Saber Interactive founder says ‘everyone seems to like to pick on Embracer’

Saber Interactive founder Matthew Karch has launched a defence of his former employer Embracer Group and its CEO, Lars Wingefors.

After several years of rapid expansion through mergers and acquisitions, the Swedish gaming giant announced last May that a $2 billion deal had collapsed at the last minute, leading it to embark on a restructuring programme that would involve the closure of studios and the cancellation of multiple projects.

Now completed, this restructuring resulted in almost 1,400 job cuts, and the cancellation of 29 unannounced games during a six-month period in 2023.

Embracer closed Saints Row developer Volition, Campfire Cabal, and TimeSplitters studio Free Radical Design, while the likes of Borderlands maker Gearbox and Saber Interactive have been sold.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, former Embracer executive Karch—who remains a shareholder in the firm but now heads new Saber owner Beacon Interactive—claimed the company did its best to safeguard jobs where possible.

“There was a long time when Lars [Wingefors] was kind of a wonder child,” he said. “He could do no wrong, he was on the cover of magazines and Lars is a pretty humble guy. It’s not like he takes all of his money and spends it. Yes, he’s bought a few things that people with wealth can buy but he’s been very maligned – in Sweden in particular.

“First, he was maligned for actually being wealthy and then he was maligned for the fact that the Embracer shares haven’t really held up over the past year. In fact, they dropped significantly and precipitously and I think it actually dropped more on a relative basis than almost anybody else primarily because it seems to be a company these days that everyone likes to pick on.

“But in my mind, nobody has been guided by more of a sense of fairness and reasonableness than Lars,” Karch continued. “The process that we’ve had to go through to terminate studios has absolutely been… it’s killed us.

“I say ‘us’ even though I’m no longer part of the company because I feel like… I mean, I still have shares, I still have close relationships and good friends, and obviously the best wishes that they succeed over there. But I would say Embracer tried harder than anybody to save as many jobs as it could.”

Layoffs across the game industry have been widespread in the last few years, and Karch claimed the staff cuts at Embracer “weren’t any worse or more significant than you saw in any other situation”.

Notably, this year alone Microsoft has announced plans to cut 1,900 jobs across Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard, Unity has said it will lay off approximately 1,800 employees, and Sony has confirmed plans to eliminate 900 roles at PlayStation.

“We were getting congratulated left and right at GDC about leaving the evil Embracer,” Karch told GI.biz. “But these are the nicest people you’ve ever met. Lars has an archive of video games. He loves games. He lives for games. He’s not a suit, even though he wears them for the stock market presentations, he’s a games guy.”

Elaborating on the challenges Embracer has faced, Karch said: “I blame being a publicly traded company for some of the woes that Embracer has. And I blame the fact that people are trying to take advantage of other people’s misery through shorting the stock as something that has resulted in a depressed share price for the company and thus some of the layoffs.

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“But I wouldn’t bet against Lars right now. He’s really on top of it. I haven’t heard him this confident in a long time and I think they’ve made the company small enough—still big, but small enough—that it’s manageable… They have some great stuff that I know of in the works that’s unannounced that I think people are gonna love.

“So I’m bullish on them. I love them and it was a bittersweet thing for me to go, but it happened. I think they’re a great company and I think they’re really, really great people. I just feel badly that the last year has been so stressful – it’s been stressful for me too.”

Karch also confirmed previous reporting that the collapsed partnership which sparked Embracer’s restructuring was with the Saudi government-funded Savvy Games Group.