To be fair, Gearbox was always a pretty crap deal for whoever was buying it because 2K owns the publishing rights to Borderlands in perpetuity. It would not surprise me if they end up under 2K, and that they end up costing 2K a lot less than they cost Embracer.

Well this is concerning. If they’re not getting any more funding from 505 to make Control 2 and Condor then, uh, who’s funding Control 2 and Condor?

Eat the rich in Minecraft

They’ve got the look spot on, but everyone’s miscast and none of the jokes land.

Well it’s Xbox Wire, so it’s PR rather than any actual critical evaluation.

And we all know how well Xbox PR has been doing lately.

Minecraft has some pretty comprehensive version control, so you should be able to install old versions pretty easily.

I mean, Idle Champions Of The Forgotten Realms is right there already.

Depends on whether your plan is to right the ship (sensible, boring, doesn’t interest investors) or to take that money and gamble it elsewhere in hope for big returns (chaotic, potentially disastrous, shareholders love it).

It’s Rocksteady, so it’ll be higher than 40s. Heck, it’s almost impossible to get a score lower than 40 on metacritic…

Mid 60s I’m guessing, perhaps as high as 69 if reviewers are feeling generous. The kind of score which would be absolutely fine if it were a cheap and cheerful B-game made by a scrappy team of underfunded devs, but which is an absolute embarrassment when applied to a multi million dollar tentpole. The kind of score that implies ‘meh’.

Until reasonably recently, Embracer was known as Nordic Games. Their plan was simple and quite effective; buy old game IP, release remasters, make reasonably-budgeted sequels aimed at niches of the industry being missed by the increasingly laser-focussed AAA publishers.

It worked for a good few years, and they became a Katamari of game development studios. An increasingly unwieldy Katamari. And like any good Katamari they started picking up bigger and bigger things. Suddenly instead of spending a couple of thousand on a struggling legacy developer, they were paying upwards of a billion at a time, swallowing up things like Gearbox, Asmodee, Dark Horse Comics, Middle Earth Enterprises, Square Enix Europe. They lost focus and just kept buying things, including things they couldn’t afford to buy. Eventually, a planned deal with the Saudis fell through, and that Katamari just slammed directly into a wall.