Quote of the Day – You Know Nothing Lars Wingefors!

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I’m not saying you can’t increase the price, but the reality is no one has tried it.

Lars Wingefors, CEO of Embracer Group, to GamesIndustry.biz

The Lars Wingefors rehabilitation tour continues.  After having pretty much set fire to the Embracer Group through transparently bad decisions by himself and his executive staff that showed, quite seriously, an underpants gnome level of depth, sophistication, and understanding of the market in which video games must resides, he is unhappy.

Embrace This

I don’t know WHY he is unhappy.  He got to keep his job while sending so many to the unemployment line.  He still gets a salary, benefits, and bonuses that could have sustained any of the studios he shut down.  In any sane world a leader who screwed up a company as badly as he did would be kicked to the curb.  But I hear if you turn out all the lights in the house, light a single candle, and stand in front of a mirror and chant “Shareholder value!” twenty-seven times the ghost of Bobby Kotick will appear and save your annual bonus.

What do you mean Bobby Kotick is still alive?  There ain’t no justice!

Hell, Lars did better than save his job and bonus plan.  He managed to get somebody to come up with a smoke screen maneuver where Embracer Group sticks around, he keeps his job, but they dump most of the debt he accrued through his bad business decisions on Asmodee.  If Asmodee fails, well… it wasn’t his fault!  They had a strong business.  Not Lars’ problem that they couldn’t cut it!  He has given himself plausible deniability for the ongoing problems he created.

But all of that hasn’t been enough.  It seems that he doesn’t want to be known as “Lars the Buffoon” or “Lars the Joke” or “Lars, wrecker of previously viable companies” around the industry.

Lars wants to be saved, get paid, AND be viewed as a crafty and insightful industry player.  He would like our respect.

So far he has been content to try to burnish his reputation by proxy, letting people like Matthew Karch go out there and defend him… though former Embracer COO Matt’s self-interest might have made him a bit too clever by half, as I not sure being called “naive” was the publicity that Lars wanted.

So Lars is now out there to do the heavy lifting himself, giving interviews to show how smart he is.  And how has that worked out?

Here is a tip Lars… how far out of your depth you are was a at least a bit of a mystery right up until you started opening your big mouth.  And now we know just how much you don’t know about the industry you’re supposed to be an expert in.

It reminds me a bit of the youngest daughter of some friends of ours.  When she was little, about pre-school age, she would get upset that her two older sisters got to do things she wasn’t allowed, being admonished that what ever the activity was it was for “big girls.”  Little Vicky would ball up her fists and give a little stomp with one foot and insist that she too was a big girl.  That behavior was adorable in a four year old.

In a middle age CEO that behavior is more disturbing than anything.

Anyway, enough well deserved general mockery of Lars, let’s go after that quote of his.

Over on Twitter, Mat Piscatella of Circana (NPD), whose account is one of about a dozen that keeps me on that otherwise declining hell site, had a barb for Lars and his opinions:

He says “no one has tried it” which is just completely not true. Publishers have just done so by offering gold/deluxe/whatever editions at higher price points… that have (generally) done quite well. What an odd statement for anyone that’s actually been paying attention.

That seems pretty obvious.  I mean, I didn’t have to look very far on this site to find premium editions of games selling for much more than the baseline AAA price point.  Just look at Diablo IV’s options from one year ago.

There is some upselling there

Or, if $100 isn’t enough, how about $250?  Would a $250 edition… with NO PHYSICAL aspects, digital only… would that satisfy Lars?

Let me re-introduce you to EverQuest expansions, which been offering a $250 option for nearly five years at this point!

The four prices of the Torment of Velious back in 2019

And Daybreak keeps offering up that Family & Friends pack every year for both EverQuest and EverQuest II expansions, content which has a base rate of $35 for just the content.

That is a lot of up sell, and they wouldn’t keep at it every year if nobody was buying them.

Now, if you go through that interview and read between the lines, you can certainly see that this isn’t really what Lars means, even if those are the words coming out of Lars’ mouth.

Lars doesn’t want to sell $100 premium editions to 5-25% of the buyers.  What Lars wants is to sell 3 million copies of Dead Island 2 for $200 rather than the $70 going rate for AAA titles.  And he trots out the usual argument about 100-150 hours of content, making him sound like the type of indie dev who gets upset when people buy Starbucks daily but won’t buy their app as though all experiences were directly comparable and transferable.

But $200 AAA titles are the only way that Lars is going to be able to deliver on the promises he made to his board and major shareholders when he embarked on this venture under the assumption that the COVID video game bubble was a line that would keep going up.

As was obvious even during the bubble, it was not going to keep going up.  I can go back to 2021 and find posts I wrote wondering what was going to happen when this extremely obvious bubble collapsed.

So Lars is out there trying to soften the ground to raise the price of his games to get them closer to his desired state… because nothing else he is doing will make the line go up, and splitting the company in three to obfuscate that is a dodge that will only last so long.

Of course, Mat Piscatella has a response for that unstated goal as well:

If you want to increase the base price point above $70 right now, well, good luck with that. Enjoy your quick price drop, I guess?

There you go.  Those discount percentages will look even more enticing on Steam when you start at $100.  Easier to calculate too.  Lars could probably do that with just his fingers and toes.

Anyway, since the Embracer Group keeps coming up I suppose I should start keeping a running tally on these posts as to the story so far.  I didn’t even start writing about them until they had already screwed the pooch and were looking for the way out of the problems they created.

The Embracer posts here so far:

 

1 thought on “Quote of the Day – You Know Nothing Lars Wingefors!”

  1. Anonymous

    Leveraged buyouts are seriously evil. They cause otherwise viable companies to end up with ridiculous amounts of debt.

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