Three hundred million dollars, or 285 million euros: this is the price at which the Swedish group Embracer announced on Monday May 2preparing to buy the North American divisions of the Japanese video game publisher Square Enix.
The takeover should be effective in the third quarter of 2022 and will complete Embracer’s making of a juggernaut of video games – and games, period. Indeed, in addition to a hundred video game studios already in its fold, including Gearbox (Borderlands), 4A Games (Metro Exodus), Volition (Saints Row), Free Radical Design (TimeSplitters), DigixArt (Road 96), Dambuster Studios (Dead Island 2), Saber Interactive (World War Z), Gunfire Games (Darksiders), 3D Realms (Bombshell), Flying Wild Hog (Shadow Warrior) or Piranha Bytes (ELEX), Embracer also owns Asmodee, the main publisher of board games in France, which it bought in 2021 at a high price of 3 billion euros.
With the acquisition, this time, of the North American subsidiaries of Square Enix, the Swedish group does not only pay for video game studios with more than a thousand employees between them: it acquires above all a catalog of more than fifty games, as well as that many intellectual properties, some of which are among the most prestigious in the industry – Deus Ex, Thief, Legacy of Kain and especially, Tomb Raider.
As detailed by Square Enix on Monday in a press releasethe Japanese company remains the owner of the trademarks Just Cause, Outriders et Life is Strange. She also explains that this $300 million transaction should allow her “to invest in blockchain, artificial intelligence and the cloud”.
A price that may have surprised observers, however, as recent months have seen sales of the companies Zynga (bought by Take-Two Interactive for 12.7 billion dollars) and Zenimax Media and Activision Blizzard (bought by Microsoft , respectively 8.1 billion and 68.7 billion dollars) reach record levels. Even Embracer had, in 2020, disbursed 525 million dollars (499 million euros) to acquire Saber Interactive, a studio with a less brilliant CV, then specialized in porting existing games to new media.
Two historic studios
In comparison, the small amount of this last transaction is therefore all the more surprising since, in addition to Square Enix Montreal, a studio founded in 2011 and responsible for developing mobile games (in particular the series of « Go » : Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go et Deus Ex Go), Embracer mainly gets its hands on two historical studios: the Californian Crystal Dynamics and the Canadian Eidos Montreal.
Founded in 1992, Crystal Dynamics was initially best known for Gex, a platform game for the 3DO console, more graphically impressive than playfully striking. After joining the Eidos Interactive team in 1998, the studio revealed its full potential by starting to work on the series Legacy of Kainof which he will sign most of the episodes until 2004.
On the strength of these successes, in 2006 he recovered the license Tomb Raider, confiscated from its creators, the British studio Core Design, also owned by Eidos. Crystal Dynamics then signs a trilogy of new episodes well received by critics, which gives a facelift to the icon with the aura then damaged.
In 2009, Eidos Interactive was taken over by Square Enix, which sought to diversify its catalog, hitherto very focused on the Japanese market. A second trilogy Tomb Raider is then started, of which Crystal Dynamics will develop the first two episodes: the critical success is even greater, even if sales are gradually running out of steam. After the box of the initial episode, each sequel achieves sales 20% to 25% lower than that of the previous opus.
A hard blow for the Californian studio, followed by the failure of its adaptation of the universe of Avengers, from Marvel: very criticized when it was released in 2020, it’s a flop costing Square Enix tens of millions of dollars. Currently, besides a reboot of the shooting game series Perfect Dark developed on behalf of Microsoft, Crystal Dynamics is working on a new episode of the series Tomb Raiderunveiled April 5, 2022.
For its part, the Canadian studio Eidos Montreal was founded in 2007, barely fifteen months before its British parent company was bought by Square Enix. On behalf of the Japanese group, he too will work until 2016 to give new episodes to an aging series that is nevertheless adored by gamers: role-playing and action games. Deus Ex.
With less success than Crystal Dynamics however, since after only two episodes, Eidos Montreal is instead entrusted with the development of the latest opus to date of Tomb Raider (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, 2018). He has since helped Crystal Dynamics on the game Avengersbefore developing his own adaptation of the Marvel universe, a Guardians of the Galaxy critically acclaimed in 2021.