Embracer Group Embracer Group Layoffs Games Industry Layoffs Lars Wingefors Matthew Karch News Saber Interactive

Head Of Saber Interactive Thinks Everyone Is Being Too Tough On Embracer Group, And We Should “Admire Them For Making Tough Decisions”

Embracer Group has earned the poor reputation that everyone thinks of when hearing the name ‘The Embracer Group.’

Chief executive officer at Embracer Lars Wingefors and the rest of the c-suite have earned their bad name all on their own, no one made them acquire more studios and IP than they could handle and then cause irreparable damage to the industry by shutting down legacy studios and laying off thousands of developers.

In the wake of that irreparable damage, Saber Interactive was formerly a subsidiary of Embracer Group that was seemingly able to escape the worst of Embracer’s fallout.

Which many players have taken to be great news, since Saber has confirmed it is still working on the coming Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic Remake and a number of other projects that might’ve been killed if Saber hadn’t left Embracer.

Since leaving Embracer, Saber Interactive boss and chief executive officer Matthew Karch has come out to say that he believes everyone on the outside looking at Embracer is being a little too harsh on Wingefors and co.

In an interview with IGN, Karch calls Embracer “as small-town and homegrown of a large organization as you’re ever going to see. It’s not a company which wants to spit out a thousand Lord Of The Rings games regardless of whether or not those Lord Of The Rings games are going to hurt the license.”

“That’s not the way Embracer operates. It’s not the way Lars [Wingefors] operates. He loves IP. He loves games. He loves game developers. He got to start in comics, God knows how long ago, and he’s just a good human being, and he cares about his people.”

Karch continues to say that the layoffs came from Embracer due to the market shifting and losing patience, which resulted in “hard decisions” that had to be made.

IGN’s report does note that Karch is “sympathetic to individuals hurt by layoffs,” but this doesn’t change the fact that he feels people have the wrong outlook on what happened with Embracer.

“It’s very easy to look from the outside at a situation when you’re not familiar with the people in this situation or what guides those people and to draw conclusions. You could state that a lot of the jobs that were lost were jobs that wouldn’t have otherwise been created…

Some of the studios that we’re taking with us would never have been able to grow the way they’ve grown. No way. We’ve created a lot of jobs, and they may have, especially in this market downturn, been out of business in any event because capital has just dried up, not just at Embracer, but everywhere.”

To try and cushion mass layoffs by saying that those jobs that were cut might’ve not even existed if not for the wild growth in the first place, almost sounds like trying to write the layoffs off like they ‘didn’t count’ because the layoffs only impacted jobs that weren’t real before.

Though they were certainly real for the people working those jobs, who lost their livelihoods when Embracer laid them off.

Karch further adds that Embracer isn’t entirely without fault, doing things like giving projects that should’ve never gotten it the green light, and having studios in their wheelhouse that weren’t a fit for Embracer.

He also counts Lars Wingefors in having made mistakes, who Karch says was actually maybe just “a little bit naive,” and in the next breath suggests we should look to Wingefors with admiration for the choices he had to make.

“I think you can blame Lars for maybe being a little bit naive that this gravy train would just continue. But I think now you could admire them for making tough decisions and doing whatever they can to preserve as much of what they’ve built as they can in a fair and equitable way.”

Karch also suggests that there are those who are “a little bit gleeful” regarding Embracer’s downfall, because they were upset at Embracer for its aggressive acquisition-spree.

“I remember a lot of negative comments about them gobbling everything up. And so now they’re a little bit gleeful…which I don’t think is entirely equitable. But give Lars a break or have somebody give him a break. Tell the world that I said they need to give this guy a break.”

Later in the interview, Karch adds that he’s friends with Wingefors and others at Embracer, and remains a shareholder of the company, so he holds no ill will towards it and wishes to see it succeed, in the same way that he hopes Embracer will wish Saber every success.

Karch is right in saying that not everyone is aware of what Wingefors and other top-level executives go through when choosing to layoff staff, not everyone is privy to all the variables that go into those kinds of decisions.

But how are players meant to take Karch’s words as anything beyond him trying to defend a friend of his, and a company that he still has financial ties to. The reality is what was said at the top, that no one forced Embracer down the path of aggressively growing in an unsustainable way.

Those laid off are owed more than the sympathies of these executives, especially when those same executives get to keep their jobs, bonuses, and get a pat on the back from shareholders for saving a bit of money.

It’s definitely naive to think that shareholders and executives at massive companies that are beholden to shareholders will put anything, people included, ahead of ‘making more money.’ But it’s also naive to think that executives shouldn’t be subject to harsh criticism when their decisions incur a massive human cost.

It can be true that Wingefors cares about people, and cares about game developers, and is “a good human being,” as Karch puts it.

None of that changes the fact that the consequences of the actions taken by Wingefors and co. are real, nor does it reward Wingefors or the rest of Embracer’s executives with the luxury of “a break,” when it’s their names at the top. The buck has to stop somewhere.

Source – [IGN, GameDeveloper]