Did Square Enix just take the first offer that was given because $300 million is extremely low for the IP's involved in this sale.  Yeah they bought it for $130 million back in 2009, but with all the high profile studio buyouts since then, the value of gaming studio's, especially with legacy IP's has grown quite a bit since then.

Square Enix might have wanted to simply cut bait. It didn’t manage its Western teams/releases particularly well with absurd projections and GaaS nonsense. Square Enix very well could have held out for a sweeter deal. Personally, it’s at least mildly admirable that it was moved on as swiftly as it did.

Well, I won't miss Square Enix using their Western studios as scapegoats every time one of their shitty Japanese managers made a godawful corporate mandate. Still, the decision to sell these studios AND their IP for practically nothing, relatively speaking, is very odd. It makes me wonder if Square Enix is in acquisition taljs of their own, and the prospective new owners find the Western studios redundant. Downsizing the company a bit before the sale makes them much more affordable, and it cuts out the bad press of having to close the devs later.

Or Square Enix's leadership is just insane and they really are looking for that quick digital hookers & crack money that are blockchains & Cloud AI, as they've said. That fits, too.  :rolleyes:

Block chain? More like the Bankruptcy chain, m i rite?! :smug:

Wouldn't surprised me.  For Smash Bros, Sakurai talked about how one of the third parties was pretty difficult to work with having crazy mandates and even though he didn't name them, it's very obvious this third party was Square Enix.  The fact that Square Enix were being dicks about giving their own characters free advertisements in Smash Bros, a series that's literally bigger then any of their own kind of shows the thought process going on with the management of this company.

I have a question. How much, if at all, does this affect Nintendo gamers? Is Deus Ex on Wii U the last game from this studio to get released for a Nintendo console? Should we expect more or less Nintendo love from The Embracer Group. I would think with a name like that we would get more love of some kind  ;).

From what we've seen the past few years, Embracer relies a lot on remasters. They're basically just a renamed THQ Nordic. Generally, their teams appear to be allowed to do their own thing. If Crystal Dynamics & the Eidos twins want to make a game on a Nintendo console, I doubt there's a mandate stating otherwise.

Hm, Squarenix must be getting desperate for cash...

Eidos (specifically the Montreal studio) also did the Guardians of the Galaxy game which is on Switch in a fashion, and the "Go" games (Lara Croft Go, Hitman Go) were at least at one time slated to come to Switch as well.

It does seem a little low compared to recent acquisitions. Sony bought Bungie for $3.6 billion even though the only IP of value they own is Destiny, EA bought a company called Playdemic (who make Facebook games) for $1.4 billion, ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) paid $4 billion to buy a company called Moonton (whose only really IP I can see is a MOBA called Mobile Legends).

Considering the massive losses the Marvel game experienced it may have been part of the reason for the low price. They wanted out before they went into the red fully.

Either way with the "market" of NFTs utterly crashing (down 92% and people with active wallets/accounts down 88%) this bid by Squeenix is ill-timed if they thought that would be a financial savior for them.

There were rumors of Sony in talks to buy them so that could still be on the table as well.