Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions(embracergamesarchive.com) |
Embracer Games Archive is preserving 75000 video games and needs contributions(embracergamesarchive.com) |
> Can I visit the archive?
> The archive is for everyone, and we welcome all inquiries. However, we prioritize requests that support gaming culture, gaming history, and the games industry. /../ While the archive is not open to the public, we hope /../
The archive is for everyone, but it's only for these groups of people, and it's also not open to the public... Yikes.
I'd much rather support initiatives that actually make the games and software required to run them open to the public, like GOG.com and Internet Archive. This feels like a one-way transaction - society puts games in, society gets nothing back.
Its Lars Wingefors private collection.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cb93xy/embracer_ceo...
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/embracer-ceo-lars-wingefors-im...
What exactly they're doing with the archive isn't stated. The FAQ doesn't explain, other than vague intentions to have the ability to do research and possibly some sort of museum (I think?)
Personally, I think there should be a non-profit that works with non-profits like this, computer and console equipment museums, Internet Archive, and a spacefaring company to ensure that history is protected in a logical way.
very unclear who these people actually are
They ran around buying and gutting every IP they could get their hands on. Nordic became THQ Nordic, whilst continuing to eat everyone around them, whilst also nearly going bankrupt multiple times, before eventually ditching the name because investors didn't like people noticing just who they were.
They are the group that ate Dark Horse, CoffeeStain, Gearbox, Square Enix, Saber Interactive and so many more.
Today, they are majority-owned by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund.
The SE-Embracer connection is that SE spun off Crystal Dynamics and its properties like Tomb Raider, selling them to Embracer Group.
I'm not inclined to trust corporate do-gooding either, but it would be nice to have some detail.
They then proceeded to run it into the ground. Waves of layoffs and studio closures, mismanagement, and a credit crunch that ultimately debilitated the company.
In other words, from the outside anyway, it looks like a classic Private Equity layup and cashout.
Do not trust the Embracer Group.
Or if they're even digitizing the games for some use of preservation. I always feel like when you hoard things in one location like this, one fire or other natural disaster and the entire collection is gone!
Much easier to get away with such things in the US (it seems).
Is there somewhere better, preferably outside the USA?
Then maybe people within the games industry, researchers, schools, and other institutions can provide those needed contributions. Very poor form to be coming to the public, hat in hand, asking them to help finance your private vidya collection.
Future collectors beware though, even though I collected a whole bunch as you can see, at the end of the day I still play either on Analogue's with Everdrive or original machines (RGB of course) with Everdrives. Sometimes even, yes, emulators. If anything, I'd honestly donate to a digital archive and emulator development. Only thing right now that really can't be emulated are CRTs - but I am honestly convinced we're soon close enough if not already 98% there with great 4k OLEDs (like sony A95L series) and some pre-processing. I can tell by the pixels when I'm looking at both A95L and BVM20 and/or B&O TV which I also have, to my wife's disapproval.
What?!? How can one preserve games without opening boxes? Physical media don't last forever.
Unless they're interested in preserving the boxes themselves? (or other goodies inside)
Reads like they're looking for donations to enlarge a private collection. Or perhaps obtain some physical copies for stuff in their IP portfolio?
You do have a point in that commercial ventures like Embracer don’t tend to last for very long. Presumably the collection would not be auctioned off piecemeal if the company goes under, but rather sold as a unit to some other entity.
In a 100 (or a few hundred) years none of the games from that physical archive will be playable, as both the physical media and the physical consoles needed to play those games will become unusable. Physical archives work only as long as the physical medium itself lasts.
The only way to actually preserve games is to digitize them. Period. Collecting physical media and consoles is a fun hobby, but in the long term it's completely useless if the goal is preservation. If you want to preserve games you should be dumping whatever undumped games still exist, contribute to databases like no-intro.org, and download and seed/share what has already been dumped. This is what will help preserve those games, not a physical collection that will turn into an unusable paperweight sooner or later.
"Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends" - The legal successor to Embracer. For their triple A studios and major ip rights (they currently own the rights to LOTR-based games)
"Coffee Stain & Friends" - For their indie studios. (Named after their most successful indie studio, the people behind Goat Simulator and Satisfactory)
Asmodee - Their board and card game group. They took out a 900 million euro "financial agreement" with Embracer to pay back part of their debts. Officially a separate entity as of February.
[0] https://embracer.com/releases/embracer-group-announces-its-i...
The Asmodee spinout officially became a separate entity as of 2/2025, and has an 18 month deadline to refinance that debt. Fitch rates this BB- [0], which apparently implies >6% probability of default (at current interest rates). Asmodee will presumably achieve that by jacking up prices on existing (boardgame and cardgame) IP, and/or killing stuff that doesn't pay much, and/or refreshing newer versions of existing IP (like Sony Games' 2024 attempt to do forced relicensing on existing PS owners' libraries).
Right after the acquisition, Asmodee silently delisted beloved Steam titles like 'Pandemic' in early 2022 [1][2], without even notifying existing owners; and only 4 years after it had been released in 2018. Supposedly this after-sale revocation violates consumer laws in California and Australia (and maybe elsewhere); if Steam ever pulls the trigger on removing them we get to find out; meanwhile back up your binaries.
Asmodee also acquired the superb online site BoardGameArena.com in 2021, cofounders Grégory and Emmanuel both left in 2023 at the height of Embracer's pillaging.
I commented previously on Asmodee (mostly pre-Wingefors) milking the awful digital implementation of Terraforming Mars (which should have been a huge hit) for like 6 years without any meaningful playtesting or bugfixing [3][4].
Here are some Redditors helpfully filling in the gaps on Wingefors "I'm sure I deserve a lot of criticism" token gesture towards humility [5].
Wingefors' behavior in divesting Asmodee and sticking it with much of the debt for his/ Embracer's failed Covid-era acquisition spree feels something like Bruce Willis strapping plastic explosive to the monitor and chair and dropping it down a 36-storey elevator shaft. Make impressive noise. Or like Restaurant at the End of the Universe when they crash the starship into the sun.
Given Lars Wingefors' trail of digital tears, why he is now begging private individuals to donate their physical copies of old videogames to a private physical archive noone can access or visit, to make him somehow look like a community-minded benefactor, is bizarre. He could simply donate to an existing online archive.
[0]: https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/fitc...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29968054 [2]: https://delistedgames.com/pandemic-the-board-game/
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42303399 [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TerraformingMarsGame/comments/1443i...
[5]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1cb93xy/embracer_ceo...
>* Our mission is to have an archive of physical games as extensive as possible. With the purpose of contributing to the joint preservation of video game culture and history.
Now they're looking for donations to a private collection that will not be open to the public. They likely plan to sell the collection the highest bidder at some point. If they can't find a buyer, they'll bin the lot of it rather than continue to pay storage costs. The employees working for them may believe in what they're doing, but Embracer group now has a history of pulling the rug out from under such people.
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Edit: The archive is based in Sweden, which has a really hopping museum scene. They could make a for-profit museum with these materials and a few talented museologists and it would likely do well. They mention no such plans and that's very odd.
Citation needed. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/09/25/s...
https://swedenherald.com/article/tough-economic-situation-fo...
For-profit museums aren't really a thing in Sweden either, because you won't be making a profit, unless you're the Vasa Museum, but even that is struggling.
https://riksarkivet.se/utforska-och-bestall/vad-du-har-ratt-...
Then they disposed of the Pieces Interactive by feeding them to Piranha Bytes!
I see some value in preserving the physical artifacts. These games are not only the medium and its content. Most have boxes with artwork, many have manuals, even “feelies”. If all we had was archive.org then those would be lost to the sands of time.
"What the Asmodee debt deal means for the board game industry (a deeper dive)" (2024/5) https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1cht230/what_th...
"Can anyone explain what exactly is going on with Asmodee games?" (ObiWahnKenobi, 2024/5) https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1crau93/can_any...
"Asmodee spun out of Embracer Group, to become a standalone publicly traded company" (2024/4) https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/1ca8wdv/asmodee...
"Board game giant Asmodee’s corporate owner allegedly loses $2bn deal with Saudi Arabian partner | Dicebreaker" (2023/8) https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/15yd0g7/board_g...
"Welcome to Delisted Games, a growing archive of 2,163 games you can't play" from game console libraries, Steam, etc. ("the town criers of video game disappearances... We research, catalog, and inform about today’s digital gaming landscape (hellscape) including store delistings, online service shutdowns and, simply put, cultural erasure").
(mentioned on HN previously in connection with the PS4 debacle [0]).
I mean there's a legitimate discussion to be had about game lifecycles and between Steam, Kickstarter, games publishers, video game consoles, value resellers like GOG, HumbleBundle, about what are more transparent, ethical ways to publish(/unpublish) and monetize games throughout their lifecycle, to different constituencies of player:
- early adopters/ alpha playtesters, who are happy with the tradeoff of a buggy and incomplete game they can play online with friends in return for a deep discount, early access, the ability to positively influence game devpt, maybe some swag or convention events
- beta playtesters, who expect a reasonably complete and stable game, an active community, forums, developers who are reponsive, regular (monthly/quarterly) bug rollups and fixes, etc.
- main-phase, who are happy to pay full price for a complete, bug-free game with tutorials, user guides, multilanguage online help, forums, etc., and have an expectation that they can quickly start an online multplayer/remote game with friends, strangers and AI.
- owners who still expect a basic post-lifecycle ability to play a game solo or against AI or other existing owners (after the publisher has disappeared or the game site has taken down infrastructure servers, achievements, forums, etc.) Such as happened with 'Pandemic' and Asmodee.
- to what extent should publishers be able to use exclusivity to lock in owners and extract revenues? what happens to digital rights after the monetizing is over? Can they retroactively convert a sale to a licensing (time-limited, region-locked, limited rights to play with friends and family...)? This is something where consumer law and regulators can limit bad behavior.
As a positive example of how to do this profitably and ethically, Civilization (Sid Meier Games/ Firaxis Games).
Archives exist to preserve what is there, not to show it off. Sometimes, that's for future scientific research. And sometimes, they may participate in museal work as well, lending off objects.
Sure, archives often permit you to actually view their original media in person, but that's not always part of their mission. Sometimes the best they'll do is give you copies for a fee. Other times they may lend their original media (or sometimes copies) to qualified entities (spoiler alert: not everybody qualifies). There really is no single "right" way for this to work.
It detracts from the thing-itself, like a showroom car that travels everywhere in a hermetically sealed container. That's not a car anymore, it's waste. Just because it gets driven 5 miles a year doesn't change shit. If someones spending money to preserve my games, I'd rather it'd just be a tarball in a well maintained magnetic tape vault available on-line than some aristocratic funko pop collection for a tiny amount of people to pog at in person.
That needs to be preserved. Just making a digital copy isn't enough.
With software the notion of an original is meaningless though.
Thus I've cut through a laundry list of silver and golden age cRPGs (and other genres, of course) with cute copy protection and complex manuals. Often times the relevant information was included as a text file (maybe not in the same format it came in), sometimes the copy protection was patched right out of the game (the Scene in the 20th century was just that crazy.) I never particularly cared. I was there for the game, not the auxiliary accoutrements. To some degree I understand the sentimentality and attachment if you grew up with the tactile materials accompanying the game. That being said, I don't feel like my experience of Ultima 3 was lessened because I lacked the cloth map any more than I feel like my experience of Wasteland was ruined because I could ctrl+f the copy protection challenges.
Their Library Director Phil Salvador is a serious historian, who extensively researched, interviewed people, and wrote a comprehensive deep dive into the history of Maxis's serious games division, Maxis Business Simulations, John Hiles, and SimRefinery.
It was such an widely read, well received investigation, that it led to the recovery of SimRefinery when a reader discovered an old floppy disk of it that had been sitting in a drawer for decades!
https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery
https://gamehistory.org/library-director-phil-salvador/
https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-ref...
https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/
Has a large collection of old systems and games, magazines and anything else they can get hold of. It's also open to visitors.
That is two museums. It's in the title: "Hands-On Vintage Technology Museums" and mentioned all over the front page.
Quite a long trip for many. That seems to signify that they're not a large enough organization to be an archive.
That... depends. A lot of older games shipped with physical artifacts which were an important part of the game: manuals, code wheels, custom controllers, "feelies" in Infocom games, etc. You can't easily make a copy of those. (And preserving them isn't just a matter of throwing a copy on a hard disk.)
And for that matter, if you're concerned about minute granular details of visual media being an integral component of the meaning and essence of that media, you should be far more concerned with whether or not the cultural context is one that's even accessible to you in a meaningful capacity, because most are not. The whimsy of the Mona Lisa in person isn't actually all that deep.
Oh boy, are you mistaken. The 1990s version of XCOM was a mess. If it wasn't enough that it was hard as a nail, it also was buggy beyond belief. To many of us, X-COM (and to a lesser extend the reskin 'Terror from the deep') was what started the 'compulsively save the game after every move' trend. OpenXcom in comparison is a lot more forgiving.
> The whimsy of the Mona Lisa in person isn't actually all that deep.
That is in large parts because you never get to experience the original as you are the copies. You always have a thousand tourists around you, all loud, all pushing to get a glimpse of the real painting once in their lives. They do not understand art needs time to work, impressions do not come between a hotdog and a trip to a café - that is why in most galleries, you see little benches that invite you to sit down and immerse yourself in a picture.
Similarly ... just giving the games to anyone without context will lead to people pushing and prodding, getting bored or frustrated easily, and eventually losing interest. For those people, it doesn't matter if you give them a masterpiece like Ultima III or junk. They consume, they move on. Abandonware sites exist for them. A scholarly archive of gaming history, not generally available to the public, still is useful.