Embracer Group has once again restructured its gaming business and renamed the stewards of The Lord of the Rings.
Last year, the company infamous for endlessly eating up (buying) game companies before spitting them (shutting them down) back out again announced that it was splitting into three separate companies. There was Asmodee, responsible for table-top and card games, indie and free-to-play-centric Coffee Stain, and then the one responsible for its heavyhitters, Middle-Earth & Friends.
Embracer has now announced that Coffee Stain will be spun off as a separately listed company by the end of the year. "We're really proud of everything we've built as part of Embracer," Coffee Stain's CEO and co-founder Anton Westbergh says in a press release.
"Now, as we take the step to become a separately listed company, it feels both exciting and, honestly, a little bit scary - but in a good way... We can now focus even more on what we do best, supporting our developers, staying close to our communities, and building an even brighter future for Coffee Stain."
Coffee Stain is somehow responsible for around 250 game developers and publishers, including Coffee Stain Studios (Goat Simulator, Satisfactory), Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic), and Tuxedo Labs (Teardown). It also publishes survival sim hit Valheim, I should add.
Things aren't changing too much on the Middle-earth & Friends front, apart from the fact that the company is now called Fellowship Entertainment - probably because the old name sounded like Gollum was about to invade Sanrio. The company's still in charge of 40 'AAA' names, such as 4A Games (Metro), Crystal Dynamics (Tomb Raider), Eidos Montreal (Deus Ex), Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come Deliverance), THQ Nordic, and, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
5 years after Avengers, 2 years after its last layoffs, and who knows how long before Perfect Dark and Tomb Raider return, Crystal Dynamics announces another round of layoffs
