The games industry's biggest fire sale continues, as Embracer Group has sold Star Trek Online developer Cryptic Studio and publisher Arc Games, which also handled publishing duties for games like Remnant 2, Torchlight, and the recently released old-school MMO Fellowship.
The buyer is Project Golden Arc, which is owned and led by members of Arc Games' management. The deal—which is worth $30 million, has been financed by XD Inc, perhaps best known as the developer and publisher of the free-to-play Torchlight Infinite.
Both Arc Games and Cryptic were purchased by Embracer back in 2021, during its apparent effort to hoover up half the games industry into one giant, private equity vacuum bag. But it all went wrong when Embracer failed to secure a "groundbreaking strategic partnership" worth $2 billion, after which Embracer laid off thousands of people, closed studios like Volition, Piranha Bytes and Pieces Interactive, and cancelled several projects, which reportedly included a new Deus Ex.
Interestingly, Embracer specifically held onto Arc Games, which was previously known as Gearbox San Francisco, when it sold the Borderlands developer to 2K Games last year. That makes this the second time Embracer has clung onto the publishing rights for the Remnant series, which are decent games for sure, but not massive sellers.
That was a month before Embracer sold Saber Interactive, developer of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Space Marine 2 went on to be an absolutely enormous success, which you'd think Embracer would have liked to be a part of. But it doesn't matter, because Embracer has revived defunct Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane in a cunning plan to revive the plastic peripheral era of rhythm games. What could possibly go wrong?
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