Publisher that pooped out Gollum wants to make Lord Of The Rings gaming's best franchise

Embracer Group Holding recently announced its plans to “exploit” its recently purchased Lord Of The Rings franchise rights, with loads of new games.

The publisher bought the rights to Tolkien’s prestigious Lord Of The Rings franchise last year for $700 million, and has since received royalties on all new LOTR projects, even the embarrassingly terrible Gollum game that released last month.

Take a look at Gollum in action below, if only for a chuckle.

The company has been on a maddening spending spree over the years, acquiring several game studios like Gearbox, THQ Nordic, Aspyr and Saber Group, overseeing publishing for multiple upcoming games, like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II and the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake. Now, Embracer has drastic plans to increase its profitability, including cancelling a variety of projects, forcing out staff and going all-in on its Lord Of The Rings rights.

Lars Wingefors, CEO of Embracer, recently stated: “The reality is that the quicker we act, the sooner we emerge as a stronger company … The actions will include, but not be limited to, closing or divestments of some studios and the termination or pausing of some ongoing game development projects. It will also include decreased spending on non-development costs such as overhead and other operating expenses.”

Wingefors went to discuss the lucrative Lord Of The Rings franchise, saying: “We own Lord of the Rings, and we know we need to be exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion and turn that into one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world … That’s obviously something we’re going to be doing. That’s a much better use of resources than some of the other projects that some of our teams have been working on.”

We’re definitely not short of Lord Of The Rings projects for the foreseeable future, with several new films planned for production, as well as new games too, like an open-world RPG that’ll supposedly last us 10 years according to the devs.

Of course, just because it’s a reputable franchise like Lord Of The Rings, it doesn’t mean success is guaranteed. The recently released Amazon show Rings of Power failed to capture viewer attention, and even received some disgraceful backlash to its cast.

One thing is for certain though, if future releases are as disastrous as Gollum was, Lord Of The Rings will be far from gaming’s biggest franchise.