Embracer Group, the Swedish conglomerate that bought the adaptation rights for Lord of the Rings last year, announced its plans for the near future in its latest earnings briefing. All the incoming Lord Of The Rings titles will be produced externally, but Embracer will receive royalties on them.
The documents also show a 128 percent increase in net sales across the company, which should help propel the flurry of its new projects forward. With 94 games in the pipeline for the 2023/24 fiscal year, four of which are AAA projects, it's easy to understand why the studio would like to outsource some projects.
We already know most of the upcoming Lord of the Rings games coming before the end of March 2024, but the fifth one is still a mystery. The first and most obvious should be The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a stealth action-adventure title made by Daedalic Entertainment. It was scheduled for a September 2022 release date but suffered multiple delays due to the transfer of rights from Middle-earth Enterprises.
Now, the latest reports suggest the game could be published in the spring or summer of 2023.
The rest of Embracer's upcoming catalog should include Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, a survival and crafting game by Free Range Games, in which players are Dwarves looking to recolonize their homeland below the Misty Mountains. EA and Embracer are also working together on the mobile game, The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth. The fourth game is an undisclosed title made by Weta Workshop. The New Zealand digital effects studio had their fingerprints all over Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, as well as James Cameron’s Avatar movies, so expectations are naturally high.
In total, Embracer Group plans to publish 224 games before March 2028, with 31 of them being AAA titles. The company is defining a AAA game as a project with over 100 full-time developers working on it during the peak development phase. A different cateria criteria that might push titles to the highest frontier are major marketing budgets and expectations of selling at least two million units.
The same report lists some of their biggest announced projects like the troubled remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the upcoming Tomb Raider game that will be published by Amazon Games, Payday 3, and many more. These will include some AA, A, and indie games, major DLCs, and cross-platform ports.
Fingers crossed, Embracer is hiding a reboot of the Legacy of Kain series and a new Deus Ex installment in there now that it owns Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal.
