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      Embracer Group lets go of Borderlands maker for $460M after three years

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 28 March - 13:39 · 1 minute

    Borderlands' Claptrap, metal hands on hips, in front of window

    Enlarge / Claptrap keeps finding himself in wild new places. Now he's heading from Sweden's Embracer Group to New York City's Take-Two Interactive. Okay, maybe not that wild. (credit: Gearbox Interactive)

    Embracer Group has been backing away from its all-encompassing position in the games industry lately. The latest divestment is Gearbox Entertainment, the studio behind the Borderlands series it bought in early 2021 for a deal that could have been worth up to $1.37 billion to Gearbox had it stayed inside the Swedish conglomerate's grasp.

    The buyer is Take-Two Interactive Software , which had previously partnered with Gearbox on publishing Borderlands and other titles. Take-Two will issue new shares of its common stock to pay $460 million for Gearbox, to be completed before the end of June this year. Embracer paid $363 million in cash and stock for Gearbox in 2021 but promised up to $1 billion more should the developer hit earnings goals over six years.

    "Today’s announcement marks the result of the final structured divestment process and is an important step in transforming Embracer into the future with notably lower net debt and improved free cash flow," said Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors in a statement intended to start nobody's imagination running.

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      Github reverses takedown of reverse-engineered GTA source code

      Kyle Orland · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 11 May, 2021 - 19:55

    • Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original. [credit: RockStar Games ]

    The reverse-engineered source code for the PC versions of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City is back online today , months after it was originally posted and then quickly taken down via a DMCA request from publisher Take-Two.

    TorrentFreak reports on the restored version of the project, which was posted as a seemingly identical fork of the original by a New Zealand-based developer named Theo. While the original GitHub poster (who goes by the handle aac) has not contested Take-Two's original takedown, Theo told TorrentFreak he filed a counterclaim to restore his copy of the project, saying it "contained no code owned by Take Two."

    A question of law

    We've previously looked in-depth at how video game fan coders use reverse-engineering techniques to deconstruct the packaged executable files distributed by a game's original developers. This painstaking, function-by-function process creates raw programming code that can generate exactly the same binary file when compiled (though the code as distributed on GitHub still requires external, copyrighted art and sound assets from a legitimate copy of the games).

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