Take-Two Interactive has finally welcomed Gearbox Entertainment into the fold.
Years after fans wondered why Take-Two doesn’t Gearbox, the sale is now official after Embracer Group confirmed that it’s selling the makers of the Borderlands franchise to Rockstar Games’ parent company for $460 million, three years after it paid $1.3 billion for the same company. Included in Gearbox’s sale are its Frisco, Texas headquarters and other branches located in Montréal and Quebec.
With the sale, Take-Two will now officially own the rights to Duke Nukem, Brother in Arms, Homeworld, and of course, Borderlands and the wildly successful spin-off, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. But not everything is going with the firesale. Embracer is retaining the publishing rights to Hyper Light Breaker and Remnant as well as Gearbox Publishing San Francisco, which it will rename before the deal pushes through.
It wasn’t too long ago that Embracer was doing all the buying. It famously took Square Enix’s western subsidiaries off its for a ludicrously low price considering what they got in return.
Embracer’s current and ongoing financial struggles, while normal in today’s climate, stem from a botched multi-billion investment deal last year with Savvy Games Group, a Saudi-owned company. Since then, Embracer has sold off Saber Interactive, Volition, and more.
This saddening news is at least made better knowing Embracer is in good hands. Take-Two is one of the few companies not to take part in this year’s layoff spree.
Believe it or not, Gearbox’s relationship with Take-Two stretches all the way back to the late 2000s with the release of the first Borderlands game. Amidst Embracer’s reshuffling, Take-Two’s bargain bin buyout is good news for both companies involved. Aside from Borderlands, which Take-Two publishes under its 2K label, the two are partners on the live-action Borderlands film that’s still not in theaters after years of work and Battleborn, a little-known Overwatch-like game that came out in 2016.
With Take-Two backing it and Gearbox’s history, don’t be surprised if we’ll see a new game come out of this new development sooner rather than later.
