http://www.joystiq.com/2013/01/23/thq-bid-winners-prices-and-runners-up/ Has a good summery, except it fails to note that the South Park game might not go to Ubi. South Park Studios filed an injunction against THQ from selling the rights.
Well, the THQ sale of properties and studios has happened.
- Thread starter I.S.T.
- Start date
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Deleted member 13524
Guest
Interesting that the next Homefront will probably come from Crytek.
Prophecy2k
Veteran
This has been known for a while though now... THQ before they died (RIP) had contracted Crytek to do the next one. It's good news to me as I actually really enjoyed Homefront's single player campaign (surprisingly much more than any COD or BF3's).
Homefront felt for me very much like Resistance 3, albeit without the aliens. It was a similar premise and the locations and colour schemes were eerily similar. R3 was my GOTY for whatever year it was that it came out (MOVE control made it all tat much sweeter).
Homefront with Crytek is Homefront in good hands. Plus Crytek have already shown themselves adept at creating games where you shoot koreans. I expect Homefront 2 to be no different.
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On a separate note, there have been rumours on NeoGaf of Platinum games being interested in rescuing and buying up Vigil. That would be AWESOME in my mind.
I also wish Volition had gone to a bigger more financially and commercially proven Publisher. Certainly one not as risk averse as the big three. I reckon Square Enix, Konami, Sony or Capcom would have been a great fit.
Come to think of it, with the success of Square-Enix' forrays into buying up ailing western devs, and then cranking out superb games (e.g. Hitman Abs & DeusEx:HR), I'm surprised more Japanese pubs haven't followed suite. Vigil and Volition would have been excellent purchases in my book.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Deus Ex: HR, sorta, except they gimped the open play bit by trying to force people to conform to their particular ideology (IE - how they want people to play the game rather than just let people play it how they want). Great game, gimped by design choices which made it less than the original but still far better than the second one.
Hitman Absolution, no, not really. It's not really a Hitman game anymore, IMO. As there is no longer the open nature of getting a contract and then you as the Hitman deciding how you wanted to approach it and how you wanted to complete the contract. Much of Absolution forces you to do things a certain way in tiny tiny tiny little levels with little to no choice. Absolutely horrible game in the Hitman franchise. Call it something else and I probably would have liked it.
So, definitely hit and miss on SE's part.
Myself I'm more worried about how SEGA is going to treat Relic Entertainment. They are also hugely hit or miss with regards to RTS games. They absolutely butchered Supreme Commander for example, turning the sequel into a steaming pile of poo. But haven't ruined the Total War series from what I've heard. So, here's to hoping they keep a hands off approach to Relic.
Regards,
SB
I like Deep Silver, they publish my favourite franchise, X by Egosoft.
Not to many publishers willing to fund space-games like that.
As long as the games are good and keep coming, I don't mind too much on how they do comercially.
I think they did these purchases because they believe it were good investments.
I think they are pretty stable, or well off financially aswell - Koch media their parent company also got more feets to stand on than video-games.
Deep Silver probably know most of the Metro guys from Ukraine, and that franchise, I think they started out in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R-studio, didn't they?
Volition is a more interesting buy. Since that's a traditional console-franchise, while Deep Silver usually makes most of their money on PC/Steam.
Prophecy2k
Veteran
With Deus Ex:HR I never played the original two games, so for me Deus Ex:HR was a fantastic breath of fresh air in a generation that has been dominated by boring modern military shooters. It was a refreshing break from the norm as so I could very much forgive its design short comings (like getting butchers by the first boss if you ended up finding yourself there without any explosive or automatic weapons becuase you wanted to play stealthy. As well as the tiny super restrictive inventory limit - which I didn't like). I still absolutely adored the game though.
I disagree about Hitman though, however again I didn't play much of the originals. I played the very first hitman on PC, and I hated the fact that they just threw you in a play area without any indication of what to do or how to complete the mission. You had to spend a long time figuring things out and what you can actually do, before you could start enjoying it. This was me as someone who had never played a hitman game before. Hitman Abs, was more a Hitman game made much more accessible. You still had quite a bit of choice in how you did the missions, as well as moment to moment choices about how or not to dispatch the enemies in each area of the game. It was fun to me, and I liked that they did provide predefined routes with unique ways to kill each target. Although I'll agree with you that by awarding you the greatest points in going those routes, you effectively make it seem as if you are trying to funnel the player and force them to complete each level "your way" as the game's designer. That factor was completely at odds with the concept of player choice that was very much afforded you as a player, with so many items, weapons and gubbinz to play about with in each stage. I think you had alot of choice, but the whole points system screwed it up and sucked a lot of satisfaction out of veering off the beaten path. If they'd stripped out the points system, or only had a systems whereby you are only penalised for being spotted and killing innocent civilians, then it would have made for a much more rewarding game.
Re SEGA and Relic, I'm tempted to agree. I loved the DOW series and Warhammer 40k in general, although I disliked what Relic did with the sequel in doing away with base building, which was the best part of DOW1 for me. In the RTS series for base building and micromanagement to become somewhat of a dirty word, such that it gets designed out of RTS games, it's pretty much turned me off the whole genre completely. All RTS games shouldn't be made into DOTA-type games, and so I didn't like that Relic yielded to that trend. On the other hand I LOVED Space Marine, outside of a few minor design choices, and the rather cliche narrative. I just want to see an action TPS game (this time with a cover system) from Relic set during the Horus Heresy time period. Whomever owns them and allows them to develop that will win my money, respect and goodwill for all eternity.
Internal studios aside, the whole company seemed to be badly managed, despite the fact I didn't know they were in the brink of bankrupty. I purchased a PC -Titan's Quest Gold- game this past summer using their service for digital downloads and in doing so, I ended up losing 15€.
Yes, the purchase was registered correctly and so on, but there was nothing to download.
I exchanged what were like 15-20 emails with the support staff and they couldn't solve the problem -different people, they all said the same, basically-, and blamed it on the subsidiary company offering the service, which was maybe the actual problem, but it just goes to show the overall management was wrong.
It's a shame anyways though.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's not any more mismanaged than Square-Enix-Eidos, or SEGA, or EA, or Activision, etc.
Basically it came down to one of their big budget AAA efforts tanking and that pretty much broke the delicate balancing act. If something similar happened at EA, you'd see them similarly get close to potential bankruptcy proceedings. EA would have been able to weather this particular product failure (larger company) but it would have greatly impacted what they are able to do and might have prompted a sale of some of their IPs to stay afloat.
BTW - that product was the U Draw game and accessory.
They took a large gamble on the whole "tablet" being popular thing and took a dive with it. Similar to how another publisher recently went under when it took a large gamble on an MMO and took down some well established developers that it had in it's stable.
Profits are razor thin for games publishers (when they aren't losing money). Even Activision-Blizzard with their money printing mega blockbuster games wouldn't be immune to a product failure of that magnitude.
AAA game development is risky. People want them to launch new AAA IP. That's great if it succeeds, but can take a company down if it doesn't. As it happened with THQ.
Regards,
SB
