When Embracer Group’s $2 billion deal with Saudia Arabia’s Savvy Games Group fellow through last year, with a sudden need to balance its numbers, the company announced in June that it was initiating an internal restructuring program that would entail widespread layoffs, studio closures, and project cancellations.
Specifics have now emerged where the latter is concerned. In June of last year, at the time it announced its aforementioned restructuring program, Embracer Group mentioned in its fiscal report that it had as many as 153 unannounced games in development across all of its many owned studios.
In its recently published fiscal report for Q3 of the 2023/24 fiscal year (covering the October-December period), that number has dropped down to 124, which means the company has cancelled 29 unannounced games since it initiated its restructuring program.
By their very nature as unannounced games, many of these cancellations have, of course, gone under the radar, but a few notable ones have grabbed headlines in recent months. In December, Embracer Group shuttered Free Radical Design, cancelling the studio’s long-awaited TimeSplitters reboot. More recently, it was claimed in reports that a new Deus Ex game that had been in development at Eidos Montreal for two years had also been shelved.
In November, it was confirmed that Chorus developer Fishlabs had suffered layoffs, as part of which its unannounced title, Project Black, had also been cancelled.
