You probably know the story by now about how Embracer made one spectacular acquisition after another, until the bubble burst last year and the crisis began. This has led to huge layoffs, but also cancelled games and unfortunately also closed developers.
The company's founder and CEO Lars Wingefors says in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz that the blame should not be placed on his many employees, but he believes that it is he himself who should be scolded and that he deserves the criticism he has received:
"As a leader and an owner, sometimes you need to take the blame and you need to be humble about if you've made mistakes and if you could have done something differently.
I'm sure I deserve a lot of criticism, but I don't think my team or companies deserve all the criticism. I could take a lot of that blame myself. But ultimately I need to believe in the mission we set out and that is still valid, and we are now enabling that by doing this [new] structure."
While this doesn't help those affected by layoffs, it's still refreshing to see a senior leader admit that mistakes were made and actually take responsibility for them. Embracer was recently restructured in three separate parts and hopefully the worst is now over for them.