The Rise and Fall of Embracer (aka THQ Nordic)

[BlackAdderBG]

Investing in a billion IPs, especially undervalued ones that you can get for relative peanuts, is just textbook risk management. Eventually one of them will give you a hit which will smoothen out the losses for the failures, that's how the market works.

BlackAdderBG it's the same logic as agents for actors in Hollywood - if they have enough capital, agents usually have multiple clients to mitigate individual risk. The expectation is for the successes to outweigh the losses. In a broader sense, it's just basic speculation.

How about you show gaming cases where that worked first. Only thing I can think of in recent years is Ubisoft and Square Enix and that didn't work at all- zero hits.

 

[Dexter]

Generally throwing stuff to the wall and see what stick isn't a good business strategy.A lot of them are bound to fail and end up in money loss.Big publishers have trimmed their number of projects for a reason

That's actually a really good business strategy if they're not looking to make THE blockbuster game making BILLIONS, but many well-selling games making a good profit and maybe develop larger franchises.

You won't have your own Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, but one successful game selling 2-3 million copies could make some good money and subvention another 10-20 projects. You don't run into the trap that makes you invest anywhere from $100-250 million into a single game, see it fail and drive your company bankrupt because selling 4-5 million copies apparently still ain't enough: https://www.dsogaming.com/news/dead...on-copies-still-wasnt-enough-electronic-arts/

You budget various games at KickStarter development price of $5-10 million or slightly above depending on how promising something is and how trustworthy the developer is and you can create (very) profitable AA games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Jurassic World Evolution, ELEX, Frostpunk or similar.

Since someone brought up UbiSoft:

I don't think this strategy actually works and Ubisoft's past shows that, none of their smaller projects worked and became big hits. All of the big publishers have cash cows and make them AAA from the start.

This is Fake News, they had a lot of smaller games and experimental projects that developed into franchises, even Assassin's Creed started out that way, but I think you're forgetting all the Tom Clancy stuff, Rayman, Rabbids, Just Dance or even Prince of Persia/Anno and all the Nintendo stuff they released like "Imagine", "My Coach" or "Petz".

It seems concerning though that they went on a buying spree without waiting for the results/fruits of their earlier acquisitions, and some of them seem kind of perplexing and more like IP hoarding. For instance, did they need to buy Outcast? Are they actually planning to develop a game in said franchise or was it some sort of strategic purchase? What makes them believe another game in it would be more successful than the Remake? Same thing with for instance Carmageddon or Timesplitters and... Goat Simulator?

 

[BlackAdderBG]

This is Fake News, they had a lot of smaller games and experimental projects that developed into franchises, even Assassin's Creed started out that way, but I think you're forgetting all the Tom Clancy stuff, Rayman, Rabbids, Just Dance or even Prince of Persia/Anno and all the Nintendo stuff they released like "Imagine", "My Coach" or "Petz".

Assassin's Creed budget was 20 mil. and Tom Clancy,Anno and PoP games are not experimental lol.

 

[Infinitron]

It seems concerning though that they went on a buying spree without waiting for the results/fruits of their earlier acquisitions, and some of them seem kind of perplexing and more like IP hoarding. For instance, did they need to buy Outcast? Are they actually planning to develop a game in said franchise or was it some sort of strategic purchase? What makes them believe another game in it would be more successful than the Remake? Same thing with for instance Carmageddon or Timesplitters and... Goat Simulator?

Well remember that they're buying not just the rights to make new games with these IPs but also long tail revenue streams from selling the old games on Steam. That adds up.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Investing in a billion IPs, especially undervalued ones that you can get for relative peanuts, is just textbook risk management. Eventually one of them will give you a hit which will smoothen out the losses for the failures, that's how the market works.

BlackAdderBG it's the same logic as agents for actors in Hollywood - if they have enough capital, agents usually have multiple clients to mitigate individual risk. The expectation is for the successes to outweigh the losses. In a broader sense, it's just basic speculation.

How about you show gaming cases where that worked first. Only thing I can think of in recent years is Ubisoft and Square Enix and that didn't work at all- zero hits.

What do you mean, 'worked'? It's a principle. I'm not defending a practice, just describing how basic risk management functions.

Microsoft acquired a bunch of shit studios, the vast majority of which that led to nothing - among them, it bought the then-relatively unknown (at least to the unwashed console peasants who had never heard of Myth) Bungie in 2000, which made them a fortune and put them on the console hardware map, helping them debunk the previous leader (Sony) for en entire generation. Activision wasn't so lucky, but it hedged its bets on a reasonably sound investment at that point.

EA acquired a bunch of studios and killed off most of them by slave-driving their employess into producing shovelware, but among its many mistakes it also bought Bioware, Popcap games and Respawn Entertainment, the first of which are nearly dead but which made them billions of dollars in revenue over the years. Respawn made 2 good games that were commercial duds (Titanfall 1 and 2), but now they're king of the hill with the most played game in the world, Apex Legends. I believe it's a fad, but CEOs are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is unfortunate that good companies die off while being bought by speculators such as EA and Ubishit, but from a business perspective, it's all risk management.

 

[Sacred82]

Microsoft acquired a bunch of shit studios, the vast majority of which that led to nothing - among them, it bought the then-relatively unknown (at least to the unwashed console peasants who had never heard of Myth) Bungie in 2000, which made them a fortune and put them on the console hardware map, helping them debunk the previous leader (Sony) for en entire generation.

lol if you think the Western console market even constitutes a market in the big picture

there's no such thing as an "unvervalued IP". IP's are constituted of nothing but their established fanbase. Ideas are ten a penny, and a more recognizable IP only translates to potentially more people offended by it. IF an IP has made it big - for whatever reason in reality and for whatever reason you think that is - that's when you know you want to get it. Dying IP's that once had that mass appeal may seem like a bargain, but then some ripoff might serve just as well.

EA really cannot serve as an example of risk management If anything, EA has been too big since forever to actually run the risk of sinking more money than they could afford, among other, less savory business practices. If only a fraction of the stories of EA's project management that have surfaced over the years are true, those guys don't even qualify as ruthless business people. They're too retarded for that. They're the kind of "ruthless business people" who can be heard screaming "Money money! Reeeeeeeeee" *autistic screeching* when confronted with the actual development processes of their products.

If anything, and that goes for EA as well (making them seem slightly less retarded), acquiring a whole slew of IP's/ studios reeks strongly of sabotage. Those studios closing doors relatively quietly after a few years is actually what the whole deal was really about.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Investing in a billion IPs, especially undervalued ones that you can get for relative peanuts, is just textbook risk management. Eventually one of them will give you a hit which will smoothen out the losses for the failures, that's how the market works.

BlackAdderBG it's the same logic as agents for actors in Hollywood - if they have enough capital, agents usually have multiple clients to mitigate individual risk. The expectation is for the successes to outweigh the losses. In a broader sense, it's just basic speculation.

How about you show gaming cases where that worked first. Only thing I can think of in recent years is Ubisoft and Square Enix and that didn't work at all- zero hits.

What do you mean, 'worked'? It's a principle. I'm not defending a practice, just describing how basic risk management functions.

Microsoft acquired a bunch of shit studios, the vast majority of which that led to nothing - among them, it bought the then-relatively unknown (at least to the unwashed console peasants who had never heard of Myth) Bungie in 2000, which made them a fortune and put them on the console hardware map, helping them debunk the previous leader (Sony) for en entire generation. Activision wasn't so lucky, but it hedged its bets on a reasonably sound investment at that point.

EA acquired a bunch of studios and killed off most of them by slave-driving their employess into producing shovelware, but among its many mistakes it also bought Bioware, Popcap games and Respawn Entertainment, the first of which are nearly dead but which made them billions of dollars in revenue over the years. Respawn made 2 good games that were commercial duds (Titanfall 1 and 2), but now they're king of the hill with the most played game in the world, Apex Legends. I believe it's a fad, but CEOs are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is unfortunate that good companies die off while being bought by speculators such as EA and Ubishit, but from a business perspective, it's all risk management.

This is not what THQ Nordic is doing. EA, Microsoft and all that gave the bought dev studios big budgets and were making AAA games from the get go. Most of them were not obscure studios, half of which don't even have a wiki page.

You said "billion IPs...you can get for relative peanuts...Eventually one of them will give you a hit"

I wanted example of that actually working in the gaming industry and that didn't happen 20 years ago.

Three years from now we will read about the bankruptcy of THQ Nordic is what I'm getting at.

 

[DeepOcean]

Keeping in mind that demanding from a past example of that "working" (of course, people can always redefine what working means) is kind of pointless, digital distribution exploded a few years back for example, making a ton of games and trying to cram all those games on complex physical distribution pipelines would be a nightmare but digital is a game changer as you can pretty much release and forget alot of games at the same time, there are things like the ready made Engines made for dummies like Unity as well that made game development alot easier, no investor in the world would give millions of dollars for IP acquisition like people did for THQ Nordic if they didn't have a sound business plan.

You can't just go to investors and say "Please, gimme your money while my plan is only sunshine and roses full of overwhelming optimism.Pretty please?", it will be impossible to know as we don't have the numbers. If they are going to achieve it is another story. I think they seem to be happy occupying the AA space for now and that is good for us. Take Spell Force III, if they sold enough of fucking Spell Force to manage to make a standalone expansion, that game made its budget. Take what the CEO said, they don't recognize the differences between indie, AA and AAA, meaning that many of those 77 ips/projects are actually really low budget stuff on the indie space and they buying IPs like crazy like Infinitron said to milk legacy sales so how much of the ips they have are actually active?

I hope they are successful and know what they are doing, the world doesn't need yet another EA.

 

[Latelistener]

They also established Grimlore Games, which made Spellforce 3. I heard the game has a good RPG part, so theoretically they could make a decent RPG in the future.

 

[Dexter]

Wasn't this just posted a few pages back?

"I told everyone that we would do acquisitions and organically invest in our own development, and this year we've started to see the first fruits from that," he tells GamesIndustry.biz.

"Many things have happened this year. I told everyone from the beginning that this would all take time - it takes time to develop games, at least three years - so it's been great to show our stakeholders, whether that's employees, shareholders or the industry, that we've started delivering."

By far the standout acquisition has been the €121 million purchase of Koch Media -- and one that has most definitely paid off. In the first quarter after the acquisition, the addition of Koch's games to the balance sheet saw revenues increase by 673% -- in the most recent financials, this rocketed to 1,403%. Profits are also up, rising by 65% year-on-year in Q3 and almost tripling year-on-year for January 1 to September 30, up 179.5%.

How can people earnestly talk about some sort of "impending bankruptcy" if by all metrics they seem to be doing more than fine, and they just released Metro: Exodus, Darksiders 3 and acquired Kingdom Come?

 

[Infinitron]

Besides Piranha Bytes acquisition, there is other news: https://news.cision.com/thq-nordic-...d-q5--operational-ebit-increased-217,c2822061

Metro Exodus performed "in line with expectations". Satisfactory exceeded expectations. 48 unannounced titles.

THQ Nordic publishes Extended Financial Year Report 2018-2019 and Q5: Operational EBIT increased 217% to SEK 396 million in the quarter
WED, MAY 22, 2019 06:00 CET

JANUARY–MARCH 2019

(Compared to January–March 2018)

• Net sales increased 158% to SEK 1,630.5 m (632.9).
• EBITDA increased 174% to SEK 618.6 m (225.9), corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 38%.
• Operational EBIT increased 217% to SEK 395.9 m (124.9) corresponding to an Operational EBIT margin of 24%.
• Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 777.2 m (699.8).
• Earnings per share was SEK 1.10 (1.02).

JANUARY 2018–MARCH 2019, 15 MONTHS

(Compared to full year 2017)

• Net sales increased to SEK 5,754.1 m (507.5).
• EBITDA increased to SEK 1,592.6 m (272.6), corresponding to an EBITDA margin of 28%.
• Operational EBIT increased to SEK 897.1 m (202.3) corresponding to an Operational EBIT margin of 16%.
• Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 1,356.4 m (179.1).
• Earnings per share was SEK 4.68 (1.88).
• As of 31 March 2019, cash and cash equivalents were SEK 2,929.1 m. Available cash including credit facilities was SEK 4,521.1 m.

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS AND CEO COMMENTS

We ended the extended financial year 2018-2019 with another stable growth quarter. Net sales increased 158% to SEK 1,630 million, primarily driven by the February release of Metro Exodus. Operational EBIT grew 217% to SEK 396 million, mainly driven by the performance of Metro Exodus and Satisfactory. We had solid cash flow from operating activities of SEK 777 million in the quarter and close to SEK 3 billion in cash at the end of the quarter. All three operative groups contributed to the Group’s Operational EBIT in the quarter.

We are operating in a dynamic market with increasing competition between new and established digital distribution platforms, which will benefit content producers, including THQ Nordic Group. Since the beginning of 2019, the Group has signed multiple deals with notable value relating to our content on digital subscription, streaming and download services on various platforms. As we look ahead over the coming years, these deals will help us create compelling content for our players while also reducing financial risk to the company. Revenue recognition will not begin until the games are released.

SOLID PERFORMANCE IN ALL BUSINESS AREAS

Net sales of business area Deep Silver were SEK 794 million, largely driven by the release of Metro Exodus, the largest game launch so far in the history of the Group. Overall, the game has performed in line with management’s expectations and has recouped all investments in development and marketing. Net sales in the Partner Publishing business were SEK 596 million, driven by several notable releases from our partners. Looking to the current quarter, ending in June, there will be fewer releases than in the past quarter.

Net sales of business area THQ Nordic increased 6% to SEK 143 million, despite no major releases to match last year’s notable release of MX vs ATV All Out!.

Net sales of business area Coffee Stain were SEK 98 million. In the quarter we had a successful early access launch of Satisfactory on the Epic Games store. The game’s launch performance exceeded management’s expectations at the time of our acquisition of Coffee Stain.

We invested SEK 305.2 million in our growing development pipeline that will be driving the Group’s growth and profitability in the coming years. During the period we signed multiple new projects, among them a new development agreement with 4A Games, the developers of the Metro franchise, for their upcoming, still undisclosed, AAA-project. By the end of the quarter, THQ Nordic, Deep Silver and Coffee Stain had 80 games in development, of which 48 titles are currently unannounced.

 

[Anthedon]

48 unannounced titles, Jesus Shovelware Christ.

 

[a Goat]

48 unannounced titles.

Wow

 

[rusty_shackleford]

For the amount of titles they're putting out it doesn't seem like they're making much money compared to similar publishers tbh

 

[Abu Antar]

48 unannounced titles, Jesus Shovelware Christ.

As long as they give me ELEX 2, they can have 99 shovelware titles.

 

[DeepOcean]

THQ method of making games:

Spoiler

We only need one to have an incline baby guise.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

From Nordic Games Who??? to THQ Shovelware in a short five years. I'm not convinced (yet).

 

[A_boring_GOG_bot]

One day this big THQ Nordic balloon will burst .

 

[Harry Easter]

THQ method of making games:

Spoiler

We only need one to have an incline baby guise.

Either that or their investors can use that somehow for taxcuts. It's weird how this stuff works :D.

 

[DalekFlay]

THQ method of making games:

Spoiler

We only need one to have an incline baby guise.

Better than sinking all your money into something designed to appeal to everyone and their mother, then going out of business when it only sells okay.

 

[Hobo Elf]

One day this big THQ Nordic balloon will burst .

And one day everything is going to be dust. What's your point?

 

[HoboForEternity]

"just enjoy good games that came out of this while it last"

seems pretty good if they can do it for several years before, like the sun out of fuel began imploding and goes supernova.

 

[Terenty]

Does it mean Piranha Bytes will have bigger budget for Elex 2?

 

[unfairlight]

Does it mean Piranha Bytes will have bigger budget for Elex 2?

Maybe. It's probably up to how their games sell, if they sell better than expected, expect larger budgets. If they flop, expect less. THQ Nordic has not yet really had a chance to show how scalable they are with projects and how high they are willing to go with budgets, but with so many projects in production we'll no doubt find out soon.