Embracer CEO suggests he must shoulder much of the blame for a ‘long list’ of mistakes

Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors has suggested he must shoulder much of the blame for a “long list” of mistakes that led to a “painful” restructuring of the company.

After several years of rapid expansion through mergers and acquisitions, Embracer announced last May that a $2 billion deal had collapsed at the last minute, leading it to embark on a nine-month restructuring programme that resulted in almost 1,400 job cuts, studio closures, and the cancellation of tens of games.

The Swedish gaming giant and its CEO faced a backlash in the wake of the restructuring, which is now complete, and Wingefors told GamesIndustry.biz that a lot of the criticism levelled at him personally was probably fair.

“As a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you’ve made mistakes and if you could have done something differently,” he said.

“I’m sure I deserve a lot of criticism, but I don’t think my team or companies deserve all the criticism. I could take a lot of that blame myself. But ultimately I need to believe in the mission we set out and that is still valid, and we are now enabling that by doing this [new] structure.”

Wingefors was speaking following Embracer’s announcement on Monday that it plans to split into three separate entities—Asmodee, Coffee Stain & Friends and Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends—each of which will be listed as a separate company on Nasdasq Stockholm.

Asmodee will continue to operate as a publisher and distributor of board games, trading cards and digital board games.

Coffee Stain & Friends will focus on PC, console and mobile games, including “community-driven free-to-play games, LiveOps games and indie / AA games”.

It will operate under premium and free-to-play divisions, with the former segment consisting of Coffee Stain, THQ Nordic, Ghost Ship, Tuxedo Labs, Tarsier, Amplifier Game Invest and others.

Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends will focus on triple-A game development and publishing for PC and console. It will own the Lord of the Rings and Tomb Raider IPs, along with the likes of Dead Island, Metro and Kingdom Come Deliverance.

Studios joining Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends will include Crystal Dynamics, Dambuster, Eidos Montreal, Flying Wild Hog, Tripwire, Vertigo Games, Warhorse Studios and 4A Games.

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“I still feel I have the trust from many or all of my key entrepreneurs and CEOs that have joined the group,” Wingefors said. “It’s been difficult, but I think they all believed in the mission of Embracer. They also understand that the world has changed, we need to change.

“It’s painful. We can’t make all the games we wanted to make three years ago, but we need to adapt to it. We will still make games, we still have one of the biggest, if not the biggest, pipeline of games in the industry. And we have great plans over the coming years or decades.”