The Lord of the Rings is a hot topic right now. JRR Tolkien’s work is being cited more and more, be it by the announcement of new games or when it comes to the eagerly awaited series implementation of the company giant Amazon.
Now there has been a new development. One could almost think that a new era is dawning. Because after 46 years, the previous license holder has sold the valuable brands The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The new owner is an old friend: The Embracer Group.
What exactly happened?
On August 18th, the Swedish publisher Embracer has early in the morning announced a whole series of new acquisitions
This approach is no longer so unusual, because the company has been in a real buying spree for a long time and is one of the largest European employers in the games industry in terms of the size of its workforce and is even larger than Activision-Blizzard or Electronic Arts.
Embracer includes publishers such as THQ Nordic, Plaion (formerly Koch Media) and Gearbox. On a slightly smaller scale, the line-up includes developer studios such as Piranha Bytes (Elex), Warhorse (Kingdom Come) and Black Forest Games (Destroy All Humans!). In addition, studios such as Crystal Dynamics or Eidos Montreal, which Embracer surprisingly took over from Square Enix together with rights to Tomb Raider or Deus Ex, will most likely soon be included.
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So now the company also counts a considerable part of Tolkien’s work in its inventory. How much the acquisition cost Embracer was not disclosed.
What does this mean for The Lord of the Rings?
It is currently difficult to assess what effects this takeover could have on new games or films based on The Lord of the Rings. Embracer acts as a decentralized group of individual companies that remain and act largely independently. Seen in this way, Middle-earth Enterprises will initially only give part of the income to another parent company than before when issuing licenses.
How does the Embracer Group tick?
If you want to learn more about exactly how this Swedish company works and what their goals are, then we recommend our podcasts with management consultant Human Nagafi. There it is expertly analyzed what this huge publisher is doing and why the procedure also harbors dangers for us players.
So it’s still possible that the LotR license will remain available to anyone doing business with Middle-earth Enterprises. It cannot be assumed that only studios from the Embracer Group will be allowed to tell stories about Middle-earth. Even if an exchange between the companies is of course possible and desired. For now, though, we wouldn’t start dreaming of a Middle-earth RPG by the Gothic inventors. Although some fans would certainly wish for more Lord of the Rings:
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But at least the announcement of the acquisition already spoke of possible opportunities that The Lord of the Rings currently offers. In detail is from Films about characters like Gandalf, Aragorn, Gollum, Galadriel or Eowyn the speech. The possibility of transmedial linking is also emphasized. In addition to video games and films, Embracer maintains huge publishers of board games and comics with Asmodée and Dark Horse.