I had a sinking feeling upon reading a press release la🌼st week that said Funko had entered into an “exclusive worldwide license and distribution agreement” for Funko Games, the tabletop arm of the company that has been publishing wo🌠rld-class board games since 2019. You have to , but it sounds like Funko is so desperate for cash liquidity right now that it decided to sell off its fast-growing and award-winning tabletop business.
My worst fears were confirmed the following day when , the design team behind all of Funko’s beloved games, had been let go. Goliath’s chief executive officer Jochanan Golad said his company is the “perfect fit to partner with Funko to develop and distribute games on a global level,” but apparently that partnership doesn’t include the people who actually make the games💟.
Jurassic Wor🎃ld: Legacy of Isla Nublar Review - Funko Games Spared N꧙o Expense
Funko Games' first legacy board game will take you through the entire history of Jurass🍒ic World♋.
Watching Funko sell off Funko Games for parts is incredibly disappointing. In 2019, Funko acquired board game studio Forrest-Pruzan Creative and its design studio Prospero Hall, and over the last five years that team has launched dozens of fantastic games, many of which have💃 gone on to become massive successes for Funko. What Prospero Hall accomplished in the board game market is unprecedented. In just a few short years its portfolio of highly-polished, hobby-grade games reversed the stigma that IP-driven board games have always had. The team had an incredible knack for taking movies that don’t necessarily lend themselves to board games and developing them into rich, compelling tabletop experiences that are both true to the source material and stand on their own as exceptional games.
I’ve reviewed many Funko Games here on TheGamer over the years, and each one impressed me more than the last. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Goonies: Never Say Die, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future , 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Fast & Furious: Highway Heist, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel BattleWorld, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Funkoverse are just a few of the many great games Prospero Hall has created over the last five years. This is the team that created both 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Villainous and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horrified too. Prospero Hall made excellent games that were commercial♛ly successful, and it deser🎃ved better than to be dismantled callously.
This isn’t the first time in recent memory something like this has happened to one of Funko's brands. Funko acquired limited edition poster company Mondo in 2022, and a year later laid off both of its founders and senior creative director among a total of 180 Funko employees laid off last year. In a Twitter post shortly after, former Funko CEO Brian Mariotti wrote that Funko felt like Mondo’s model for releasing limited-run posters was unfair to fans, neglecting the fact that that’s what made the Mondo brand so popular in the first place. These days it seems like Funko’s entire business model is built around buying up and quickly dismantling small teams doing cool work, and losing astronomica🦩l amounts of money on Funko Pops.
This is the economic reality of acquisitions and consolidation between megacorporations that are too shortsighted to protect their own investments. We’re seeing more and more of this kind of gross mismanagement in the game industry too. Embracer is the biggest culprit at the moment, hoovering up dozens of studios over the last few years just so it could unceremoniously 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shut them down the moment that some value on a spreadsheet increases beyond an arbitrary threshold, but this isn’t a new phenomenon. Campo Santo hasn’t released a game since getting acquired by Valve in 2018, and the team behind Firewatch has seemingly been absorbed into the larger Valve machine. Activision has a long history of scooping up studios and turning them into support arms for Call of Duty, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Darkwatch studio High Moon and Tony Hawk studio Vicariou📖s Visions, now work🍨ing on Diablo 4 under the new name Blizzard Albany, are just two examples.
The Prospero Hall team had incredible talent and skill, and hope the displaced employees will go on to do more great things. It’s a terrible shame that the studio had to end this way, because there’s so much more it could have done. We don’t know what Goliath’s plans are for Funko Games now, bu♐t seeing as it wasn’t willing to preserve one of the best teams in the tabletop business, I don’t have a lot of faith in its decision-making, nor am I interested in continuing to support companies that don’t support the people that made them valuable in the first place.
