Another studio is leaving the ship. Embracer lost one more studio.
34BigThings reclaiming its independence from Embracer Group is one more studio quietly walking out of a conglomerate that spent years buying everything and is now, just as steadily, letting it all go. The Italian studio, best known for the Redout series and last year's Carmageddon: Rogue Shift, confirmed that original co-founder Valerio Di Donato re-acquired 100% of its shares from the Swedish giant, with the deal having formally closed back on April 17. That makes the Turin-based team Italy's second-largest independent game developer once again, and it does so with a happier ending than most Embracer exits, since this is a founder buying his company back rather than a studio being shuttered or fire-sold. The financial terms weren't disclosed, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
To see why this fits a much larger pattern, you have to trace how 34BigThings ended up where it was. Embracer acquired the studio in November 2020, right in the thick of its frantic acquisition spree, and slotted it under Saber Interactive, one of Embracer's bigger sub-groups. Then things got messy. When Saber Interactive split away from Embracer in March 2024, taking a chunk of studios with it, 34BigThings was left behind, retained by Embracer rather than leaving with Saber. That detail matters, because it left the studio somewhat orphaned inside a parent that was actively dismantling itself. Since the 2023 collapse of a major investment deal, Embracer has become synonymous with mass layoffs, divestments, and closures, cutting roles this year alone at Vertigo Games, Tripwire, Crystal Dynamics, and Eidos Montréal, and ultimately splitting itself into three standalone public companies, Asmodee, Coffee Stain, and Fellowship Entertainment.
The Diplomatic Version, and the Honest One
Di Donato paid genuine tribute to Embracer Group, crediting its "invaluable structure and stability" with letting 34BigThings scale to more than 70 staff and establish itself as a respected European developer, which is fair enough. But he also described the arrangement as offering "a first-hand look at the complexities of balancing internal development with external stakeholders," which is about as diplomatic a way as exists to say they learned exactly what they didn't want. Franchi, now leading the studio, was pointed about one thing in particular, stressing that the buyback was entirely the founders' own initiative and "independent to any, if existing, conversations otherwise" Embracer may have been having about the studio's future. In plain terms, they jumped rather than waiting to find out whether they'd be pushed, which given Embracer's recent track record looks like sharp timing.
A Full Pipeline and a Real Risk
The genuinely encouraging part is that 34BigThings exits in healthy shape rather than as a wounded survivor. Remarkably, the studio kept its entire 70-plus workforce intact through the industry's brutal layoff wave, staying quiet to focus on shipping Carmageddon: Rogue Shift while staff elsewhere were being cut by the thousand. And its roadmap is stacked, with the team teasing a major title built on "one of the most important, beloved, and revered intellectual properties in the world" for later this year, another major title in 2027, and a further project in 2028. That's an ambitious pipeline for a 70-person independent, and it points to the one real risk in all of this. Independence is liberating right up until a project runs long and the runway gets short, since the studio no longer has a deep-pocketed parent to absorb a delay or a misfire. For now, though, the founders have their company back, their staff intact, and a full slate ahead, which is a considerably better position than most studios emerging from the Embracer machine have managed.
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