Asmodee shines amid more Embracer cost-cutting, and how The Op got 8 million TikTok views last month
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When news broke last summer that Asmodee’s parent business Embracer Group was launching a massive cost-cutting exercise, there were huge questions marks about how the restructuring would affect Asmodee - and whether it would even remain part of the wider business. Several months later, and Asmodee has not only remained largely unscathed amid 1,300 job losses across Embracer - with its own 2,500-plus headcount falling by just 82 - but has emerged as its parent company’s standout business, outperforming PC and Console Games and Mobile repeatedly across the last couple of quarters. This morning’s Q3 results brought another outsized performance from Asmodee - but Embracer still has work to do, with CEO Lars Wingefors saying a few large divestments are still on the cards. Whether that ends up being Asmodee remains to be seen.
Elsewhere this week we have insights from social media and marketing specialist Ray Billings on how she helped The Op Games hit 8 million TikTok views last month. Additionally - BoardGameWire has signed its first advertiser in Fulfillrite. This is a huge boost for us, and hopefully puts us on the road to growing our news output and increasing our coverage, so please consider clicking and checking out their site - each click makes a big difference to BoardGameWire. And as we say on the site - if each of our readers from last year supported us with just £1, no matter how many articles they read, we could hire two full-time reporters and fund travel and accommodation to every major board game convention. Please consider supporting our journalism!
Asmodee shines while owner Embracer Group continues large-scale cost-cutting
Tabletop gaming giant Asmodee’s corporate owner Embracer Group is planning more big divestments, amid its ongoing struggle to pay down huge debt taken on to fund a string of acquisitions in recent years. Embracer admitted in its latest financial report today that it is unlikely to bring its net debt down to its SEK8bn ($760m) target by the end of March, despite shuttering a string of video games studios and projects and cutting more than 1,300 jobs in the past few months.
Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors said the company, which owns video game franchises including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex and Borderlands as well as Asmodee, still has “a few larger structured divestment processes ongoing” which could significantly reduce its net debt, but did not reveal what those divestments could be. He added, “Our overruling principle is to always maximize shareholder value in any given situation.”
Asmodee remains Embracer’s biggest earner after overtaking its PC and Console Games segment for net sales last year. The tabletop arm has avoided large-scale job losses so far, with its internal headcount falling by 82 to 2,500 people since Embracer began restructuring last summer. The tabletop gaming business increased its Q3 net sales 7% year-on-year to about $420m, while PC and Console saw net sales fall 5% to $321m in the same time period. Embracer’s company-wide net sales in Q3 fell by 4% to $1.14bn.
How board game maker The Op got 8 million TikTok views last month
In an industry where selling several thousand copies of a game can often be considered a success, getting eight million people to look at your products is something most publishers would bite your hand off to achieve. Board game media and marketing specialist Ray Billings, who has years of experience under her belt with companies including Czech Games Edition and Resonym, told BoardGameWire how her foray into TikTok since joining The Op five months ago has led to eye-watering engagement figures for the company - and explains how other publishers should be following suit.
Magic, D&D maker Hasbro lost over $1bn in Q4, predicts WotC revenue decline in 2024
Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons owner Hasbro lost more than $1bn in the final quarter of 2023, as huge expenses associated with selling its eOne film and TV business far outweighed growth from its Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming segments. Hasbro suffered a bigger-than-expected drop in its Q4 earnings, with a poor Christmas of toy and games sales also weighing heavily on its results.
While Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming saw a revenue bump of 7%, that was massively offset by a 49% decline in its entertainment segment, which includes eOne, and 25% in its consumer products business, which includes Monopoly, Transformers, Nerf and My Little Pony. The huge $1.2bn operating loss in Q4 was largely made up of charges associated with eOne. Hasbro agreed to sell eOne’s film and TV assets to Lionsgate for about $500m last year, bringing to an end its plans to expand beyond a toy and game business into a multimedia giant.
Wizards of the Coast, which includes both Magic and D&D, outperformed for Hasbro across the whole of 2023, with its revenues up 10% year-on-year compared to a 15% revenue slide for Hasbro as a whole.
Marketing on BGG “has been very much hit or miss, especially lately”: Mindclash Games’ CEO on effective marketing, crowdfunding’s rocky patch and the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of stretch goals
Mindclash Games has made a name for itself as a Kickstarter-focused heavy board games expert since the launch of debut title Trickerion on the crowdfunding service in 2015. Since then the publisher has hauled in almost $6m across a string of successful campaigns, including more than $1.5m alone for its biggest Kickstarter project, 4x space eurogame Voidfall, in 2021. Fresh from two more strong crowdfunding campaigns for Septima and Perseverance, which raised more than $1.7m between them, Mindclash CEO Viktor Peter spoke to BoardGameWire about the company’s changing approach, its recent use of Gamefound rather than Kickstarter, and how some avenues for marketing its games are not proving as lucrative as in the past.
Sustainable tabletop games maker scores second crowdfunding success, raises nearly $1m for new Earthborne Rangers campaign
Earthborne Games, a sustainable manufacturing-focused board game maker run by former Fantasy Flight Games designers and artists, has scored its second crowdfunding success by raising almost $1m for the new printing of co-operative card game Earthborne Rangers. Earthborne was launched in 2020 by former Fantasy Flight head of studio Andrew Navaro, who worked on seminal games including Twilight Imperium 4th Edition, Arkham Horror The Card Game and Marvel Champions.
Navaro founded the company on the principle that tabletop games “can and should be manufactured sustainably”, and saw that principle through with the first printing of Earthborne Rangers, which raised more than $450,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in mid-2021. That campaign came with a pledge to create the game sustainably, targeting suppliers and manufacturers offering carbon-neutrality, eco-friendly materials, efficient energy use and waste reduction. The company settled on Germany-based Ludo Fact for its first print run, and delivered a game which contained no plastic of any kind and which is fully recyclable and compostable – unlike most modern board games, which are frequently not recyclable due to plastic coatings and cores on cards and boards.
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Good to know, for those of us who are in the business: For all of Hasbro's troubles, it seems like D&d and MtG are expected to remain strong. It's the digital licensing business that is expected to fall off (which would explain the report that Hasbro has been talking to Tencent). I'm glad you guys are reporting this, because it's the sort of thing that you would not find in the financial news, and it's also the sort of thing that easily gets warped by the online rumor mill.