That’s a lot of Lord Of The Rings games (pic: New Line Productions)



The company that owns the makers of Tomb Raider and Guardians Of The Galaxy wants them to make five new games by 2028.



While it’s Microsoft that’s currently in the spotlight, over its acquisition of other games companies, Swedish firm Embracer Group has been on a very similar kind of spending spree and yet because no-one has ever heard of them, and they’ve still yet to release a major hit, they often get ignored.



They’re constantly buying new developers, even if most are vastly smaller than Activision Blizzard , and are always talking about making dozens of new games, that we never seem to hear about again. For example, in their latest financial results they claim to have 94 projects planned for the next financial year, 58 of which are unannounced.



They’re counting multiple versions of the same game there, as well as minor releases, but apparently this includes 31 AAA titles, including five from new acquisitions Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal.



The two studios were famously acquired from Square Enix , who were upset at the commercial failure of the Avengers and Guardians Of The Galaxy games. With Avengers now being wound down it’s not been clear what they’re working on next, other than the next Tomb Raider and vague talk of Legacy Of Kain and Deus Ex – and possibly more Marvel games .



Unfortunately, we still don’t know anything specific, but according to Embracer the two studios are set to release five new games between them, by April 2028. Which is a lot, when you consider a high quality game generally takes around five years to make.









They are big studios, that can work on multiple games at once, but it seems Embracer is counting Crystal Dynamics helping out on Perfect Dark and Eidos-Montréal lending a hand with Fable as separate games.



Why Microsoft needs them to help, or exactly how much work they’re doing, has never been made clear and, to be honest, it’s more than likely we’ll never find out for sure.



In equally vague news, Embracer has also said it plans to release five new Lord Of The Rings by next April, which is also a lot.



Again, they didn’t say what any of them are but given the time frame it’s likely that one or more are mobile or other lower budget titles.



Another is almost certainly The Lord Of The Rings: Gollum, which is not an Embracer game but because they bought the rights to The Lords Of The Rings, after buying Middle-Earth Enterprises , everything has to come through them now.



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What is a AAA game?



As nebulous as their plans are, perhaps the most interesting thing to come from the financial report is the definition by CEO of Lars Wingefors of what exactly a triple-A game is.



The term has been in use for decades in the games industry, but it’s never been formally defined. According to Wingefors though it’s a game that has over 100 fulltime developers working on it, is expected to sell at least two million copies, and has a ‘significant’ marketing budget.



We don’t think anyone’s going to argue with that, although other publishers are sure to define it in different ways.









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