Saber Interactive, which owns 3D Realms, 4A Games and more, has been sold by Embracer Group in a deal worth $247m
As we’ve covered before in these virtual pages, Embracer Group spent a couple of years snapping up a host of videogame studios, publishers and other companies. But now, like some gigantic sea creature, the Swedish firm now in the process of disgorging several of these entities onto a beach.
Embracer has announced that it’s sold Saber Interactive in a deal worth $247m. Although not as megalithic as Embracer, Saber Interactive is itself a clown car of other big-name companies – among its subsidiaries you’ll find the likes of 3D Realms, 4A Games, Asypr Media and Tripwire Interactive.
Bloomberg reports that Saber’s purchaser is Beacon Interactive, a company founded and owned by Matthew Karch – the co-founder of Saber Interactive. In essence, Saber has been sold to itself. It’s late-capitalist Inception.
Read more: Embracer Group | The giant that has changed the videogame industry, for better or worse
As outlined in a lengthy set of bullet points by IGN, though, the deal is quite complex, with Beacon Interactive taking some subsidiaries but leaving others under Embracer’s control. We won’t rehash all of them here; in brief, Beacon gets to keep 3D Realms, New World Interactive and eight other studios, while Embracer keeps 4A Games, Tripwire and Snapshot, as well as publishing rights to several game projects related to them, including the next Metro title, the remake of Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, and several other unannounced titles.
Both Embracer founder Lars Wingefors and Karch have praised the deal, with the former describing it as a “win-win”.
Following the collapse of a deal worth $2bn in 2023, Embracer has made a number of moves to limit the fallout, including numerous job losses, studio closures, and the cancellation of several high-profile projects. It’s also in the process of selling Gearbox, the studio behind Borderlands.
Embracer Group purchased Saber Interactive for $525m in 2020.
