Between July and December 2023, Embracer Group cancelled 29 unannounced games, as confirmed by the firm’s latest financial report.
After a period of aggressive expansion earlier in the 2020s, the Swedish industry giant Embracer Group had a major financial wobble in 2023. The result has seen a huge number of job losses and studio closures, and now, thanks to the company’s latest financial report, we know that Embracer also cancelled 29 games between July and December 2023.
As reported by VGC, Embracer had a total of 153 unannounced games in the works at the various studios under its banner as of June 2023; by December that year, the number had tumbled to 124. Doing a quick bit of maths, that means 29 projects vanished at various points in that six month period.
We heard in January that a previously unannounced Deus Ex sequel, in the works at Eidos Montreal, had been scrapped by Embracer.
Those cancellations came in the wake of a collapsed with an unnamed third party which was worth over $2bn. As it fell apart at the eleventh hour, news of the sudden hole in Embracer’s finances left investors running for the hills; stock prices plummeted by 40 percent, and Embracer CEO Laws Wingefors signalled the beginning of a lengthy bout of cost-cutting.
Read more: Embracer Group | The giant that has changed the videogame industry for better or worse
From the summer of 2023 onwards, we’ve seen numerous studios close – Free Radical and Volition were two high-profile victims – and it’s reckoned that the total number of job losses over Embracer’s portfolio of companies amounts to 1,387.
In further grim news, Embracer has said that the ‘restructuring’ is still ongoing. In his CEO comments, Wingefors writes that while the company is “nearing completion of the [restructuring] program,” there is “room for further improvements of our financial performance, primarily within PC/console.”
Elsewhere, Wingefors has said that “Our overruling principle is to always maximise shareholder value in any given situation.”
For employees worried about their long-term futures, Embracer’s latest report provides far less reassurance.
