First names coming out of THQ bankruptcy auction – Rumour
As you probably already know THQ filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on december 19th after struggling to keep the company alive for months, being forced to sell all of it’s assets and lincenses in an attempt to make enough money to pay back it’s debt. That aution took place yesterday and although the auction was closed of to the public it didn’t take long for rumours to come out about some of the bigger names up for sale. Here’s a short list of what’s come out of the rumour mill so far:
The most surprising one is probably the supposed acquisition of the new South Park game, South Park: The Stick of Truth, by French developer Ubisoft. I say surprising because yesterday news came out that South Park Studios, the company behind the series, had taken legal action to stop THQ from auctioning of the new game, claiming THQ didn’t have the right to do so and that in the case that THQ couldn’t produce the game itself, the rights to it would go to South Park Studios who would then probably look for a new developer itself. THQ’s legal team did put out a message later in the day saying they were in their right selling the game and that they would try to find a compromise with South Park Studios about the sale of the game.
The second big acquisition is that of bigtime RTS developer Relic, mostly know for the Warhammer 40K games and Company of Heroes games, by Sega. Another somewhat surprising acquisition if true since Sega has been closing down most of it’s western developers recently. Whether this one turns out to be true and what this means for Company of Heroes 2 which was supposed to be released in Q1 of this year remains to be seen in the coming days and weeks.
Lastly there’s the purchase of Illinois based developer Volition, the guys responsible for the very succesful Saints Row franchise, by the mostly European based dustribution and publishing company Koch Media. This purchase does not however mean that Koch will be the one publishing the next Saints Row game since that lincense was sold seperatly and there is no news about who bought it. It would make sense though that if you’re going to buy the studio behind a certain franchise you’d want to buy the franchise aswel since Volition had already confirmed to be working on a new Saints Row game.
Again these are all rumours and it will probably be a while before we see actualy confirmed news on any of these or other purchases. If any confirmation does come out or other rumours pop up we will ofcourse keep you up to date.
So what do you think? Do you like these purchases or would you have rather seen another company run off with them? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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