Saber CEO Matthew Karch has entered a no-holds barred interview with IGN about his company’s experience with Embracer Group. But what he has to say is probably going to surprise you.
Talking to Rebekah Valentine, Karch says he has no regrets about their partnership, and calls Embracer’s CEO Lars Wingefors a good person and a man of his word. To paraphrase Matthew, he found that Embracer was “supportive of our ambitions to replicate what we thought we were successful at doing, and to find a way to increase the speed at which we could develop product and bring content to market.”
So, we’re sure the first thing you’re thinking of is, what about the hundreds of layoffs Embracer did, including in Saber itself? Here’s Matthew’s perspective on things, as someone who was in the company itself as it happened:
“Embracer is as small-town and homegrown of a large organization as you’re ever going to see. It’s not a company which wants to spit out a thousand Lord of the Rings games regardless of whether or not those Lord of the Rings games are going to hurt the license.
That’s not the way Embracer operates. It’s not the way Lars operates. He loves IP. He loves games. He loves game developers. He got to start in comics. God knows how long ago, and he’s just a good human being, and he cares about his people.
But when the market shifted, the market lost patience. And when the market lost patience, hard decisions had to be made because there was just no way to sustain everything that was going on. And so that’s why the layoffs occurred.”
Matthew elaborates further, after being prodded that Embracer still fired people, whether Lars was a good guy or not:
“It’s very easy to look from the outside at a situation when you’re not familiar with the people in this situation or what guides those people and to draw conclusions.
You could state that a lot of the jobs that were lost were jobs that wouldn’t have otherwise been created…Some of the studios that we’re taking with us would never have been able to grow the way they’ve grown.
No way. We’ve created a lot of jobs, and they may have, especially in this market downturn, been out of business in any event because capital has just dried up, not just at Embracer, but everywhere. There was a long period of time when nobody was investing at all.”
Matthew then points out the bad decisions he thinks Embracer did make, such as acquiring Gearbox Software. Gearbox’s projects were too high risk, high reward for the gaming company to take on, especially when Take-Two or Gearbox could have been taking those risks for themselves.
But it seems, Matthew is pointing out that the popular online perception isn’t reality. In fact, Matthew has argued that Saber itself blossomed under Embracer, because they were able to grow the way they wanted with Embracer’s backing. Matthew also correctly points out, in spite of the large amount of attention pointed their way, that other game companies have also done huge layoffs.
This may be a hard pill to swallow for many of Embracer’s former studios and employees. After all, they actually closed Volition. But it’s worth considering this viewpoint, that if Embracer’s management was foolish to take on risks for Savvy Games when they could renege, they weren’t being greedy.
