The Swedish company, formerly known as THQ Nordic AB, continues expanding, and one of the new acquisitions seem quite suspicious…

The biggest surprise is that Embracer Group and The Gearbox Entertainment Company enter a merger. Gearbox and its CEO, Randy Pitchford will become significant shareholders in Embracer Group, becoming its seventh operative group (joining others, such as THQ Nordic, or Saber Interactive). With the merger, collaborations can happen within Embracer Group regarding development, publishing, technology, and intellectual properties, plus Embracer now gets a foothold for further acquisitions and mergers in North America. The 1.3-billion transaction is planned to close by May, and Pitchford continues to lead Gearbox.

Embracer also announced that Aspyr Media (which employes 140 people and deals with both development and publishing) has been purchased, and will be put under the arms of Saber Interactive. We’ll only quote this part from the press release: Aspyr Media „has an exciting pipeline and is looking to build on its’ vast catalogue during the next few years as well as to bring out new content based on multiple licensed IP.” But wait, it gets better. They have several games are in development, including „one major ongoing game development project with an approximate budget of $70 million that is expected to become important for the entire group.” And guess what has been rumoured about Aspyr recently? We suspect that they not only work on the console re-releases of the first two Star Wars: Knights of the Republic, but also the rumoured remake…

Finally, Embracer confirmed that a lead mobile developer (developing advertising-based puzzle and logic games, their 15 live titles have 12 million daily active users and 750 million installs), Easybrain, is going to merge with them, making Easybrain Embracer’s 8th operative group. This transaction is expected to close in two months. Peter Skoromnyi, Matvey Timoshenko, and Oleg Grushevich, the senior management, will become the third-largest shareholder in Embracer Group.

Now you likely understand why we have been saying for years that the Sweden-based Embracer Group should be looked at closely – now even Gearbox and Aspyr Media belong to them!

Source: Gematsu, Gematsu, Gematsu