Embracer continues to sell off assets — Swedish gaming holding company has just confirmed sale of The Gearbox Entertainment studio to Take-Two Interactive. The amount is — $460 million and will be paid in newly issued Take-Two shares.
Suddenly, we forgot who Take-Two is – it is the owner of Rockstar (Grand Theft Auto, Read Dead, Bully series) and 2K (NBA, Mafia, Bioshock). Gearbox sale agreement Kotaku reported at the end of February.
Under the terms of the deal, Take-Two will acquire Gearbox Software, Gearbox Montreal, and Gearbox Studio Quebec. As for the games, Rockstar will acquire the rights to the Borderlands and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands franchises, as well as Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms, Duke Nukem, and Homeworld.
It has also become known that Gearbox is currently working on 6 projects, 5 of which are continuations of existing franchises (Borderlands 4, Homeworld, etc.) + one completely new IP.
Embracer will retain Gearbox San Francisco, which will be renamed until the transaction closes (Q1 of FY24/25, ending June 2024). In addition to the single Gearbox studio, Embracer will retain Cryptic Studios, along with Neverwinter Online and Star Trek Online, Lost Boys Interactive, and Captured Dimensions. It also retains the rights to publish Remnant, Hyper Light Breaker, and other unannounced projects.
As a reminder, Embracer,which has recently been actively buying up video game developersis currently in a difficult financial situation and is actively restructuring — closes studios, fires people en masse and cancels games. Earlier, Embracer confirmed the sale of a part of the US-Russian Saber Interactive for $247 million — together with Ukrainian studios 4A Games (creators of Metro) and Fractured Byte.