Embracer Group is now changing itself to three companies.
In a press release announced earlier today, Embracer explained that they would be retiring the Embracer name, and splitting into three, Asmodee, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends.
Asmodee is a company that specializes in publishing pen and paper tabletop games. Founded in 1995, they have been acquired by various companies through the years, with Embracer picking them up in 2022. They also have a video game division that specializes in publishing video game versions of their board games, such as 7 Wonders, Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan.
Coffee Stain & Friends will be a new entity, described in the press release as “a diverse gaming entity with a dual focus on indie and A/AA premium and free-to-play games for PC/console and mobile, with a high degree of recurring revenues.” Coffee Stain’s famous indie titles include Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Wreckfest, Teardown, Valheim. On the free to play side, they have titles like Easybrain, Sudoku.com, and also manage the likes of Star Trek Online and Dungeons and Dragons Neverwinter Online.
Finally, Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends will have the big AAA studios still under their name, and will also manage their ownership of properties like The Lord of The Rings and Tomb Raider. This is the one which we will likely follow most closely in the near future. This group will include Plaion, Freemode, and comic book company Dark Horse.
Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends studios will include Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster Studios, Eidos-Montréal, Flying Wild Hog Studios, and others. Other games under this company will include Dead Island, Killing Floor, Kingdom Come Deliverance, and Metro.
On a structural level, Embracer Group will spin off Asmodee and Coffee Stain & Friends into separate companies, and keep Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends. Eventually, Embracer itself will rebrand itself completely to Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends. Shareholders will essentially retain their shares across the three companies after they figure out all the details. And yes, Lars Wingefors, as the biggest shareholder at Embracer, will continue to have huge ownership shares at all three separate companies after the fact.
Thankfully, this is the end of the too big to succeed saga of Embracer Group. Spreading the risk by making them separate companies is transparently the right thing to do at this time, as people in one studio shouldn’t have to suffer layoffs if their games are still profitable, but a bigger project from another studio is not.
