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Embracer Group continues buying spree, adds Lord of the Rings IP, game studios

By George Yang Published August 18, 2022

Video game giant Embracer Group has obtained the rights for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien through its acquisition of Middle-earth Enterprises. The holdings company also acquired multiple other gaming studios to form its new group, Embracer Freemode.

Embracer Group has made major acquisitions recently, positioning it as one of gaming’s biggest forces. It made headlines earlier this year when it acquired Square Enix’s Western studios, obtaining the IP rights to franchises like Deus Ex. Now, the company holds the rights to the Lord of the Ring series — not just the rights to publish video games based on the franchise, but the entire IP.

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The Lord of the Rings purchase is the most shocking bit of news from Embracer’s acquisition spree, but it’s only small piece of the company’s buying binge. Embracer Freemode will include the newly purchased Limited Run Games, Tuxedo Labs, Bitwave Games, Gioteck, Tripwire Interactive, Singtrix, and Tatsujin.

“Creators by their nature are at the forefront of industry-leading innovation and disruption, Lee Guinchard, Freemode CEO, said. “Founders are empowered to realize their true creative vision. Ultimately, our goal is to provide our entrepreneur-led companies with the essential resources to deliver the most exciting entertainment experiences for fans around the world.”

Bitwave Game, Tripwire Interactive, and Tuxedo Labs are game development studios. Bitwave also announced that it will be rereleasing retro titles like Truxton, Twin Cobra, Out Zone, and Zero Wing later this year. Tripwire is best known for games such as Killing Floor and Maneater, while Tuxedo Labs is the studio behind Teardown.

Tatsujin is Embracer’s first Japanese studio, led by Masahiro Yuge. Singtrix and Gioteck are more product companies, with the former focusing on music and audio gaming products while the latter creates gaming accessories like headsets and controllers. Limited Run Games creates physical copies of games and collector’s editions.

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George Yang is a freelance games writer for Digital Trends. He has written for places such as IGN, GameSpot, The Washington…

Gaming

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum publisher lays off internal development staff

Gollum stares at a cruel woman in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.

The developer and publisher behind The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Daedalic Entertainment, laid off its internal development staff so it can focus on game publishing going forward.

Daedalic Entertainment made a name for itself by developing and publishing a lot of adventure games and RPGs in the 2010s. It developed series like Deponia and Blackguards and published games like Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Inkulinati. Nacon acquired Daedalic in February 2022, ahead of the release of what was supposed to be its most ambitious title, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. When the game finally came out in May 2023 after multiple delays, it was a train wreck.
The game was near-unplayable for reviewers ahead of launch, and even when the game did work, its design felt outdated and unpolished. Digital Trends' one-star review of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum called it "a disaster in a way that I sincerely thought wasn’t possible anymore." Earlier today, German outlet Games Wirtschaft reported that Daedalic had closed its development branch, and the company confirmed that to Digital Trends in a statement.
"Daedalic Entertainment has made the decision to close its development department, with full focus now on our publishing business. Eight promising releases will be launching in this financial year alone," a spokesperson for Daedalic said. "Even though The Lord of the Rings: Gollum did not live up to the expectations we had for the game, we are very grateful for the opportunity and the learning experience it brought us."
Daedalic confirmed to Digital Trends that another Gollum patch is in the works but that an upcoming The Lord of the Rings game from Daedalic is canceled. It's a sad end to the Gollum saga for the developers involved, although Daedalic wants to frame this situation as a "new beginning" for the company.
"Currently, we are working on another patch for The Lord of the Rings: Gollum," the spokesperson continued. "A follow-up project in The Lord of the Rings universe that has already been started will be discontinued. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, as the body responsible for the federal funding, was informed of this some time ago. We value each and every member of our team very much, and it is important to us that the transition goes as well as possible. We will therefore support our former employees in finding new opportunities within our network. A difficult break, but also a new beginning in the already long history of Daedalic Entertainment."
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch.

Gaming

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was too broken to review on PS5

Gollum stares at the eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum key art.

Update (5/26): We returned to the PlayStation 5 version of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum after Update version 1.003.000 was released, and have found the experience has improved notably. It does still feature plenty of bugs, which we experienced on the PC version, but it's far more stable on console now. Progression-preventing glitches have disappeared, and the updated PS5 version has yet to crash on us. If you're grabbing the game on console, make sure to download the patch before starting.

What's unclear is how many of the problems were actually fixed. During the review period, Nacon's PR team attributed Gollum's performance problems in part to a setting that animated the character's hair. The patch appears to remove that option from the game entirely. It's likely that the problems the toggle was causing still persist behind the scenes, so it's hard to say if the game was fully fixed, so much as a problem feature was cut.

Gaming

Heroes of Middle-Earth isn’t afraid to play with Lord of the Rings canon

An evil Galadriel in Heroes of Middle-Earth

The Lord of the Rings franchise has a storied history in almost every entertainment medium, and we are entering a new era for its film and gaming efforts. As Amazon continues to produce The Rings of Power, Middle-Earth Enterprises has been acquired by Embracer Group. Instead of all of The Lord of Rings' games being made by Warner Bros., which had been the case for some time, we are now seeing lots of studios make games in the Lord of the Rings universe, providing their own spin on the idea. While The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is doing that on consoles this month, mobile game players are also getting a brand new game.
The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-Earth is on the way from Capital Games and EA, and I attended a preview event for the game ahead of its launch on May 10. This game takes the character-collecting RPG approach established through its previous game Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and gives it a Middle-Earth makeover. What’s most intriguing about the title, though, is that it’s not afraid to ask “What if?” while playing around in the world of this long-running franchise.
What if?
When it comes to gameplay, my brief playtime with Heroes of Middle-Earth didn’t surprise me. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a mobile character-collecting RPG set in The Lord of the Rings universe. Still, the character-based approach allows Capital Games to play in The Lord of the Rings sandbox in ways few creatives have been able to. It has more freedom to craft more experimental scenarios with the franchise's iconic characters, as it’s not as concerned with falling in line with lore.

The premise is that players have discovered a new Ring of Power, which they must use to keep The Lord of the Rings timeline intact as a mysterious enemy is trying to throw it in disarray. That setup means that the game can create scenarios that don’t necessarily align with the Middle-Earth canon. Players can make characters from different time periods, races, and allegiances team up in a way that wouldn’t work anywhere else. They’ll encounter a Galadriel who was corrupted by the Ring and other characters who may have strayed from the path laid for them in the books and films. Post-launch, some of these alternate versions of characters will eventually become playable as well.
In the age of the multiverse story in media, these kinds of “What if?” scenarios make for a novel The Lord of the Rings game set pieces and give the developers plenty of room to come up with future characters for players to collect. In a press roundtable, Heroes of Middle-Earth Design Director Jay Ambrosini was undoubtedly enthusiastic about these concepts but said the team is also making sure any of these ideas and alternate timelines that they do pursue feeling respectful toward the world J.R.R. Tolkien established.
“There are so many characters that you look at and see the small little decisions that happen and affect them, and it’s so fun to think about what happens if they made the other decision,” Ambrosini says. “They are fun things to explore and talk about, but the most important thing to us is that we’re telling a genuine Tolkien story and that we’re very faithful to the laws of the world that exist. Good deeds are rewarded with goodness; bad deeds are rewarded with bad things happening. We’re making sure that we’re appreciating and celebrating those pieces of Tolkien’s work.”