In a press release revealed on Monday, Japanese online game writer Sq. Enix introduced that it could be divesting its fashionable Tomb Raider franchise for $300 million and investing the proceeds into blockchain, synthetic intelligence (AI) and cloud computing applied sciences.
The principal developer of Tomb Raider is Sq. Enix’s subsidiary Crystal Dynamics, which generated $92 million in income in its fiscal yr ending March 2021. Apart from Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Interactive, one other subsidiary to be divested, maintain mental properties for titles akin to Deus Ex, Thief and Legacy of Kain.
Shares of each firms, in addition to Sq. Enix Montreal, shall be transferred to Sweden-based Embracer Group AB. The settlement is predicted to conclude between July and September of this yr.
Since its inception in 1996, the Tomb Raider franchise has offered greater than 88 million models. About 40% of the gross sales got here from the franchise’s rebooted trilogy consisting of Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadows of the Tomb Raider, whereas the remaining got here from gross sales of the unique sport. Moreover, the franchise noticed over 53 million paid cell downloads from video games akin to Lara Croft: Relic Run.
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Cointelegraph beforehand reported that Yosuke Matsuda, CEO of Sq. Enix, revealed plans for blockchain, metaverse and nonfungible tokens integration originally of the yr. Particularly, the CEO sees the event of play-to-earn blockchain video games as a key pillar of progress for the business and expects 2022 to be a yr with rising hype for the metaverse.
