Who could have foreseen the inevitable?
The Embracer Group clearly aren’t playing around anymore, following the shelving of Volition by repurposing them to become janitors of Gearbox Software’s Texas studio, before swiftly executing Volition outright entirely.
There was obviously a reasoning behind Volition being dissolved entirely, that being the woke abomination known only as the Saints Row Reboot which was so poorly received and hardly sold many copies it cost the Embracer Group a metric fuck load of cash.
So why does it come as no surprise that Embracer are reportedly looking for a potential sucker buyer for Gearbox Software, the one hit wonder studio behind the Borderlands franchise?
Exactly the same reason as to why Volition got scrapped, piss poor performance. In actual fact it’s highly speculated that the woeful financial performances between Volition and Gearbox themselves were the very reason why Embracer lost a $2 Billion dollar deal with the Saudi government funded Savvy Games Group.
So naturally, Embracer’s CEO isn’t the least bit happy about letting $2 Billion slip through his fingers all because of a couple misbehaving children who endlessly burn cash in return for producing garbage products that nobody buys.
Such as the failed abortion that was “New Tales from the Borderlands” developed by Gearbox themselves, the game quickly came and went with majority of its Steam reviews, out of 496 of them, being negative. The game had managed an all time peak concurrent player count of just 435.
Comparing it to the Telltale designed prequel which actually garners more players on the daily surprisingly, that peaked over eight years ago with just shy of 8,700 players.
You think we’re done there? Oh heavens no, because Gearbox themselves have been endlessly milking the Gearbox franchise for all that it’s worth, especially when you take into account of their previous flop, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
How would you like to pay full price for a prolonged Borderlands 3 DLC expansion pack that’s sold as its own standalone game with additional monetization and purchasable content along with a season pass. Sounds fun right? Well, many people disagreed, SHOCKING I know.
While the game may be considered positively received from Borderlands loyalists, there’s no denying that the games sales were lackluster, especially when compared to the sort of figures that Borderlands 3 managed to put up in terms of sales, with Gearbox managing to sell more than 18 million copies of Borderlands 3 as of August 2023.
Less we forget the fact that Gearbox in a desperate attempt to generate additional revenue offloaded its Borderlands 2 rendition of the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC as a standalone game, any guesses as to how that went?
They offloaded Borderlands 1 to a third rate studio to re-release it as the “GOTY Enhanced” edition which removed LAN support, they’ve bundled and resold several Borderlands games numerous times at this point, with their last attempt being the “Pandora’s Box” collection featuring every single Borderlands game produced to date excluding Wonderlands of course and all digital content.
Yeah, the unforeseen issue is the spontaneous announcement of the Pandora’s Box which released the very same day as Bethesda’s Starfield. Once again, any takers in the room want to have a guess as to how financially “successful” this move was?
My guess is that Gearbox were beyond desperate to shovel its shit heap “New Tales from the Borderlands” upon unsuspecting customers with this pitiful collection.
Because I’d wager it was about as financially successful as the Borderlands movie that has seemingly been in production since at least 2015 but never officially started filming until April of 2021, Gearbox have wasted over $150 million dollars on the production of the Borderlands movie with not one fucking dollar generated in return.
Look at this from Embracer’s perspective, from the immense success of Borderlands 3 which as mentioned above has sold over 18 million copies to date, Embracer was conned into buying Gearbox Software for $1.3 Billion dollars back in February of 2021.
Over a billion fucking dollars. For Borderlands: The Development Studio.
Because Gearbox sure as shit cannot manage to produce anything outside of its one hit wonder franchise, similarly to Volition, Duke Nukem Forever is a laughing stock, Gearbox literally robbed SEGA blind with Aliens: Colonial Marines and who could forget Battleborn?
Taking into account the money wasted in purchasing Gearbox, the immense financial failures they’ve produced since being bought out, how they and Volition are genuinely to blame for a massive $2 Billion dollar dealing with Saudi Arabia falling under, it’s now time for Embracer to rid itself of the cancer that it was accumulated.
Not even three years after purchasing Gearbox, Embracer now want to offload its burden upon some other unsuspecting moronic conglomerate with the assistance of Goldman Sachs and Aream while Gearbox’s marketing materials are already available for potential suckers buyers.
And in all honesty the only conglomerate retarded enough to burn through their endless wallet to overpay for Gearbox, a failing studio would probably have to be Tencent and possibly Microsoft, depending if they’ve ingested too many “special salts” on that particular day.
Embracer paid far too much for the studio and clearly Gearbox has caused nothing but headaches for Embracer’s finances, will they cut their losses and flog Gearbox Software for far less than they originally paid? I highly doubt that, their hubris knows no bounds and as such they will look to garner as much money from selling Gearbox as possible.
Sing us a song on your deathbed, Randy!
