Volition's Legacy Will Live On Under Plaion

General news News 09/03/2023

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Although Volition has closed its doors after three decades (as we reported the other day), Embracer Group will not abandon the company’s IP.

While the studio is done for, with Volition’s latest game, the Saints Row reboot, is one of the titles in PlayStation Plus Essential’s September offering (while Sony rather cheekily hid at the end of the post that it would be hiking the price of 12-month subscriptions by at least 30% while making no announcement WHAT it would be giving in return), Volition has closed its doors, which is a ridiculous timing, especially from Sony’s point of view, except that the team has created several IPs in its existence.

First-person spaceship shooter (Descent), space combat simulator (FreeSpace 2), action RPG (Summoner)… but it’s Red Faction and Saints Row that most people know Volition for. Deep Silver, which is part of Plaion, announced on Twitter that the studio’s IP will live under Plaion, meaning that this branch of Embracer could license the rights to Red Faction and Saints Row to another developer if someone wanted to take them on. Perhaps another in-house studio could take over the Volition legacy, but let’s not forget that many of Embracer’s acquired IPs are not in use. Now, the Swedish conglomerate is admittedly focusing on the Lord of the Rings IP to maximize its revenue (while they bought the rights for a paltry $395 million, which is peanuts in this context).

Volition recently had two flopping games, with the Saints Row reboot preceded by 2017’s Agents of Mayhem. Embracer didn’t want to close the team at first, but after Volition moved from Deep Silver to Gearbox in November with the hope that Randy Pitchford and his team would have better control over their operations, they ended up here. (Gearbox Entertainment was also involved in the layoffs!) Their situation wasn’t helped because a planned $2 billion deal with Saudi Savvy Games didn’t materialize, so Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors decided to go for a full-scale reorganization.

Let’s see who would take on the development of a new Red Faction…

Source: WCCFTech

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)