Embracer Group officially closed Free Radical Design — more than 80 people were left without work
Today, the British studio Free Radical Design has closed its doors forever. Dozens of employees told about it on social networks.
"Free Radical Design has been a focus of creativity, but unfortunately we have joined an ever—growing list of victims in a malfunctioning industry where entire studios are seen as easily replaceable cogs in a soulless machine fixated only on stock prices," wrote QA manager Kevin Ellis in a farewell post on LinkedIn.
Embracer Group has not yet publicly announced the closure of its division. However, all information has been deleted from the studio's official website, and visitors are now greeted with the message: "404 company has not been found."
Initially, Free Radical Design was founded in 1999. Ten years later, the studio, known for the TimeSplitters series, was bought by Crytek. The team helped the company with the development of the second and third parts of Crysis, as well as Warface.
Faced with financial difficulties in 2014, Crytek was forced to close Free Radical Design. After that, she sold the rights to IP Homefront to German Koch Media (now part of the Embracer Group as the Plaion operating group), and most of the former studio employees joined the new Dambuster Studios team led by Deep Silver (the "daughter" of Koch Media and Embracer).
In 2021, the Swedish holding unexpectedly announced the revival of Free Radical Design with the support of the founders of the original studio, David Doak and Steve Ellis. Up until the closure, the team was working on a new game in the TimeSplitters franchise, but Embracer seems to have decided to cancel the project and dissolve the studio as part of a massive restructuring.
As a reminder, Embracer Group is currently undergoing a large-scale restructuring. The company announced its decision to cut costs in June after it broke a $2 billion deal (presumably with the Saudi fund Savvy Games Group). The goal of the program is to reduce net debt to at least 8 billion Swedish kronor ($757 million) by March 31, 2024.
Many divisions of the holding became "victims" of the restructuring. In addition to Free Radical Design, Embracer closed Campfire Cabal and Volition, and made cuts at Gearbox Publishing, Beamdog, Crystal Dynamics, Rainbow Studios, Zen Studios, Fishlabs, New World Interactive and other studios.
According to the company's latest financial report, over 900 people have officially lost their jobs since June (5% of the total staff of the holding). However, given the ongoing wave of layoffs, the number of people laid off could already exceed a thousand.
