tomb Raider
Yesterday, on a Square Enix earnings call, the company explained its recent sale of Crystal Dynamics and Eidos to Embracer Group, which was at the fire sale price of $300 million for the pair of them.
Their explanation is…bizarre to say the least, and according to Square Enix, the sale was “driven by concerns that the titles cannibalized sales of the rest of the group and so it could improve capital efficiency”
Asanalyst David Gibson explained in a thread about the call, this makes little sense, especially when by the time the sale is over, Square Enix has tons of cash on hand, more than enough to fund games and studios, and the real reason appears to be making itself a more attractive target for acquisition, but they refuse to say that.
At baseline, the notion that Crystal Dynamics or Eidos games are cannibalizing other Square Enix games makes little sense to anyone. First of all, Square Enix is constantly complaining that games from those studios are underperforming and not selling. enoughso how could they be significantly cannibalizing Square Enix’s other games?
Then of course, the scheduling of releases and the genres of the games have literally nothing to do with each other. There’s no coherent argument about what Tomb Raider, Avengers, Deus Ex or Guardians of the Galaxy games are “cannibalizing.” The only thing I can even remotely think of here is the release of Avengers and Outriders in the same window, two live service looters, albeit if anything Avengers got the worse end of that stick, and Outriders has been extolled by Square Enix as a success and important IP for their future. But what do any CD/Eidos games have to do with “cannibalizing” other big Square Enix series like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest?
Again, the overwhelmingly common theory here is that Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics/Eidos have not been a good fit for years, and they wanted to offload them in order to become a slimmed down, more desirable target for acquisition by someone like Sony. While nothing official has been announced, an eventual Sony acquisition, given the history between the two companies and the current state of the market where all independent publishers are getting snapped up by megacorps, would be less than a surprising development. But the fact that Square Enix is being this disingenuous about what’s really happening here is somewhat tiresome and corporate speak at its worst.
Meanwhile, Crystal Dynamics is still making Avengers content, helping Microsoft with Perfect Dark and starting a new Unreal Engine 5 Tomb Raider game for Embracer. Eidos is working on a number of secretive UE5 projects, and we could see the return of IPs like Thief or Legacy of Kain from them. Square Enix, meanwhile, is set to release its highest profile game in a long while, Final Fantasy XVI, next year.
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