Lord of the Rings Needs to Be Turned into One of Gaming’s Biggest Franchises, Says Embracer COO
Following today's news of a restructuring program that will include closing some studios, canceling some unannounced projects, and laying off some employees, new Embracer Group interim COO Matthew Karch (formerly CEO of Saber Interactive for around two decades) spoke to investors about turning the Lord of the Rings IP into some of the biggest gaming franchises thanks to better usage of the group's resources.
I think sometimes growth comes by cuts. You refocus your efforts, and you do a better analysis of the talent that you have. Sometimes teams get put on products because the team has availability. In a structure that is not quite consolidated, there aren't necessarily the resources to put that team on the best product.
With some more centralization, and I'm not obviously implying that we are moving from one model to another, but we are going to incorporate elements of consolidation and centralization into certain aspects of our business. We are going to have a much better picture of the teams that are coming available and we're going to have much better data to support product selection and to create product which is going to ultimately achieve better results than some of our past products.
I have a high degree of confidence that this entire process is going to easily translate into better product selection that's more profitable and that gives us a greater opportunity for growth in the future and that helps to leverage the IP that we own within our organization.
We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turning that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world. And that's obviously something we're going to be doing.
That's a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on. Working together, we have those opportunities and we're super excited to see that put to work relatively quickly.
The Embracer Group acquired the Lord of the Rings IP for a relative pittance when it bought Middle-earth Enterprises in August 2022. Since then, Amazon Games announced a new deal with Embracer to produce an MMORPG based on Tolkien's beloved fantasy books.
There are also other Lord of the Rings games under production, such as the survival crafting game Return to Moria (out this Fall) and a project in the works at Wētā Workshop (recently delayed), but it sounds like we can expect a lot more from Embracer Group's many internal studios in the future.
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