For years, Embracer Group has been sitting on legendary franchises such as Deus Ex, Saints Row, Thief, Red Faction, TimeSplitters, and Legacy of Kain as if they were forgotten boxes in a storage room. Now, through a new structure built around Fellowship Entertainment, the Swedish company wants to use its catalog more actively and allow external partners to revive long-dormant IPs.

Ten years after becoming one of the largest and most controversial conglomerates in the games industry, Embracer Group finally seems to have noticed that it did not merely buy studios, but also acquired franchises with real cultural value. In recent years, the Swedish company has mostly made headlines for brutal restructuring, studio closures, cancelled projects, and the fallout from a collapsed multibillion-dollar Saudi deal. Now, however, a different direction is taking shape: under Fellowship Entertainment, Embracer wants to better organize the licenses that could be much more than names gathering dust on a shelf.

According to the plan, Fellowship Entertainment will become one of the central divisions of the “new” Embracer Group, while continuing to operate under its current leadership. This unit will manage some of the company’s most important intellectual properties, including Tomb Raider, The Lord of the Rings, and Metro. That would already be a heavy package on its own, but the point is not simply to place the big names under one roof. The company specifically wants to build a model in which external studios, production companies, and partners can work with Embracer franchises across video games, films, television, and other multimedia formats.

Dark Horse And Licensing May Sit At The Center Of The Machine

One of the most important parts of the reorganization is the creation of a dedicated IP and licensing division. Its goal will be to increase revenue from franchises that the company has often failed to use properly. The American comic book publisher Dark Horse will become an operational part of this new unit, thanks to its long experience co-producing films and series with Hollywood partners. Embracer’s leadership sees this as a clear advantage, because the company is not only thinking about games, but also about broader entertainment exploitation.

Lars Wingefors, president of Embracer Group, said the company now wants to “more actively explore” agreements and partnerships that could bring its best-known brands back into motion. The list is strong enough by itself: Saints Row, Deus Ex, Red Faction, Thief, TimeSplitters, and Legacy of Kain. Several of these series have been shelved for years, or even decades, while others have only returned in forms that never amounted to a true revival. Wingefors also confirmed that the group will continue investing in more recent AAA franchises such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Dead Island, Darksiders, and Remnant.

The announcement is especially interesting because Embracer is now making plans for many of the very brands it previously treated rather poorly. Deus Ex, for example, remains one of the most important names in modern sci-fi role-playing, yet multiple reports indicated that a new game in development at Eidos-Montréal was eventually cancelled. Thief is another legacy without which the history of immersive sims and stealth games is hard to imagine, but it has not received a worthy modern continuation. As for Legacy of Kain, fans have been waiting for years for someone to take the series’ gothic fantasy world and time-bending mythology seriously again.

The Bitter Irony Is That Embracer Buried Several Of These Dreams Itself

There is a heavy dose of industry irony in this announcement. Embracer was the company responsible for cancelling the return of TimeSplitters, even though the project was being developed by Free Radical Design, the studio formed by the original creators of the series. It was also Embracer that shut down Volition, the developers of Saints Row, after its cost-cutting wave swept through the group. Behind that story was the collapse of a massive Saudi investment that never materialized, after which Embracer began aggressive restructuring and eliminated several teams that had built important franchises in the first place.

That makes the new strategy both promising and hard to forget. It is promising because Deus Ex, Thief, Red Faction, Saints Row, TimeSplitters, and Legacy of Kain are not museum pieces, but series that a strong studio could still turn into powerful modern games. It is hard to forget because many fans remember that in recent years Embracer often behaved not like a careful curator, but like a cold financial machine toward several of the teams and IPs it now wants to revalue. If Fellowship Entertainment really intends to bring these names back through external partnerships, the company will need more than a press-friendly strategy. It will need trust, the right developers, and a real understanding not only of what these franchises are worth, but of what made them matter in the first place.

Source: 3DJuegos