Embracer Group Restructuring settles Asmodee with huge debt

Boardgames
21

This all reminds me of the time I was appalled at my, then, city considering raising local tax rates yet again, citing a budgetary shortfall. Curiously, I went and downloaded the financial reports and budgets that the city had just filed (being public record and all). What I found was certainly cooked books, but without being an actual Level 9 (or higher) Finance Wizard, I couldn’t tell if they were criminally-cooked.

Each departmental/divisional budget had substantial balance transfers in from one or more other budgets, and out to one or more budgets. So trying to figure out how much they spent on, for instance, road and bridge maintenance required that you untangle balance transfers in and out of 6 other budgets.

That is, all to say, financial wizardry is, in my book, almost as bad as marketing.

I’m also reminded of the recent Game Brewer closure announcement; the cynical portion of me (roughly 99.7% of my physical and spiritual mass), suspects that supporting older titles represents a liability that outweighs the future earnings potential of selling new expansions and/or reprints for those said titles. Especially considering that they can close down, sell off company assets, cash out the company coffers, pay out executive bonuses (I mean, we’re talking about the boardgame industry, so bonuses may be in the magnitude of “<x> dozen pens from the supply closet”, but could be substantially more if they’ve timed this well)

Then, just wait 12 months, start a new LLC and approach all those designers who may still be looking for somewhere to go with their recently relinquished publishing rights and see if they want to get the band back together (with a 1.2% decrease in royalties, due to these troubling times and the fact that we’re just getting started “from scratch”).

If played well, you could get a brand new company with roughly the same assets, but without any of the liabilities that previous company had accrued.

In other words: I chose the wrong class. I should have been a Finance Wizard or, at the very least, a Serial Entrepreneur.

5 Likes
22

IMO the business mistake FFG made at the start, which clearly makes for a better game, is that you can still play with your original ships in a tournament today; you don’t need to re-buy everything every few years. So there’s a secondary market, which makes no money for the publisher. (Compare Games Workshop.)

I mean there’s still power creep, so the competitive gamer who’s their primary market still keeps needing to buy new stuff too, but…

I’ve been told that in wargaming overall, games with individual guys on the table are generally the most popular, then individual 'mechs or tanks or spaceships or whatnot, then massed formations like your classic Napoleonic battles.

As for X-Wing specifically, I suspect what’s going on here is a straightforward “we pay X for this game (licence, production, running tournaments) and we make Y on it, and the value of Y/X is lower than for this other game at which we could throw some of the resources”. When you’re run by accountants, that’s the only class of decision you can make.

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