A year after announcing their split into three companies, Embracer has finalized their plans with a change of name.
Last April 2024, Embracer revealed they would be splitting into three companies; Asmodee, Coffee Stain & Friends, and Middle-Earth & Friends. Embracer’s shareholders would get the equivalent values of their shares split into shares of all three companies. As we’ve seen, Embracer managed to pull this off, but given the obvious logistical challenge, they took some time to do it.
Asmodee covers the entire tabletop game business, including video game adaptations of those tabletop games. Embracer acquired them in 2022, and they finalized their split in February 2025, AKA just a few months ago.
That takes us to Embracer’s press release from yesterday. In their own words:
Embracer today announces its intention to spin-off Coffee Stain Group (previous working name “Coffee Stain & Friends”) into a standalone group of community-driven game developers and publishers by the end of calendar year 2025. The shares in Coffee Stain Group will be distributed to the shareholders of Embracer, and are intended to be listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market in Stockholm.
At the same time, Embracer Group AB are planned to be renamed Fellowship Entertainment (previous working name “Middle Earth & Friends”).
Coffee Stain & Friends are the developers who work on smaller scale games, that Embracer marketed as indie, but can now legitimately refer to themselves as indie. As they announced in 2024, this is the group developing and now publishing games like Deep Rock Galactic, Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, Wreckfest, Teardown, and Valheim.
Middle Earth & Friends received that name because they would be the company that gets to keep the AAA properties, including the Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings franchises. This is also the group that includes comic book publisher and media company Dark Horse.
The Embracer name will still stick around but in a completely different manner. Lars Wingefors, as the CEO of Embracer Group, is the biggest shareholder in all three companies. To ensure this deal goes through, Lars will establish a new privately held holding company called Embracer AB.
AB is an abbreviation for Aktiebolag, which is just the term for limited companies under Swedish jurisdiction. Embracer AB, in its capacity as a private limited company, will function as the largest shareholder of Asmodee, Coffee Stain Group, and Fellowship Entertainment.
In general, it certainly looks like this will be the best way for Embracer to go forward. The smaller size of the three companies should make them less susceptible to the risks and issues that the company originally went through. And hopefully, that means these companies won’t be going through more cycles of layoffs and studio closures, but that will now depend on how each studio does business moving forward. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fellowship sells or splits off to even more companies as some more studios leave in the future, possibly by Fellowship’s hand.
But for now, we wish the best for all the studios and developers working for Embracer Group, who will now be working in new smaller, and hopefully more sustainable, game companies.
