The state of Lara Croft is a curious one. She’s about to get a big animated series over on Netflix starring Hayley Atwell, and many think it could be really good. The legendary gaming icon has also been crossing over into other games recently, including certain horror titles and some other genres. However, for her main series, the future is still a bit murky. If you recall, she had a reboot-style trilogy of games via Crystal Dynamics, with Square Enix as the publisher. Then, almost randomly, they dropped Crystal Dynamics and Tomb Raider, which The Embracer Group then picked up.
Crystal Dynamics is developing the next title in the line, with the twist being that Amazon Games will serve as the publisher this time. The problem is that The Embracer Group has been hitting many of its gaming studios with layoffs and “restructuring” efforts, and that hit Crystal Dynamics. However, in a chat with IGN, Amazon Games head Christopher Hartmann claimed that the studio is doing fine and they’re simply trying to complete Lara’s next game:
“The studio, from what I can tell, is fairly sheltered from everything going on with Embracer. I mean, it has to because Embracer never was one company. It was just an accumulation of an incredibly large amount of independent businesses; and it’s not just games development, they’re like books and games and this and that. And they always were very sheltered. People obviously look at what the parent company is doing, but it never impacted on resources, never led to any changes on management for them, so they’re fine.”
One could interpret many things from those lines, but we’ll pause for now to go to another quote he made about the status of Lara’s return to gaming:
“I mean, doing a new Tomb Raider, the bar is so high. The longer you go, the expectation goes higher, so it’s a huge, huge task, but things are progressing.”
He also noted that there were some “big ideas” going around for the game, though he wouldn’t say exactly what was pitched.
While it’s nice to hear that things are “progressing,” it’s important to note that The Embracer Group has gutted gaming companies while they were in the middle of doing a project, including laying off 50% of one staff while they were working on a high-profile property.
So, while Lara Croft may be immune from true death in her gaming universe, this might be one foe she can’t stop if they decide to turn against her.
