Embracer Group is a global group of gaming and entertainment businesses. Its more than 16,600 passionate professionals deliver entertainment to gamers and value to customers around the globe supported by one of the industry’s largest and most exciting portfolios of intellectual property. Embracer Group has a decentralized operating model where great entrepreneurs run operations through operative groups – each with their own distinctive heritage, branding, business strategy, and other characteristics – all within a shared framework of governance and accountability.
Embracer Group has come a long way on its journey to be a substantial, lasting, and sustainable Group. The long-term strategy is underpinned by its three Group values: trust, long-term mindset, and embracing. We empower great people to make the right decisions and pursue great ideas and reach their full potential, all within our common framework of governance and accountability.
The Embracer Group head office hosts control and support functions, provides access to capital, shared knowledge, intra-Group synergies, and a solid governance framework. The organization is lean as the operative groups have significant responsibility for managing commercial operations and for implementing the governance framework including financial control, governance, compliance, human resources, and communication.
The operative groups serve as primary ecosystem building blocks. They have financial and operational responsibility and accountability, and run the businesses largely independently from each other, based on Embracer Group’s values and governance model and with active support and coordination from Group-level functions.
Embracer Group adapts a multi-brand strategy where game and entertainment consumers meet Embracer through any of the numerous brands, each with its unique way, style, and spirit.
Embracer Group comprises an ecosystem for studios, publishers, and other gaming and entertainment companies. The collaborations, empowerment, and business opportunities presented to companies are unique and provide a strong incentive to be part of Embracer Group. Embracer Group employs a decentralized operating model. The model provides operative group CEOs, founders, and studio heads with creative freedom based on accountability, while acting under our shared Group values and following Embracer Group’s framework for control, reporting, governance, and compliance. This approach fosters creativity, speed, and relevance.
While employing a decentralized operating model, the Group seeks to realize synergies between operative groups where possible and deemed appropriate. This may include collaboration, spread of best practices, as well as IP and talent sharing. Centrally mandated integration initiatives are also considered in order to foster win-win synergies, both in terms of revenue and cost-savings.
Embracer Group management continuously evaluates the performance and outlook of the 12 operative groups. Capital allocation decisions above a certain level, including for example game development projects, must be approved by the parent company. The Group strives to create a more comprehensive, centralized process for game investment and progress review, while maintaining creative freedom for each operative group. Diversification between operating segments and operative groups increases capital allocation opportunities and flexibility with regard to project management and IP management, while the approval process aims to focus capital allocation where it is expected to deliver the best return on investment. Embracer employs a model based on risk-adjusted profit and cost of capital.
OUR DECENTRALIZED OPERATING MODEL EMPOWERS PEOPLE, FOSTERS AUTONOMY, SPEED AND CREATES SUSTAINABLE ORGANIC SYNERGIES ACROSS THE GROUP’S ECO SYSTEM. EMBRACER’S ROLE IS TO UNLEASH THE FULL POTENTIAL OF EACH TEAM AND SUPPORT THEM WITH THE RESOURCES NEEDED TO SUCCEED.
/ Lars Wingefors
Embracer Group is organized in four operating segments: PC/Console Games, Mobile Games, Tabletop Games and Entertainment & Services. Through these operating segments, Embracer Group has strong market positions in PC, console, VR, mobile, and tabletop games, as well as niche positions in film and comic book publishing, including attractive partner publishing. Together these operating segments form a growing ecosystem that is unique in the industry.
• AAA
• AA / A / Indie
• Free-to-play
• MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online)
• Asset Care
• VR
• Work-for-hire
• Free-to-play
• Pay-to-play
• Board games
• Trading card games
• Comic books
• Film
• TV
• e-Services
• Merchandise
• Distribution
Embracer Group retains a strong position in all major value creating areas of the gaming market value chain. The Group hosts an intellectual property portfolio consisting of more than 850 game titles, 139 internal development studios world-wide and a global capacity for online and physical retail publishing.
Organic growth is mainly driven by the release of new games, additional content and revitalized IPs, and increased investments in user acquisition activities and marketing. A quality-first approach is applied, ensuring that games are released when the return on investment (ROI) potential is maximized. Increased investments in user acquisition activities are justified when demands on return of ad spend are met.
The Group has more than 200 ongoing game development projects in PC/Console Games, with a combination of new IPs or revitalized franchises as well as existing franchises and active trademarks. Licensed IPs from Embracer Group will also be an important source of organic growth. For mobile games, investments in user acquisition activities are particularly important for driving organic growth. For board games, increased brand recognition and shelf space for existing franchises are key organic growth drivers.
An additional important source of organic growth is catalog sales. Embracer Group’s diversification and capabilities within the ecosystem coupled with its vast IP portfolio, now consisting of over 850 IPs, including some of the most popular and iconic titles in gaming, comics, and other media gives a solid foundation for organic growth in the coming years.
At Embracer Group, building value through our IP is central. The Group strives to leverage its unique IP portfolio, structure, and development capacity as a basis for building a presence across key entertainment media formats. There is an abundance of highly successful video games today that originate from TV/film, comic books, and tabletop games. There is also a strong trend of video game adaptations to other media formats.
Through its transmedia strategy, Embracer Group strives to build an even stronger ecosystem based on a diversified IP portfolio, with new technologies and services complementing the Group’s core gaming business – from creation to distribution. Embracer Group sees an opportunity to cross-fertilize IPs and strengthen licensing partnerships across gaming categories, different content formats, and platforms. IPs will mostly originate from PC/Console games, but Embracer Group will also create PC/Console games based on tabletop games and comics IPs. This integrated approach together with the Group’s decentralized model builds resilience and is attractive for both organic growth and growth by acquisition.
Over the past several years, the Group has invested significantly in building one of the largest providers of PC/Console content in the industry. Embracer has over 10,000 engaged developers creating games, many based on the Group’s deep and growing catalog of IPs. These efforts have created significant collective value that can be capitalized through partnership and licensing deals, which can improve predictability, lower business risk, and provide a positive impact on cash flow and profits. It also has the potential to enable further investments into making even greater games based on both established and new IPs, driving long-term organic growth.
Embracer Group is run by entrepreneurs and owned by entrepreneurs. In order to align interests with founders, management, and key shareholders in acquired companies, Embracer Group often issues equity and uses long-term earnouts as part of considerations that are linked to specific operational and/or financial targets that the acquired company must achieve. Embracer management and co-founders jointly own around 40 % of the capital and around 60 % of the votes. Most executives and people in leadership positions that do not own shares are incentivized by earnouts. Operative groups are responsible for incentivizing key employees and creating profit sharing on studio level, within the framework determined by Embracer Group to maximize and align long-term interests.
Any approved individual game development project presents a considerable business opportunity, but there is also an inherent risk element. Therefore, diversification really matters. As the Group has grown from 1 to 12 operative groups since 2016, there is now limited dependency upon single titles. This results in an attractive risk profile, while enabling our studios to be creatively bold in their mindset when developing games.
Embracer Group encourages individual game development studios to put quality first and create games that really stand out – as the depth of the diversified games pipeline lowers the aggregated operational risk at Group level. There are currently more than 200 games under development across genres and targeting different audiences.
Our leverage target is to have Net Debt to Adjusted EBIT of 1.0x on a 12-month forward-looking basis. The Group may exceed this ratio for the right inorganic growth opportunity, but with the ambition to return to below 1.0x in the medium term. A strong balance sheet is emphasized, which reduces the financial risk and maximizes strategic flexibility.
Embracer Group is a global group of creative and entrepreneurial businesses in PC/console, mobile and board games and other related media. The Group has an extensive catalog of over 900 owned or controlled franchises.
With its head office based in Karlstad, Sweden, Embracer Group has a global presence through its twelve operative groups: THQ Nordic, PLAION, Coffee Stain, Amplifier Game Invest, Saber Interactive, DECA Games, Gearbox Entertainment, Easybrain, Asmodee, Dark Horse, Freemode and Crystal Dynamics – Eidos. The Group has 139 internal game development studios and is engaging more than 16,500 employees in more than 40 countries.
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