After surviving Embracer's $460 million studio shuffle, director of anticipated open-world roguelike hits back at "cascading effect" of corporate consolidation
May. 23, 2024“I don’t want to depend on megacorporations doing X, Y, and Z to dictate our future”
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The developer ofour most-anticipated open-world roguelikehas hit back against the “cascading effect” that recent swathes of layoffs and corporate consolidation can have on the rest of the industry.
In the latest episode of NoClip’s ongoingHyper Light Breakerdocumentary series, Alx Preston, the game’s creative director and founder of developer Heart Machine, discusses the impact of Borderlands developerGearbox’s $460 million sale to Take-Two. While the publishing rights to the Borderlands series and several other games went to the new owners, Gearbox Publishing stayed under Embracer, along with the rights to Hyper Light Breaker. The publishing label has since been renamed to Arc Games.
Preston says “there was no expectation” that Perfect World would sell “to any other company, ever” when the Hyper Light Breaker publishing deal was signed. Now, however, the developer has its third corporate publisher in only four years. One of those companies was Embracer Group,which has been responsible for more than 1,400 layoffsand several cancelations and studio closures.
That’s unlikely to affect Heart Machine directly. Preston says that “I think [in] most of the scenarios that happen, Heart Machine will be fine regardless of how it pans out. There are scenarios that are not so great. There’s a lot that’s going to happen behind the scenes that we have no say or control over. These are folks that we’ve been working with for two-plus years now, so that alone is a stressful change of ‘I don’t know who I’m going to be working with in a few months.”
Preston points to “this cascading effect across the industry, where it isn’t just the people who get laid off but it’s the teams. Maybe that project still exists but now you don’t have the resources you once did, you have to reformat, restructure that project in some way or another, or cancel it because you don’t have the people any more. And that’s really debilitating in some ways, or demeaning, because you’re working on this thing for a year, two years, maybe more in some cases, and you never announce it and you’re really excited, and it’s going well, and then it’s gone.”
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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