Club PA Newsletter #96 (Patreon)

Hey!  It me.  Which is Jerry - I guess I should make that clear.  I am the one that some of you saw at the last PAX East meetup, which I had a lot of fun at, except for when my mom was sending me videos from Tucker Carlson for some reason.  I just replied with the word "NO" in all caps.

The Embracer Group just sounds like a scary name.  Aside from the fact that this is the term in Vampire: The Masquerade for literally biting people so hard they become vampires, anytime you have to purposefully call out what you do - in this case, embrace things - I always wonder if that's what you're actually doing.  In this most recent case, they scooped up some teams and IP who might do with a different home.  You'll note that a few years ago IO Interactive (creators of the Hitman games) bought <i>themselves</i> out of Square-Enix, and they've found great success since.  They're working on an official 007 game now, and it's like…  yeah.  That tracks.

Embracer Group used to be called THQ Nordic, who made a few moves collecting gaming brands for a while, but their holdings are fascinating in their scale: most noteworthy to me are, uh, Gearbox, sort of a big deal there, and indie powerhouse Coffee Stain (Valheim, Satisfactory, Deep Rock Galactic, and the freshly into early access Songs of Conquest).  Also, uh, Dark Horse?  But most noteworthy to me at least, underneath all the rest, is Asmodee; the company is virtually synonymous with boardgaming as a hobby and as an industry.  There is a weird amount of potential in there, with these physical goods so near this amount of digital talent.  Is it possible to extract it?  That might be a little more complicated than buying companies.

Also, look for Lexcalibur to ship in Early June!  Books are on their way, and there's some proofs that came in I'm dying to see.  Mike was able to get something I really wanted to see in there and I hope it feels the way it did in my imagination.

Yours,

(CW)TB