Welcome back to another brief roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Business business business!
Embracer: Embracer has been a dumpster fire of epic proportions over the last year as its leadership botched a massive deal, which crushed the company’s stock and forced it to scramble to achieve solvency, dumping workers and studios and games overboard – but not the C-suite people who screwed it up so badly along the way, of course. Never them. Anyway, the man who is for some reason still CEO of Embracer, Lars Wingefors, now says that with the sale of a hollowed-out Gearbox last week (accompanied by still more layoffs), the company’s restructuring is over and no more properties are being sold off – or purchased, for a while, which is good news and a large part of how Embracer got into this mess in the first place. We note again that Cryptic and its MMOs are still part of the Embracer umbrella, now chucked off to rest under Embracer’s Deca Games.
Riot Games: Remember way back in 2017 when Riot Games sued Chinese games company Moonton, alleging that it had infringed on its IPs with its titles Magic Rush: Heroes, Legends: 5v5 MOBA, and Mobile Legends: Bang Bang? Good, I hoped not; under no circumstances should anybody be wasting brain space on something called Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. Nevertheless, after the courts dismissed the case for jurisdictional reasons and sent it overseas, Tencent prevailed against Moonton’s CEO, and Riot tried to sue the company in California again in 2022, which also failed. Now, they’ve apparently settled their differences, and Riot has withdrawn the lawsuits, and that’s that.
Ubisoft: Finally, Kotaku is reporting that Ubisoft’s layoff spree continues now into spring as the company has dropped around 60 workers in the US (the Cary, NC branch) and the UK (the Newcastle branch). It sounds like the workers impacted are customer service employees and will add to the European staff losses already underway by the closure of Ubisoft Benelux.
