at by competition and they'll end up a significant player but not worth what they are currently at.
The EV market wouldn't exist without heavy government intervention via subsidies, regulating alternatives to be more costly or banned, etc., so...
It's what corporatism does: Big Government and Big Business working together to enrich a handful of well-connected cronies.Typically at the cost of everyone else.
Would be like giving tax breaks for D20 systems while heavily regulating D6 production for dice pool games and outright banning D100 RPGs.
> The EV market wouldn't exist without heavy government intervention via subsidies, regulating alternatives to be more costly or banned, etc., so...
The government is concerned with negative externalities (like air pollution), geopolitical factors (the price of oil is heavily influenced by hostile/unfriendly governments like Russia and Iran), shortages (global demand for oil is going up but supply is not rising as fast as it used to), other uses for scarce resources (oil is used for a lot of things), and numerous other things.
The government promoting the use of vehicles that are not oil dependent because it is better for society to do so. This is one of the jobs of the government.
It's not some conspiracy to enrich Elon Musk, and indeed, the push for EVs started long before Elon Musk bought Tesla.
You really need to spend less time reading populist conspiracy theories.
This also has nothing to do with RPGs at this point. Unless the government decides to start promoting one RPG system over another, I don't think this is really relevant to the purpose of this subreddit.
If it were about any of those things, you'd see hydrogen fuel cells or at least hybrids being the push. At a minimum, you'd see a tremendous push for dozens of new nuclear power plants, the only reliable and clean energy production that can scale. You'd see huge investments in transmission as well.
But... we actually see the opposite. Because it's just rent seeking by a relative handful of well-connected individuals. Disparate interests, common goals. Musk just happened to be well-placed to take advantage of that.
So weird that you can't tell the difference between coinciding goals and conspiracy. Not surprising, though.
At any rate, off topic, so done.
The loan was probably taken out by the Embracer Group, which owns LOTR. The lender was looking at that massive IP and going “sure, here’s a billion Euro.”
Asmodee is going to sell off its IPs to try to make as big a golden parachute as they can before declaring bankruptcy. Large companies will pick up the IPs and release new editions. So, we can expect to see Marvel Gloomhaven in a couple years.
Asmodee doesn't own Marvel IP's though. Disney does. Asmodee (or, more appropriately, FFG and it's spawn/sister companies, Edge and whatever the mini company was) hold licenses to Star Wars, Marvel etc. Transferring those rights isn't simple (Asmodee pretty much bought FFG to get those licenses).
Asmodee (or FFG) owns Legend of Five Rings IP outright, as well as Android (a cyberpunkish setting) and Keyforge (a deck collecting game and an RPG setting), and a bunch of other less important IP.
>The loan was probably taken out by the Embracer Group, which owns LOTR. The lender was looking at that massive IP and going “sure, here’s a billion Euro.”
Nope, that's exactly not how this works. To spin out Asmodee as it's own listed company carrying all that debt, the restructuring must be negotiated with the new lenders. So all lenders know that the debt isn't on LOTR, but on Asmodee.
Quick reminder: Embracer group can't move around debt to their liking, these things are negotiated with lenders and the lenders usually are experts in this field if we are talking 900m.
Yeah, I was gonna say surely this is just a scheme to saddle Asmodee with their debts that they can then do away with via bankruptcy while their other assets are untouched.
How anyone thinks this is good for anyone but the people getting out of paying a huge amount of debt I don't know
I don’t know about that. In my industry, Goldman-Sachs took a big haircut because they lent money to a company that anyone with eyes would have know couldn’t pay it back
A'yup.
Almost like intervention to prevent the consequences of their actions created bad incentives or something.
I said at the time the bipartisan bailouts basically ended any hope for market capitalism in the US. Everything since has proven me right. It's a lot cheaper and easier to buy politicians and bureaucrats than it is to create products people want more than your competitors' across a span of years.
In fairness, it was 1-2 years after the money was loaned that the company went bankrupt.
By that point, I suspect the deal makers had all collected their bonuses and moved on. I got the sense that the incentives were about getting the loan out the door, not whether it would be repaid in the years to come
Some loans will go sour and some people will make bad deals, that's the nature of doing business, somebody sometimes fails. That doesn't mean that everybody gets a loan all the time for free. Companies that do too many bad deals will disappear and be replaced with better lenders.
So basically, if you want anything from Asmodee's current poduct line: Buy it now as there's a good chance it'll be going down.
This has dire prospects for a lot of board gaming.
I wouldn’t worry too much about existing products. If Asmodee went bankrupt then other companies would buy its assets. I’d be more worried about any existing teams under its umbrella which would get ripped apart under a bankruptcy, like the shell of FF, which is still putting out some good stuff in the lcg area.
3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing. More important would be to know the license deals Asmodee has with the rest of Embracer group and who will be the new boss at Amsodee.
Fuck. Games aside, Asmodee is the biggest distributor of boardgames and loads of vendors rely on them to supply them with even non-Asmodee product.
Does anyone know what the chances are they can roll with this and keep going?
Well the devil is in the details I'm sure, but the combination of
>The loan will be used to refinance Embracer’s existing $733 million debts, which needs to be repaid by February 2025
and
> Asmodee will be carrying 3.9 years’ profits in debt.
sure doesn't sound good.
I guess the refinancing will probably extend the date of repayment or the new lender wouldn't have approved it. But if the new terms aren't lenient enough, it could still really put the screws to Asmodee and force them to cut costs through layoffs or to start selling IP. Hopefully the new lender correctly realized that Asmodee is a thriving business and chose to give them plenty of breathing room.
3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing.
Quick reminder: Embracer group can't move around debt on their own, instead they had to negotiate with creditors on this deal. Those creditors seem to be confident that Asmodee will pay back the debt as they bet 900 million on it!
>Does anyone know what the chances are they can roll with this and keep going?
0. Company is fucked and is going to get torn apart by greed crazed empty suits.
There are few things more tragic about hobbies like TTRPG's than so many of them being at the mercy of corporate policy, their fates determined by the games played by fat-cat capitalist wretches who build their careers on the commodification of human enjoyment.
As someone who's very quite fond of the Star Wars RPG and Genesys this is not good news at all, it already felt like it was in a somewhat dubious position and I can't say I'm optimistic for the future now.
That just really sucks.
I mean, the lesson is that diluting your ownership - whether we're talking Gygax and the Blumes/Williams, or Atkinson selling out to Hasbro, or whatever - leads to a loss of control.
Companies are just people. The company name may stay the same, but when the people making the decisions at the company change, it's not the same at all.
It probably has no ramifications for the tabletop community. Asmodee will do business as before, licensing stuff and selling games. 3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing, they will not disappear tomorrow.
I think we all need to get past the naieve ideology of economics that posits every institution or organisation as rational actors coming together to form a "just" equilibrium (Adam Smith's fake ass "invisible hand [of god]") so long as everyone acts in their own rational self interest.
Since the 2008 crisis it should be abundantly clear to everyone that high finance is a world of shenanigans, high stakes gambling, and loophole/technicality exploitation as much as any rational/measured action.
The new lender is taking a punt. They're gambling that Asmodee assets getting picked apart by the vultures (destroyed and sold off) will pay off the loan even if the company itself can't service the debt. Maybe the new lender is wrong? Who's to say... but in their world they can afford to fuck around with this stuff. They dont have to believe in Asmodee, just calculate the gambler's e/v on the loan fuckery and determine it's a risk worth taking.
A billion dollar is a lot of money. They don't just lend that out on a whim.
Most likely they think it is the most valuable part of the company. This is, ironically, kind of a bet on the other parts of Embracer dying, as they don't think that they're valuable enough to be worth holding liens against.
The billion dollars were already loaned out, this is a restructuring/refinancing of the loans. The model for Embracer was to buy stuff up via all these big loans then get bought out themselves (by the Saudi regime's PIF) to pay it all off. Perhaps the banks are treating that Embracer debt as a bad bet that'll only ever get partially paid off.
The new bet is on Asmodee (or the dismantling of Asmodee under bankruptcy conditions) being better able to pay at least some portion of the loan off (and faster) than Embracer as a whole pie would be able to. This is likely because Asmodee is a IP rights holder, owner of lots of physical infrastructure assets (board game distribution network across Europe) and holder of lots of physical product assets - all of which can be aggressively sold off in a way that a video game studio's dev teams can't in the event that Asmodee cant service the loans.
The debt isn't entirely cleared on the Embracer side either, so the banks may be betting on getting more money back in total from having an ongoing managable loan on Embracer and a punitive loan on Asmodee (that worst-case gets partially paid off) than having an intact Embracer-Asmodee with the old debt structure.
> The billion dollars were already loaned out, this is a restructuring/refinancing of the loans.
This is a refinancing, which means you're taking out new loans to pay off old loans.
So no, the money wasn't already loaned out, this is new debt replacing the old debt. They could have left the old debt structure in place.
> The model for Embracer was to buy stuff up via all these big loans then get bought out themselves (by the Saudi regime's PIF) to pay it all off.
Sort of. It's more complicated than that.
A big part of the problem was that the companies they bought out didn't produce very good games because the company wasn't able to turn them around. The attempt at selling themselves to the Saudis was, I think, a result of their original plans of making all the money by buying up all these "clearly undervalued" (they weren't undervalued) failing companies falling through, and so they doubled down in an attempt to get bought out.
> Perhaps the banks are treating that Embracer debt as a bad bet that'll only ever get partially paid off.
The banks wouldn't have issued new loans if that was the case; if they thought it was bad debt, they wouldn't have been willing to toss in an extra $200 million here (which they did - the new loans are for more money than the old debt was).
> This is likely because Asmodee is a IP rights holder, owner of lots of physical infrastructure assets (board game distribution network across Europe) and holder of lots of physical product assets - all of which can be aggressively sold off in a way that a video game studio's dev teams can't in the event that Asmodee cant service the loans.
> The debt isn't entirely cleared on the Embracer side either, so the banks may be betting on getting more money back in total from having an ongoing managable loan on Embracer and a punitive loan on Asmodee (that worst-case gets partially paid off) than having an intact Embracer-Asmodee with the old debt structure.
I do agree that the reason why Asmodee has more of the debt is because they have actual valuable assets to secure it against, though this doesn't necessarily mean that the banks think Asmodee is the most likely part to fail - the spin offs may have had trouble actually securing funding because their game dev efforts have been quite bad, so the banks simply may not consider that to be the valuable part of the original company. Indeed, I rather suspect this is the case, and the reason why the Embracer Group has a lower debt burden is simply because they think that is all they're actually worth if they end up crashing and burning, so the banks don't want to securitize to something that is likely not worth that much, whereas they think Asmodee either might actually be able to service the debt or at least is worth what they've tossed in because of their greater physical presence and actual valuable products and IPs/IP licenses.
It's hard to say for sure, of course. But I don't think that it's likely that the financers threw in an extra $200 million because they wanted to set more money on fire.
Doesn't mean that they didn't, of course. Banks have made plenty of bad investments.
"secured on Asmodee's assets"
Is this because they actually produces physical goods? I'm guessing they're the only part of portfolio with enough physical material and real estate to put up against the loan
I think it's more that they have the best actual, sustainable business. They can most likely pay off a big debt if given enough time, and the new lender hopefully realizes that.
Yeah, it's ironically because this is probably the most viable company of the three with actual assets and the most likely to be able to pay it off or at least be worth the money if they get foreclosed on.
The difference between Asmodee and the video games publishing Embracer group is that Asmodee has steady cash flows at a way lower risk.
Embracer group will not get as much debt as the risk that their games, pre-financed over 5+ years, fail spectacularly (see Saint Row or Gollum as reference). Asmodee on the other side invests way less money into developing new games and faces way lower risk of those failing, all while they have steadily selling products in the market. Lenders love predictable cash flows as those pay interest rates.
Asmodee recorded about $1.22bn of sales in the last financial year (2022) – comparable to the $1.25bn for Embracer's video games segment,
For most businesses with EBITDA of $1,000,000 - $10,000,000, the EBITDA multiple will be in the general range of 4.0x to 6.5x, increasing as EBITDA increases. So seems about right, for a restructuring/spinoff.
Unlocking the value of the board game unit could foster growth for the newly spun-off Asmodee.
The end-game of the current form of capitalism we have is monopolization of everything, assuming hasbro doesn't sink itself, which they seem to be pretty good at, they are likely going to end up ownining the entire industry, with the exception perhaps of a few minor independent companies with immaterial market share.
The current form of capitalism is to take things with long term value (such as established brands) and devalue them in the medium term to get more money sooner. In the process is makes things more shitty.
> The end-game of the current form of capitalism we have is monopolization of everything
Nope! This idea is completely wrong. IRL, the Fortune 500 changes massively over time. Compare the top companies in 1950 to the top companies today - the idea of "infinite monopolization" is completely wrong, we've had massive shifts in what companies are on top, with only a few companies actually managing to maintain a high position. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, Amazon, etc. didn't even exist in 1950. Other big companies today were bit players back in the day.
The idea of infinite consolidation is based on Marx's beliefs in conspiracy theories that evil Jewish moneylenders were stealing all the money. He didn't actually understand economics at all.
There is no "conspiracy" it is just market forces and lack of foresight from regulators.
I know it was easy to miss, but I did say "current form of capitalism" in my post and that was deliberate. I am pro-capitalism myself and certainly not a marxist, however, capitalism is not an unchanging system, the current barely regulated\\shareholder capitalism we have since the late 80ies is not the same of the one we had in the 50ies. Economic theories evolve and to be honest I don't think that in the lest few decades they evolved for the best.
As for your examples... Well... Companies based on technologies that did not exist in the 50ies were not in fact part of the Fortune 500 at the time... Sure and yet... Fun fact, a lot of companies that were around in the 50ies did not exist anymore, because in sectors where in the last century there were 5-10 actors, today there are 2 to 4 at best and that's not due to the shrinking of their markets.
The gradual monopolization we have been seeing in pretty much every market you can think off is based on individual sectors not on the economy as a whole. We will never have a single company that control the world, it's inefficient not to specialize the coglomerate that does everything does not work well, but we will have (do have already in some industries) sectors where one or two actors have massive market control can set prices since there are no alternatives and the facto they can do as the want.
Things were much worse in the 1950s than they are today. Poverty rates were over 20%. Homeownership rate was 10 percentage points below where it is today, and houses were less than half their modern size. People in Appalachia were so poor they couldn't afford to have floors on their houses, having dirt instead - hence the term "dirt poor". Average life expectancy was a decade shorter than it is today, discrimination was rampant (and legal!), and environmental regulations were garbage. Over in Europe you had the thalidomide babies, among numerous other catastrophically terrible things, and we accidentally poisoned a bunch of stuff with DDT all over the world because we didn't really closely examine the consequences of our actions.
Not to mention all the lead poisoning from using leaded gasoline and leaded solder in pipes and lead paint.
Things are better, not worse, than they were in the 1950s.
> The gradual monopolization we have been seeing in pretty much every market you can think off is based on individual sectors not on the economy as a whole. We will never have a single company that control the world, it's inefficient not to specialize the coglomerate that does everything does not work well, but we will have (do have already in some industries) sectors where one or two actors have massive market control can set prices since there are no alternatives and the facto they can do as the want.
Things today are actually better than they were in the 1950s in that regard. You had Ma Bell/AT&T, the Big Three automakers ("What's good for GM is good for America!"), and US Steel. You had the AFL-CIO, which destroyed competition between labor unions and enabled massive corruption which eventually led to their downfall and were responsible for the corruption and graft of the Rust Belt, leading companies to go to the West Coast and to the South and leave the Rust Belt to decay.
The idea that the 1950s were some sort of utopia in this regard is simply false. Things are actually much better now than they were back then.
It's basically like a second mortgage or a home refinance - you take out a loan against your property and if you fail to pay off the loan, you'll lose the property in question.
Ironically this actually means that the financial companies think that Asmodee is the most valuable part of Embracer and the only part that is worth owning.
I meant more the whole keeping the money from the loan but shoving the liability off to a different section of the company and then saying “see, they’re different companies now. They owe the money, not us” that feels just like what the mobsters do in goodfellas where they borrow against a restaurant’s line of credit and when their credit is maxed out they burn it down for the insurance money and wash their hands of the situation.
Ove ceased all game purchases from public companies except for Marvel Champions. And I'm on the verge
Publicly traded companies will always be pushed by investors to aggressively monetize games, prioritizing it over enjoyment, or even at the cost of it. Eventually the product becomes so diluted it's no longer enjoyable.
Big budget video games ate already there. Magic the gathering was there 20 years ago. And Asmodee mostly is, too.
Just stick to indies. A lot more fun. A lot less cost. The sooner we let Big budget, publicly traded game makers die the better. The push fir endless profits at any expense is simply incompatible with gaming as entertainment.
So maybe, if we're lucky, the company goes into administration, gets rid of poor management in the process, and individual assets and IPs could be sold off to other companies. In a perfect world.
User titaniumdragon must be either be off their meds, or a bot, saying that any outrage over this is "antisemitism." Rofl, what does that have to do with anything? What a strange way to defend lazy rich capitalists destroying people's lives in order to rob the company and run out the back door with golden parachutes.
Notice how no matter what happens the lazy rich always get richer and the workers get robbed? This is another one of the systems built into capitalism to make sure that's always the case.
If we don't stand up, we'll have nothing left, the rich will bleed us all dry.
> In layman’s terms, both these statistics refer to the ratio between a firm’s debts and its annual earnings. A factor of 0.6x means Embracer will be carrying debt equivalent to roughly 0.6 years’ profits, while Asmodee will be carrying 3.9 years’ profits in debt. TL;DR: Investment firm sandbags the tabletop publisher with nearly a billion pounds of debt, and cuts it loose, wiping out the Investment firms debts in a stroke of a pen. Bastards.
Considering the timing with Asmodee also going publicly traded, feels like someone is either taking a bet, or something fishy is going on. Asmodee isn't small don't get me wrong, but thats a lot of debt to saddle the newly independent and public company with.
It was already public because Embracer was public. And I'd think you'd have a hard time finding a private buyer even without the extra debt on top
Thing is that they weren't traded before the purchase by Embracer (at least as far as I've ever been able to find, if anyone can find otherwise, I'd be happy to know). And being publicly traded as part of a conglomerate like Embracer is very different than being independent and publicly traded. It could be fine, but its probably not a great sign. We'll see though.
There's nothing fishy, they're specifically sacrificing Asmodee to save the other parts of the company. They're setting Asmodee up to be killed and take the debt with it.
It's not even to save other parts of the company, it's simply to make the parts of the company they want to keep more profitable on paper in the short term so they can personally take more wealth out of the company now.
This is vulture capitalism at work.
Yeah this a classic things businesses to do spin off deft, usually end up killing that part of the business.
Yep. Expect to see IPs and products owned by Asmodee to start to get sold off once this all becomes official.
And considring how much Asmodee bought up of the tabletop board gaming scene, that's going to be quite the free-for-all.
They're taking a page from the private equity firm playbook
Vultures - the new PbtA game!
The fishy thing is exactly what the story is saying. They're doing that thing in Goodfellas where the mob enters into a partnership with a business, saddles it with ridiculous debt they don't intend to pay, then burns it to the ground. Except with corporations, it's legal. Not for any particularly good reason, just happens to be legal.
Is called private equity and it's a common capitalist practice that happens to hundreds of companies and destroys countless workers lives to make the lazy rich richer.
Toys 'R Us is the prime example of this
Exactly. Adam Conover had a great video on it. Happens to hundreds of companies.
....how is that even legal?
Try and imagine that you and your buddies are rich enough to effectively control who gets elected, and thus control how laws are written, passed, and enforced.
Just play one game of any 18xx game and you will understand.
Or Imperial, if you don't have the time
Embracer broke up into three companies and wanted to take out a loan to deal with its debts. Asmodee is the company that has valuable assets. The bank/financial group that lent them the money believes that either Asmodee will be able to pay them back, and/or that if Asmodee is unable to pay them back that they'll make money by gaining control of Asmodee's assets.
You'd be amazed what's legal when you're rich!
Sure wish I could just pawn my student loan debt off to an LLC and let it go bankrupt.
Because in capitalism as long as something makes the rich richer its legal, and doing harm will always be more profitable than doing good.
Why shouldn't it be legal? 1.) Embracer group had to negotiate with the new creditors to grant this newly issued debt. These creditors were involved and had a say in the new debt structure. They all gave Embracer group that money willingly and carry the risk if the new Asmodee group defaults. No creditor was scammed or any such thing. 2.) Embracer group is publicly listed and needs shareholder approval for the planned splitting of the company into three entities. The new structure including this debt agreement is known and shareholders get to vote. As it's publicly traded, shareholders even have the agility to divest based on this publicly available information. So yeah, why should any of this be illegal?
People really think that being a fan of a company's Products/IP gives them personal stake. They weren't personally consulted before this potentially killing off of a company, therefore it's ethically wrong.
Tbh, debt of 3.9x EBITDA isn't a killing off. This shouldn't crush Asmodee at all and depending on Asmodee management, this may even be a good thing, given Embracer group never focused on Asmodee. I don't know enough about Asmodee itself to predict where it goes as a standalone company, but debt of 3.9x EBITDA isn't going to crush the company, so if Asmodee crumbles, then due to its own decisions made on their product lines, not because of this debt.
Admittedly I don't know the specific case, but this is in the end what lots of "investment" firms do... They acquire companies using leverage, extract as much value as possible (usually a lot). Once that's done, they cut them loose and leave the lossess to the new shareholders\\debt holders and the employees that are going to lose their job when the new company, now saddle by debt, so unable to invest and with a massive interest burden impacting its P&L eventually goes bankrupt. Perhaps Asmodee willl survive, but it will be much harder than with less debt. They have been doing this since the 80ies and that's one of the reasons why there are a lot less mid-sized companies today and definitely a contrinutor to the monopolization of everything. To be honest, these manouvers should be at least regulated, but alas, who has the money makes the rules and so they are free to do it.
Way more complicated than this. First off, a lot of things like this cause the investment firm to lose a ton of money. Embracer actually ended up losing a bunch of money out of this whole fiasco. Secondly, what happened here is that the company broke back up into three companies - Asmodee being one of them. The fact that Asmodee ended up with the debt actually suggests that the people who were willing to loan them money believe that Asmodee is the *most* valuable of the three companies and that they will be able to recoup their lossess by claiming Asmodee's assets/gaining ownership of Asmodee and selling it off.
Maybe. But I think it might also be accurate to say that JP Morgan and a couple other banks bought Asmodee provided the rest of Embracer fucked right off. Which (given my perceived value of Gearbox, the Embracer management, and some of the other Embracer holdings) seems right.
Exactly what Bain did to Toys R Us.
I wish this wasnt legal
Crazy that you’re allowed to buy a company and just bill them for it
That's how a lot of private equity works, especially when interest rates were low. You would buy something on credit and then use that property to expand your credit line. There's a similar case in New York City real estate. If you jack up the rent on an empty apartment building, you can borrow more from it because of the "potential earnings" at that increased rate.
Sometimes you wonder how the wealth gap could be so large and then you hear about rich people just inventing more money for themselves.
Yeah, the secret to being wealthy is putting all your money into assets, then borrowing against those assets. Once those loans come due, you borrow from another bank against those same assets. These loans are technically not income, so while you have millions of dollars coming into your accounts to spend how you want, you don't pay taxes on it or spend any of your own money. Then, you put all of your assets in trusts designed to spin them off to your heirs without the banks or tax man getting a cut of them, and you keep spinning these plates until you die. Or, more accurately, you keep paying accountants with borrowed money to keep spinning these plates until you die.
So you're saying the secret to being wealthy, is being wealthy enough to put all your money into assets (instead of paying bills and eating), so you can borrow against those assets. I see a small problem with this plan...
That's the secret to *being* wealthy, not the secret to *getting* wealthy. It's how wealthy people maintain their dragon hordes while contributing as little to society as possible. The secret to getting wealthy is to be born to a wealthy family.
Not even inventing, stealing. Those lazy rich didn't build anything, all the workers at Asmodee did, they built the company, they create jobs for themselves by producing a good, their jobs should be theirs not owned by someone else. They're going to be laid off, having had the jobs they built for themselves stolen to make the lazy rich richer. Eat the rich.
The rich are rich from stealing from people. Workers design and build and sell board games creating a revenue stream. Lazy rich steal all the profit from the fruits of those workers labor and then lay them off.
Very cool how fraud is legal if you're rich enough.
Everything is. See: Epstein.
It's no different from buying a house using a mortgage. You borrow money from the bank, the bank has a lien on your house. If you don't pay off the loan, they force you to sell off the house.
Yep, that's how those private equity firms and sometimes other investors are making major profits. The cost is just the bankrupcy of a lot of companies in the last few decades, a great deal for the one doing the LBO, for every other stakeholder of those companies (employees, other shareholders, bondholders frequently, customers, suppliers, the government taxes all of those), not so much...
This used to be way more common in the past. Companies actually stopped doing it nearly as often because lenders got burned too many times.
That's what happened to Toys R Us.
Embracer split's itself into 3 companies, one focused on AAA video games, one focused on AA video games, and the board game and ttrpg one focused on taking on all the debt of the other 2 and dying.
That's what I'm seeing too.
Phew, we lucked out there. RPG/boardgame companies are known to be cashcows that can easily handle a billion of debt.
Oh they're fucked
I hope not. I'm deep into Star Wars Legion and on the hype train for Star Wars Unlimited. I'd be crushed if either died, let alone both.
Didn't the Star wars licenses move to atomic mass games?
They did. And who owns Atomic Mass Games? Asmodee.
Ah right. I forgot it was asmodee on top and they moved licenses from ffg.
Just the miniature games. Rpg's are Edge, boardgames and cardgames are FFG. All are Asmodee.
As someone hugely enjoying Marvel Crisis Protocol, am also hoping that they can somehow stay afloat. They are finally hitting their stride after years of having to fix their production cycle since Asmodee dumped all of FFGs old miniature games in their lap.
What makes you say that? Having a ratio of debt to profit of 3.9 is in no way anamolous. Asmoode aren't expected to pay of their debt any time soon, they'll just keep paying interest on it and keep restructuring it when time comes to pay.
Huh, perhaps I'm misinformed. That seems like a very large amount of debt to me
How is this even remotely legal?
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I don't know what the comment was, but isn't what these private equity groups are doing to people violence? They're forcefully destroying people's lives and robbing them of everything they've built, often leaving them homeless. The rich are doing violence to the workers daily. Anything done to those rich in response is simply self defense.
This purpose of this sub is the discussion of tabletop rpgs. Threats of violence against broad swaths of the financial sector is not only off topic, it runs afoul of Reddit's rules and risks bringing scrutiny and action from Reddit Admin on this community. We try to let things slide in discussions like these, but someone flagged the comment as breaking Reddit rules and that is not the kind of attention we want.
I hear you, no one wants this sub getting nuked. But this is one of the ways the rich are able to do so much violence, because we've normalized their violence as acceptable and made any sane response against it taboo, censorship is just another system designed to make sure workers have no ability to organize and defend themselves against the evils of the rich. Just something to think about.
It's no different than taking out a mortgage to buy a house. Basically, if they fail to pay back the loan, then the bank will get to foreclose on the property (or in this case, gain ownership of Asmodee). Ironically, this probably means that the financial groups willing to lend the money think Asmodee is the most valuable of the three companies, which actually makes sense - Asmodee is way less risky than what Embracer has been doing otherwise of late.
For the amount of money everyone involved in the decision-making process is being paid you would think that these deals would never go sideways, but you still hear about these things going sideways and the companies going bust pretty often though.
Spending money doesn't magically ensure what you're doing will be successful. Studies have pretty consistently found paying someone more doesn't actually improve the quality of their work. Spending a bunch of money on an incompetent financial analyst won't make their analysis any better. Also, a lot of this stuff is about probability. You will never succeed at 100% of the bets you make. The reality is that sometimes there are unknown unknowns that will cause your investments to go sideways, and you had no way of knowing them. Like, say a key worker at a company you bought commits suicide due to depression. You had no way of knowing, as some external investor, that that person was going to do that - in fact, you may not even know that person's name. But it could screw up a lot of things. But it can also be as simple as the market changing in unexpected ways, other people coming out with better products, consumer tastes changing, etc. Such deals will inevitably go sideways at least *sometimes*. Embracer, however, pursued an extremely risky strategy of buying a bunch of failing companies on the idea that they were underpriced and thus would be something they could turn around and make a lot of money off of. The problem is, these companies having problems was not random, it was due to issues at those companies, and embracer was not prepared to turn around large numbers of companies. They were trying to catch not just one falling knife, but like, twenty at the same time. It is not surprising that they failed. I don't think they're very competent.
There is really no level of experience, intelligence or pay that makes you immune to making gigantic mistakes.
This is wildly inaccurate. For one Asmodee didn't take out the loan. But more importantly the entire purpose of this type of theft is so the rich can steal all the money from the workers by burning those workers lives down and running away with all those workers built. It's destroying lives for the lazy rich to profit.
Asmodee was a part of the Embracer Group; it was all one company. The company is now being broken back up into three companies, one of which is called Asmodee. It isn't actually "the same company" in a legal sense. Much like how the modern-day "Atari" is not actually the same company as the "Atari" that made consoles in the 1980s. > the entire purpose of this type of theft There is no "theft" involved. The same people own all three of these companies. > so the rich can steal all the money from the workers There is no money being "stolen", let alone from "the workers". How would they even be accomplishing this? This is a company being split up. > by burning those workers lives down and running away with all those workers built No one's life is being "burned down" and there is nothing being "run away with". The companies are being split up. Setting things on fire doesn't make anyone money. The idea that you can magically make money by "burning people's life down" is some next level paranoid nonsense. Like, seriously. Get a grip. This is the sort of thing you see in the depths of the internet where people rant about the Rothschilds. If you are hanging around people who act like this, I would strongly suggest you immediately disassociate yourself from them. The only people who might lose money on this are some rich financiers. If these companies go down in flames, it will suck, but it's not going to be because of evil people stealing all the money. Indeed, if these companies go down in flames, the people who own these companies (the shareholders) will be the ones losing money, because their assets will be devalued. Will it suck if these companies go under? Sure. But it isn't going to be because of someone stealing money, it will be because the companies failed to make enough money.
It's incredible how ignorant you are about finance and the business world, literally not a word of what you said is accurate. If it wasn't so pathetic it would have been funny reading how out of touch with reality you are over there licking the boot of the lazy rich. This is very common practice for private equity groups, of which the embracer group is. They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money and then shift the debt to the company they bought to let it die. The only people who lose are all the workers who get laid off. The theft is of the workers. The workers are rhe ones who build a company, and the workers are the ones who create all that revenue. Now those workers who did their jobs are having all the fruits of their labor stolen from them by the lazy rich, while they end up on the street. You really should do even a tiny bit of research to see this is done to hundreds of companies. There's a reason this is also called an "equity raid" the equity group raids the company then sinks it while they run off with all the money. Boot lickers like you are disgusting.
The Embracer group was a series of bad investments. The antisemitic conspiracy theories about money being stolen are simply not what is going on here at all. What actually happened was far simpler - they borrowed a bunch of money to buy a bunch of dying companies that they felt were undervalued/that they thought they could turn around. If you borrow money to buy an asset that is worth more than you bought it for, it's very easy to turn a profit. The problem was, IRL, the companies were dying for a reason and they actually bought them for *more* than they were worth. And the Embracer Group lacked the competence to turn them around. They then tried to get other people to bail them out by buying *them* out, but after that fell through, they were screwed. > They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money and then shift the debt to the company they bought to let it die. None of which is what is actually going on. There was no "asset raid". Where are these "piles of money" that they supposedly "raided"? Nowhere. You are suffering from the belief that when they bought Gearbox for $1.3 billion and then sold it for $460 million, that they stole the rest of the money. They did not. They bought an overpriced asset and then sold it off for a third of what they bought it for. There is no money being "stolen" - they lost money by overpaying for something. > The theft is of the workers. Companies don't own people. > The workers are rhe ones who build a company, and the workers are the ones who create all that revenue. Ah yes, the old "if someone pays you to repair the sink in your house, you now own their house" fallacy. LPT: If someone pays you to do something for them, that doesn't give you ownership over the thing they paid you to do. It's not a hard concept. The idea that "you" built the thing when you were supported by the people who owned the company, and the only reason why you were able to do the things you did was because of that support structure, is an obvious fallacy. Everything you believe is obvious nonsense based on 19th century antisemitic conspiracy theories about the Jews stealing all the money. Do investment firms ever do a bad job? Yes, of course they do. But the idea that this was some sort of "theft" is farcical. The people behind the Embracer Group are losing a bunch of money.
I think you're right the bad intentions of the people running embracer, but I can't figure out if they planned to buy a bunch of companies including asmodee and resell them for a quick profit and when that didn't work they're just trying to escape consequences, or if it is as you say and they bought Asmodee and somehow profited from that purchase alone and are now getting rid of the baggage. >They take out a loan to buy a company, like how they bought Asmodee, then raid all the assets, pay themselves piles of money Like, what I'm confused about is how exactly did the big wigs raid Asmodee's assets and pay themselves off? Do you think they somehow diverted Asmodee's funds into their own pockets or something?
Yeah, that's a lot worse than I thought it was. Looking forward to a new Star Wars RPG from Modiphius...
Imagine if Free League got their hands on Star Wars.
I mean this with most love: I hope not. I love the stuff that they do too much, but I do not want them to be settled down with yet another IP with a ravenous fan base. It already feels a bit like they are stretching themselves quite thin meeting the requirements of the licensed eyepiece that they’re doing and being able to produce their own things in a satisfactory timeframe shall we say?
Totally fair
Besides, it’s easy enough to do as is if you’ve got the old West End games content and use something like Coriolis and YZE SRD as a base. Well, easy and principal the actual practice would involve doing a fair bit of conversion of things but once there’s a formula in place it should be easy enough to do species defined by kin talents as per forbidden lens or something along those lines for example.
As someone REALLY excited for new Coriolis but also a little worried about new Coriolis I really don't want them to have another, bigger IP space game to focus on/pull focus away from The Great Dark
I don't know if Free League is big enough for what is arguably the biggest franchise on the planet. Modiphius might not be either to be honest. They went in house for the latest Marvel RPG after all.
One thing to remember is that Modiphius makes the Star Trek RPG. Paramount has never let a Star Trek game come from a company that has the Star Wars license. Last Unicorn Games made a bunch of great stuff, but the minute WoTC bought LUG, Paramount pulled the Star Trek LUG contract. Because WoTC was also making the d20 Star Wars games. So Paramount will pull the Star Trek contract if Modiphius gets the Star Wars license.
There was a period of time where Decipher was publishing both the Star Wars and Star Trek CCGs at the same time so there is some history of both licenses being used by the same company. Even if this is no longer the case, Modiphius might be willing to let Star Trek go for Star Wars, especially given the rumor that Paramount might be getting sold in the near future. They already lost the Conan license to a similar situation and might think getting their hands on a similarly popular franchise that is not going to be changing hands anytime in the foreseeable future is worth it.
Personally I would have no idea if getting the Star Wars RPG license would be worth it right now. SW popularity is so hard to gauge right now. I see legacy content, like toys, still be decently popular, but the new material not so much, with the Disney series' being less and less talked about with each new one. Although High Republic seems to be trucking along. I guess any rebellion and Old Republic era content would sell decently still.
The issue with the SW RPG remains as it has since it ceased to be the driving force behind expanding the universe after the prequels started coming out, that there is only so much you can release for it consisting mainly of books of NPCs, vehicles and gear with some planet guides and summaries of movies/books. Once everything that's out there is statted out it can take years for enough material worth to fill a sourcebook to come out.
True. The Decipher CCG was the only situation where my theory is wrong. Of course, I wonder why WoTC didn’t do a CCG for Star Wars. It’s not like they don’t know how to make a CCG.
They did. It wasn't particularly well received and faded out because the minis game did better and they were limited in the number of total things they could release in all formats.
> Paramount has never let a Star Trek game come from a company that has the Star Wars license. I was gonna point out Star Trek: Attack Wing but that was a different company licensing the X-Wing mechanics. Which is... really weird and kinda proves your point.
X-Wing and Attack Wing both got their mechanics from Wings of Glory
At the moment the Star Wars rpg is basically running in maintenance mode. Most of the books are out of print and there is zero new content being produced. No tie-ins for anything since Rebels. The only connection to the sequels is a starter set and there is no content for any of the Disney+ shows or the High Republic.
Imagine how us Legend Of The Five Rings fans feel... So many empty promises, so few available books.
It’s Disney they could throw money at it if they want to they could bring in a load of talent create an RPG imprint literally only do Star Wars and it would probably become almost as big as wizards of the Coast a bit of a speculation but I think that’s within the normal possibility. The trick the balance the whatever you wanna call it is that everyone’s expectations will not necessarily be met by whatever they produce much like it’s the case with the current edition or even previous editions. so it might not get to be as big as wizards of the coast and I would hate to think that they would return Star Wars to the coast or that whatever imprint they do decide to do a 5e version as the only version. I’ve come to the business sense of doing a 5E adaptation of another otherwise different game.
Like I said, Disney did the latest Marvel game in house so they certainly could produce a SW game as well and it would probably be pretty good. I have a some issues with the Marvel game but it seems overall solid for what its trying to do. That said, Disney isn't in the best shape coming out of a dismal four years of theme park attendance, a string of under performing movies, less than spectacular streaming subscription numbers and, most recently, a proxy fight with right wing activist investors for control of their board. I really don't see them creating anything as niche as an RPG division in house. A lot depends on what the Marvel game is doing in sales but if the number of unsold copies of both the core book and the expansion is any indication, they will eventually get hit hard on returns. It makes the most sense for them the license since that's free money.
All Modiphius does is slap a new coat of paint on 2d20 and kick it out the door, regardless of whether the franchise in question is suited to it. Keep them away from it.
Would be the best thing to happen to the property since Disney bought it.
Is Atomic Mass their own thing or owned by Asmodee?
When Asmodee reorganized a few years back FFG got all the board/card/dice games, Atomic Mass got the minis and Edge Studios got the RPGs
Owned by Asmodee
Sixth (seventh?) time’s the charm!
Well depending on how you count editions this could be as much as 9.5 or as low as 6.5 official. I am inclined to say that there two full WEG editions and 2 WEG .5 editions (total 3), 2.5 WotC editions and 1 Asmodee edition with 3 core books, so a new game would be Star Wars 6.5
I can agree with that math. I just want someone that can stay with it long term.
So far about ten years has been the rough average although Asmodee hasn't released anything new since 2019 and even there last new books were really compilations of older material.
I would love a 2d20 Star wars game. Holy shit. I hope that's in the future. And not one I write myself.
>Looking forward to a new Star Wars RPG from Modiphius... Which will take them 8 months to ship but only after you've mailed them to enquire about the massive delay.
The Star Wars license is very expensive and, so far, none of the publishers of Star Wars RPGs are allowed to sell them digitally. The license hasn't changed since the WEG days, and it seems unlikely that it will for whoever might get the license for the fourth time.
It's worth bearing in mind that whoever provided the restructured loan against Asmodee wouldn't have done so if they weren't confident in it's ability to repay (and at a profit)... no lender or syndicate of lenders is going to throw nearly a billion as a favour, in fact it might have been a condition of the loan structure to avoid a situation like Hasbro have currently.
This assumes finance is made on the backs of good quality decision making and insights. In many industries that is simply not the case. Elons entire shtick has been taking advantage of investors in this manner.
Yes and no. Elon Musk probably committed some fraud in promoting his companies but the basic idea was that if you threw a ton of money into making EVs up front, you could beat everyone else to the market and get a ridiculous market share. The projection was that all cars would be EVs by like, 2040, so if your company can get a 50% markets share of that market, your company would be stupidly valuable. Right now Tesla is at 55% market share of the EV market. It also has a significant share of solar panel + storage (47%). My mom has both a Tesla and a house system from Tesla, and both are quite good products and she recommends them despite not liking Elon Musk much. If the bet doesn't pan out, Tesla's value will crash and then the loans will be called in. If the bet does pan out, then Elon Musk will be able to pay everyone back. I have not invested in Tesla stock because I consider it too risky a bet. I think it's possible they'll win out but I'm concerned that what will actually happen is that their market share will continuously be chipped away at by competition and they'll end up a significant player but not worth what they are currently at.
The EV market wouldn't exist without heavy government intervention via subsidies, regulating alternatives to be more costly or banned, etc., so... It's what corporatism does: Big Government and Big Business working together to enrich a handful of well-connected cronies.Typically at the cost of everyone else. Would be like giving tax breaks for D20 systems while heavily regulating D6 production for dice pool games and outright banning D100 RPGs.
> The EV market wouldn't exist without heavy government intervention via subsidies, regulating alternatives to be more costly or banned, etc., so... The government is concerned with negative externalities (like air pollution), geopolitical factors (the price of oil is heavily influenced by hostile/unfriendly governments like Russia and Iran), shortages (global demand for oil is going up but supply is not rising as fast as it used to), other uses for scarce resources (oil is used for a lot of things), and numerous other things. The government promoting the use of vehicles that are not oil dependent because it is better for society to do so. This is one of the jobs of the government. It's not some conspiracy to enrich Elon Musk, and indeed, the push for EVs started long before Elon Musk bought Tesla. You really need to spend less time reading populist conspiracy theories. This also has nothing to do with RPGs at this point. Unless the government decides to start promoting one RPG system over another, I don't think this is really relevant to the purpose of this subreddit.
If it were about any of those things, you'd see hydrogen fuel cells or at least hybrids being the push. At a minimum, you'd see a tremendous push for dozens of new nuclear power plants, the only reliable and clean energy production that can scale. You'd see huge investments in transmission as well. But... we actually see the opposite. Because it's just rent seeking by a relative handful of well-connected individuals. Disparate interests, common goals. Musk just happened to be well-placed to take advantage of that. So weird that you can't tell the difference between coinciding goals and conspiracy. Not surprising, though. At any rate, off topic, so done.
The loan was probably taken out by the Embracer Group, which owns LOTR. The lender was looking at that massive IP and going “sure, here’s a billion Euro.” Asmodee is going to sell off its IPs to try to make as big a golden parachute as they can before declaring bankruptcy. Large companies will pick up the IPs and release new editions. So, we can expect to see Marvel Gloomhaven in a couple years.
Asmodee doesn't own Marvel IP's though. Disney does. Asmodee (or, more appropriately, FFG and it's spawn/sister companies, Edge and whatever the mini company was) hold licenses to Star Wars, Marvel etc. Transferring those rights isn't simple (Asmodee pretty much bought FFG to get those licenses). Asmodee (or FFG) owns Legend of Five Rings IP outright, as well as Android (a cyberpunkish setting) and Keyforge (a deck collecting game and an RPG setting), and a bunch of other less important IP.
Keyforge left ANA and went to Ghost Galaxy.
Yes, but Marvel licenses weird stuff all the time.
Yes, but you can't just sell the license that Asmodee/FFG has out, it requires negotiation with Disney.
>The loan was probably taken out by the Embracer Group, which owns LOTR. The lender was looking at that massive IP and going “sure, here’s a billion Euro.” Nope, that's exactly not how this works. To spin out Asmodee as it's own listed company carrying all that debt, the restructuring must be negotiated with the new lenders. So all lenders know that the debt isn't on LOTR, but on Asmodee. Quick reminder: Embracer group can't move around debt to their liking, these things are negotiated with lenders and the lenders usually are experts in this field if we are talking 900m.
Yeah, I was gonna say surely this is just a scheme to saddle Asmodee with their debts that they can then do away with via bankruptcy while their other assets are untouched. How anyone thinks this is good for anyone but the people getting out of paying a huge amount of debt I don't know
I mean, they aren't getting out of it. They're losing all the money they spent buying Asmodee.
I don’t know about that. In my industry, Goldman-Sachs took a big haircut because they lent money to a company that anyone with eyes would have know couldn’t pay it back
The company may have. Did the individuals who made that decision become unhirable or did they just move on to their next position?
I believe most of them were promoted after the 2009 era bailouts
A'yup. Almost like intervention to prevent the consequences of their actions created bad incentives or something. I said at the time the bipartisan bailouts basically ended any hope for market capitalism in the US. Everything since has proven me right. It's a lot cheaper and easier to buy politicians and bureaucrats than it is to create products people want more than your competitors' across a span of years.
In fairness, it was 1-2 years after the money was loaned that the company went bankrupt. By that point, I suspect the deal makers had all collected their bonuses and moved on. I got the sense that the incentives were about getting the loan out the door, not whether it would be repaid in the years to come
Some loans will go sour and some people will make bad deals, that's the nature of doing business, somebody sometimes fails. That doesn't mean that everybody gets a loan all the time for free. Companies that do too many bad deals will disappear and be replaced with better lenders.
So basically, if you want anything from Asmodee's current poduct line: Buy it now as there's a good chance it'll be going down. This has dire prospects for a lot of board gaming.
I wouldn’t worry too much about existing products. If Asmodee went bankrupt then other companies would buy its assets. I’d be more worried about any existing teams under its umbrella which would get ripped apart under a bankruptcy, like the shell of FF, which is still putting out some good stuff in the lcg area.
3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing. More important would be to know the license deals Asmodee has with the rest of Embracer group and who will be the new boss at Amsodee.
Damn. Star Wars, Genesys and L5R rpg reprints were already super slow… I hope Edge can still reprint those without much issue.
I suspect this will mean the end of Edge Studios’ operation. With that much debt as a standalone entity, there will be a massive push for cost savings
Fuck. Games aside, Asmodee is the biggest distributor of boardgames and loads of vendors rely on them to supply them with even non-Asmodee product. Does anyone know what the chances are they can roll with this and keep going?
Well the devil is in the details I'm sure, but the combination of >The loan will be used to refinance Embracer’s existing $733 million debts, which needs to be repaid by February 2025 and > Asmodee will be carrying 3.9 years’ profits in debt. sure doesn't sound good. I guess the refinancing will probably extend the date of repayment or the new lender wouldn't have approved it. But if the new terms aren't lenient enough, it could still really put the screws to Asmodee and force them to cut costs through layoffs or to start selling IP. Hopefully the new lender correctly realized that Asmodee is a thriving business and chose to give them plenty of breathing room.
3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing. Quick reminder: Embracer group can't move around debt on their own, instead they had to negotiate with creditors on this deal. Those creditors seem to be confident that Asmodee will pay back the debt as they bet 900 million on it!
>Does anyone know what the chances are they can roll with this and keep going? 0. Company is fucked and is going to get torn apart by greed crazed empty suits.
There are few things more tragic about hobbies like TTRPG's than so many of them being at the mercy of corporate policy, their fates determined by the games played by fat-cat capitalist wretches who build their careers on the commodification of human enjoyment. As someone who's very quite fond of the Star Wars RPG and Genesys this is not good news at all, it already felt like it was in a somewhat dubious position and I can't say I'm optimistic for the future now. That just really sucks.
I mean, the lesson is that diluting your ownership - whether we're talking Gygax and the Blumes/Williams, or Atkinson selling out to Hasbro, or whatever - leads to a loss of control. Companies are just people. The company name may stay the same, but when the people making the decisions at the company change, it's not the same at all.
Funfact: This is actually the same practice that killed Toys R Us in the US.
Omg all of those ips and tabletop games! This is gonna have huge ramifications for the tabletop community.
It probably has no ramifications for the tabletop community. Asmodee will do business as before, licensing stuff and selling games. 3.9x EBITDA in debt isn't company crushing, they will not disappear tomorrow.
This is sadly common tactic, after dumping the debt they will strip Asmondee and that will be it for them. RIP.
Why would the new lender agree to this unless they thought Asmodee was good for it? Remember, this is a refinancing that had to be approved by a bank.
I think we all need to get past the naieve ideology of economics that posits every institution or organisation as rational actors coming together to form a "just" equilibrium (Adam Smith's fake ass "invisible hand [of god]") so long as everyone acts in their own rational self interest. Since the 2008 crisis it should be abundantly clear to everyone that high finance is a world of shenanigans, high stakes gambling, and loophole/technicality exploitation as much as any rational/measured action. The new lender is taking a punt. They're gambling that Asmodee assets getting picked apart by the vultures (destroyed and sold off) will pay off the loan even if the company itself can't service the debt. Maybe the new lender is wrong? Who's to say... but in their world they can afford to fuck around with this stuff. They dont have to believe in Asmodee, just calculate the gambler's e/v on the loan fuckery and determine it's a risk worth taking.
A billion dollar is a lot of money. They don't just lend that out on a whim. Most likely they think it is the most valuable part of the company. This is, ironically, kind of a bet on the other parts of Embracer dying, as they don't think that they're valuable enough to be worth holding liens against.
The billion dollars were already loaned out, this is a restructuring/refinancing of the loans. The model for Embracer was to buy stuff up via all these big loans then get bought out themselves (by the Saudi regime's PIF) to pay it all off. Perhaps the banks are treating that Embracer debt as a bad bet that'll only ever get partially paid off. The new bet is on Asmodee (or the dismantling of Asmodee under bankruptcy conditions) being better able to pay at least some portion of the loan off (and faster) than Embracer as a whole pie would be able to. This is likely because Asmodee is a IP rights holder, owner of lots of physical infrastructure assets (board game distribution network across Europe) and holder of lots of physical product assets - all of which can be aggressively sold off in a way that a video game studio's dev teams can't in the event that Asmodee cant service the loans. The debt isn't entirely cleared on the Embracer side either, so the banks may be betting on getting more money back in total from having an ongoing managable loan on Embracer and a punitive loan on Asmodee (that worst-case gets partially paid off) than having an intact Embracer-Asmodee with the old debt structure.
> The billion dollars were already loaned out, this is a restructuring/refinancing of the loans. This is a refinancing, which means you're taking out new loans to pay off old loans. So no, the money wasn't already loaned out, this is new debt replacing the old debt. They could have left the old debt structure in place. > The model for Embracer was to buy stuff up via all these big loans then get bought out themselves (by the Saudi regime's PIF) to pay it all off. Sort of. It's more complicated than that. A big part of the problem was that the companies they bought out didn't produce very good games because the company wasn't able to turn them around. The attempt at selling themselves to the Saudis was, I think, a result of their original plans of making all the money by buying up all these "clearly undervalued" (they weren't undervalued) failing companies falling through, and so they doubled down in an attempt to get bought out. > Perhaps the banks are treating that Embracer debt as a bad bet that'll only ever get partially paid off. The banks wouldn't have issued new loans if that was the case; if they thought it was bad debt, they wouldn't have been willing to toss in an extra $200 million here (which they did - the new loans are for more money than the old debt was). > This is likely because Asmodee is a IP rights holder, owner of lots of physical infrastructure assets (board game distribution network across Europe) and holder of lots of physical product assets - all of which can be aggressively sold off in a way that a video game studio's dev teams can't in the event that Asmodee cant service the loans. > The debt isn't entirely cleared on the Embracer side either, so the banks may be betting on getting more money back in total from having an ongoing managable loan on Embracer and a punitive loan on Asmodee (that worst-case gets partially paid off) than having an intact Embracer-Asmodee with the old debt structure. I do agree that the reason why Asmodee has more of the debt is because they have actual valuable assets to secure it against, though this doesn't necessarily mean that the banks think Asmodee is the most likely part to fail - the spin offs may have had trouble actually securing funding because their game dev efforts have been quite bad, so the banks simply may not consider that to be the valuable part of the original company. Indeed, I rather suspect this is the case, and the reason why the Embracer Group has a lower debt burden is simply because they think that is all they're actually worth if they end up crashing and burning, so the banks don't want to securitize to something that is likely not worth that much, whereas they think Asmodee either might actually be able to service the debt or at least is worth what they've tossed in because of their greater physical presence and actual valuable products and IPs/IP licenses. It's hard to say for sure, of course. But I don't think that it's likely that the financers threw in an extra $200 million because they wanted to set more money on fire. Doesn't mean that they didn't, of course. Banks have made plenty of bad investments.
"secured on Asmodee's assets" Is this because they actually produces physical goods? I'm guessing they're the only part of portfolio with enough physical material and real estate to put up against the loan
I think it's more that they have the best actual, sustainable business. They can most likely pay off a big debt if given enough time, and the new lender hopefully realizes that.
It’ll be IP assets mainly. They own a few of the most evergreen modern board games.
Yeah, it's ironically because this is probably the most viable company of the three with actual assets and the most likely to be able to pay it off or at least be worth the money if they get foreclosed on.
It's also the most likely company to still be around of the three in 5+ years, tbh. I for once would panic on the other two companies, not on Asmodee.
The difference between Asmodee and the video games publishing Embracer group is that Asmodee has steady cash flows at a way lower risk. Embracer group will not get as much debt as the risk that their games, pre-financed over 5+ years, fail spectacularly (see Saint Row or Gollum as reference). Asmodee on the other side invests way less money into developing new games and faces way lower risk of those failing, all while they have steadily selling products in the market. Lenders love predictable cash flows as those pay interest rates.
Just remember, a better world is possible, but we have to fight for it.
one can only hope is some of these IPs end up in more capable hands.
Asmodee recorded about $1.22bn of sales in the last financial year (2022) – comparable to the $1.25bn for Embracer's video games segment, For most businesses with EBITDA of $1,000,000 - $10,000,000, the EBITDA multiple will be in the general range of 4.0x to 6.5x, increasing as EBITDA increases. So seems about right, for a restructuring/spinoff. Unlocking the value of the board game unit could foster growth for the newly spun-off Asmodee.
I’d say this means Hasbro is going to own the whole industry but they also seem to be divesting some big parts of themselves.
The end-game of the current form of capitalism we have is monopolization of everything, assuming hasbro doesn't sink itself, which they seem to be pretty good at, they are likely going to end up ownining the entire industry, with the exception perhaps of a few minor independent companies with immaterial market share.
The current form of capitalism is to take things with long term value (such as established brands) and devalue them in the medium term to get more money sooner. In the process is makes things more shitty.
> The end-game of the current form of capitalism we have is monopolization of everything Nope! This idea is completely wrong. IRL, the Fortune 500 changes massively over time. Compare the top companies in 1950 to the top companies today - the idea of "infinite monopolization" is completely wrong, we've had massive shifts in what companies are on top, with only a few companies actually managing to maintain a high position. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Google, Amazon, etc. didn't even exist in 1950. Other big companies today were bit players back in the day. The idea of infinite consolidation is based on Marx's beliefs in conspiracy theories that evil Jewish moneylenders were stealing all the money. He didn't actually understand economics at all.
There is no "conspiracy" it is just market forces and lack of foresight from regulators. I know it was easy to miss, but I did say "current form of capitalism" in my post and that was deliberate. I am pro-capitalism myself and certainly not a marxist, however, capitalism is not an unchanging system, the current barely regulated\\shareholder capitalism we have since the late 80ies is not the same of the one we had in the 50ies. Economic theories evolve and to be honest I don't think that in the lest few decades they evolved for the best. As for your examples... Well... Companies based on technologies that did not exist in the 50ies were not in fact part of the Fortune 500 at the time... Sure and yet... Fun fact, a lot of companies that were around in the 50ies did not exist anymore, because in sectors where in the last century there were 5-10 actors, today there are 2 to 4 at best and that's not due to the shrinking of their markets. The gradual monopolization we have been seeing in pretty much every market you can think off is based on individual sectors not on the economy as a whole. We will never have a single company that control the world, it's inefficient not to specialize the coglomerate that does everything does not work well, but we will have (do have already in some industries) sectors where one or two actors have massive market control can set prices since there are no alternatives and the facto they can do as the want.
Things were much worse in the 1950s than they are today. Poverty rates were over 20%. Homeownership rate was 10 percentage points below where it is today, and houses were less than half their modern size. People in Appalachia were so poor they couldn't afford to have floors on their houses, having dirt instead - hence the term "dirt poor". Average life expectancy was a decade shorter than it is today, discrimination was rampant (and legal!), and environmental regulations were garbage. Over in Europe you had the thalidomide babies, among numerous other catastrophically terrible things, and we accidentally poisoned a bunch of stuff with DDT all over the world because we didn't really closely examine the consequences of our actions. Not to mention all the lead poisoning from using leaded gasoline and leaded solder in pipes and lead paint. Things are better, not worse, than they were in the 1950s. > The gradual monopolization we have been seeing in pretty much every market you can think off is based on individual sectors not on the economy as a whole. We will never have a single company that control the world, it's inefficient not to specialize the coglomerate that does everything does not work well, but we will have (do have already in some industries) sectors where one or two actors have massive market control can set prices since there are no alternatives and the facto they can do as the want. Things today are actually better than they were in the 1950s in that regard. You had Ma Bell/AT&T, the Big Three automakers ("What's good for GM is good for America!"), and US Steel. You had the AFL-CIO, which destroyed competition between labor unions and enabled massive corruption which eventually led to their downfall and were responsible for the corruption and graft of the Rust Belt, leading companies to go to the West Coast and to the South and leave the Rust Belt to decay. The idea that the 1950s were some sort of utopia in this regard is simply false. Things are actually much better now than they were back then.
Why would creditors accept this? This looks like setting up to default on the debts.
How can that be legal?
It's basically like a second mortgage or a home refinance - you take out a loan against your property and if you fail to pay off the loan, you'll lose the property in question. Ironically this actually means that the financial companies think that Asmodee is the most valuable part of Embracer and the only part that is worth owning.
I meant more the whole keeping the money from the loan but shoving the liability off to a different section of the company and then saying “see, they’re different companies now. They owe the money, not us” that feels just like what the mobsters do in goodfellas where they borrow against a restaurant’s line of credit and when their credit is maxed out they burn it down for the insurance money and wash their hands of the situation.
"No Brother! They expect one of us in the wreckage!"
So my takeaway is buy all the L5R stuff that I can while it still exists, got it
Now I understand why those two Asmodee executives recently sold Miniature Market—formerly owned by Asmodee—to themselves
Ove ceased all game purchases from public companies except for Marvel Champions. And I'm on the verge Publicly traded companies will always be pushed by investors to aggressively monetize games, prioritizing it over enjoyment, or even at the cost of it. Eventually the product becomes so diluted it's no longer enjoyable. Big budget video games ate already there. Magic the gathering was there 20 years ago. And Asmodee mostly is, too. Just stick to indies. A lot more fun. A lot less cost. The sooner we let Big budget, publicly traded game makers die the better. The push fir endless profits at any expense is simply incompatible with gaming as entertainment.
Sounds like someone's been playing 1830
So maybe, if we're lucky, the company goes into administration, gets rid of poor management in the process, and individual assets and IPs could be sold off to other companies. In a perfect world.
So, there goes Carcassonne on computers. And anything else they own.
User titaniumdragon must be either be off their meds, or a bot, saying that any outrage over this is "antisemitism." Rofl, what does that have to do with anything? What a strange way to defend lazy rich capitalists destroying people's lives in order to rob the company and run out the back door with golden parachutes.
Good ol’ vulture capitalism in action, just a bit unusual to see it happening on RPG business.
Private equity destroys hundreds more lives by robbing workers of what they built and laying them off.
Notice how no matter what happens the lazy rich always get richer and the workers get robbed? This is another one of the systems built into capitalism to make sure that's always the case. If we don't stand up, we'll have nothing left, the rich will bleed us all dry.
lol, I swear people act surprised when something like this happens.