Embracer Group recently made the decision to split into three seperate companies after rounds of mass layoffs and game cancellations at the company. All of this can be traced back to decisions made by CEO Lars Wingefors, who has earned a very negative reputation in the gaming industry lately. Speaking candidly in a recent interview, Wingefors said “I’m sure I deserve a lot of criticism,” addressing the layoffs and scrapped projects.
“I’m sure I deserve a lot of criticism,” said the CEO in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, acknowledging that a lot of the blame is put on his shoulders. “But I don’t think my team or companies deserve all the criticism. I could take a lot of that blame myself. But ultimately I need to believe in the mission we set out and that is still valid, and we are now enabling that by doing this [new] structure.”
Wingefors goes on to talk about the decision to split Embracer Group into three companies – a move that allows each company to now independently oversee various levels of game and tabletop development:
“I still feel I have the trust from many or all of my key entrepreneurs and CEOs that have joined the group. It’s been difficult, but I think they all believed in the mission of Embracer. They also understand that the world has changed, we need to change. It’s painful. We can’t make all the games we wanted to make three years ago, but we need to adapt to it. We will still make games, we still have one of the biggest, if not the biggest, pipeline of games in the industry. And we have great plans over the coming years or decades.”
Wingefors later mentions that the reality of the situation is grim, referring to the 900 employees it laid off last year at Embracer Group and the sudden cancellation of 15 games including a new Deus Ex game at Eidos Montreal:
“As a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you’ve made mistakes and if you could have done something differently. In every given moment, you are making decisions you believe are right. When we were at the peak of 2020, 2021, we made all those decisions to acquire or organically set up or invest… and everyone was backing that. I firmly believed in that. The outcome, because it takes a number of years to make games, is different and it’s painful and we need to adapt to it. We have been trying to safeguard as many jobs as possible. We’ve been trying to find new homes for teams and people… It’s easy to look back in hindsight on things.”
Source: GamesIndustry.biz
