THQ Assets Sold to Sega, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take Two and Koch

Following last week’s announcement that THQ’s assets would be put up for auction, the auction took place today with many of the studios being sold to other publishers.

According to Kotaku, a letter was sent to all employees of THQ from CEO Brian Farrell and President Jason Rubin, outlining the situation:

The proposed sales of multiple assets is as follows :

• Sega agreed to purchase Relic
• Koch Media agreed to purchase Volition and Metro
• Crytek agreed to purchase Homefront
• Take 2 agreed purchase Evolve and
• Ubisoft agreed to purchase Montreal and South Park

We expect these sales to close this week.

In other words, Sega has taken on the studio developing Company of Heroes 2 and Crytek now have complete freedom on Homefront 2, which they were developing anyway. The previously unannounced game from Turtle Rock Studios, Evolve, could be published by Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft are about to own another studio in Montréal along with some new games currently in development.

Ubisoft have confirmed their acquisition of THQ Montreal and publishing rights for South Park: The Stick of Truth over Twitter. I’ve also seen reports online that they still plan to release South Park: The Stick of Truth in 2013 but not received the press release myself.

With Koch Media’s acquisition of Volition and Metro, they have confirmed in a press release that publishing arm Deep Silver will lead all further development and marketing on the Saints Row and Metro franchises. You may remember Deep Silver for last week’s Dead Island: Riptide bust marketing attempt. This could be fun.

There were apparently no bidders for Vigil Games, the developers of Darksiders and its sequel. The remaining parts of THQ, such as the publishing businesses and other IPs will be included in the “Chapter 11 case”, which refers to a chapter of the United States’ Bankruptcy Code, permitting reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States.

I wish everyone from THQ all the best, wherever they wind up.

Update via Polygon: Ben Cureton, Lead Combat Designer at Vigil Games has made a heartbreaking post on NEoGAF:

Did I like coming to work? Yes. Was I proud of the work that I did? Yes. More importantly, was I proud of the work that WE did? Absolutely. I knew, without a shadow of the doubt, that the project we were working on (Codenamed: Crawler) was going to blow people away. In fact, it DID blow people away. We did, in TWO months, what many companies haven’t done in a year. The pride of knowing that no one was doing anything like us was so satisfying, it kept us coming to work and giving 100% every single day, even through the dark times.

… so maybe you can imagine what it feels like when you read the list of who bought what only to discover your name is not on the list. Why? Did we do something wrong? Were we not good enough? Were we not worth ‘anything?’ Imagine that.

One Comment