Last summer, the Swedish conglomerate, which recently announced layoffs, acquired the Lord of the Rings rights, but until now, we didn’t know how much they paid for them.
Variety reported that Embracer Group had revealed in its annual report how much it had to pay for what is probably the world’s best-known fantasy franchise. Embracer paid the Saul Zaentz Company about 4.2 billion SEK, or about $395 million. With the rights, the company can make movies, video games, board games, merchandise, theme parks, and stage productions, but the package was estimated to be worth about $2 billion! For a fifth of that, Lars Wingefors has snapped up the rights…
Matthew Karch, the recently appointed interim Chief Operating Officer, also stated that Embracer wants to turn the Lord of the Rings rights into one of the biggest video game franchises and that it will be one of their main goals for the future, and as they have recently started a restructuring within the company, they will have more resources to do this: “We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world. And that’s something we’re going to be doing. That’s a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on. Working together, we have those opportunities, and we’re super excited to see that put to work relatively quickly.”
In addition to them, we’ve already heard about two Lord of the Rings games. The Lords of the Rings: Return to Moria, which focuses on the dwarves” survival, will be released sometime in the fall, and Amazon Games is making another MMO, but this time it’s not with a Chinese tech company (there was a previous collaboration, but it didn’t ultimately go through). Beyond that, Embracer Group has undoubtedly started giving several of its subsidiaries the thumbs up to Tolkien. Gearbox, for example, might be the exception, as the Borderlands developers would be hard to see them doing that…
Source: WCCFTech
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