Square Enix bought the broken Tomb Raider publisher for £84M at the 2009 bottom

By the start of 2009 Eidos, the British publisher behind Tomb Raider, was close to the edge. Its shares, above £4 two years earlier, had collapsed to 32p after a string of profit warnings, culminating in January's admission that the latest Lara Croft game had failed to sell over Christmas. The company was openly worried it could breach the terms of its overdraft, and had already mortgaged part of its future: a £60M refinancing from Time Warner in April 2008 gave the media group 20% of the stock and a contractual obligation to follow the board's recommendation on any bid.

On February 12, 2009, the board recommended Square Enix's cash offer of 32p a share — £84.3M for the whole company. Square Enix's president Yoichi Wada said the deal would 'accelerate our aggressive expansion into western markets'; Eidos chairman Tim Ryan praised the certainty of cash 'in today's challenging market backdrop and economic outlook.' Time Warner was locked in, and institutional holders with 13% accepted immediately.

The same day, Midway Games — the Mortal Kombat publisher that had survived on Sumner Redstone's subsidies until he sold out for pennies on the dollar — filed for Chapter 11 in Chicago, drowning in $240M of debt. That was the alternative fate for leveraged Western mid-tier publishers in the crunch: extinction or forced sale, with creditors in control.

Square Enix, funded by the cash flows of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, instead bought counter-cyclically: the Tomb Raider franchise, which has since sold roughly 88 million copies, along with the Hitman, Deus Ex and Thief properties and an operating Western studio network it had never possessed.

Tomb Raider — an 88M-copy franchise — plus Hitman, Deus Ex and Thief IPs, and a Western publishing platform Square Enix had lacked

Crisis pricing set the terms: 32p bought a franchise that had been worth twenty-five times more before the warnings began.

Time Warner's £60M refinancing locked the largest shareholder into accepting a board-recommended bid, eliminating a bidding war.

Square Enix's Japan-funded balance sheet was unlevered while its Western targets ran on overdrafts and covenant waivers.

Wada had already committed to Western expansion; buying an existing publisher was faster and, in 2009, cheaper than building one.

The cheapest assets of a crisis are the distressed ones in a different currency area. A cash-rich company can buy at the trough a brand it could never build in a boom.

The rescued Eidos studios, rebranded under Square Enix, produced the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot that sold in the millions and relaunched Lara Croft for a new generation. Thirteen years after paying £84.3M, Square Enix sold the Western studios — Eidos-Montréal, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix Montréal — and the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief and Legacy of Kain rights to Sweden's Embracer Group for $300M in May 2022, bookending one of the crisis-era's clearest counter-cyclical buys.