Business hasn’t exactly been booming for THQ. While the $38.4 million quarterly loss can easily be bounced back from (as reported in a sales meeting earlier today), the company felt things could’ve gone better -- particularly with two games.
The first, MX vs. ATV Alive, didn’t sell as well as expected, due to the new DLC-based pricing model that the company created. "The key learning is that it was not a successful experiment," Farrell said, adding, "Our takeaway there is it's not a great model in the console market because with the high fixed cost of goods in the current console model, you can't get the price low enough to drive that installed base out there to drive the DLC." That said, there was no word on where the series would go from here.
One series that probably is doomed, however, is Red Faction. The latest release in the series, the rather impressive Armageddon, didn’t perform up to standards at all, nor did the downloadable Xbox Live release Battlegrounds. (Though, let’s face it, that one couldn’t hold a candle to Armageddon’s destructive power.) That said, THQ has decided to shelve the series, which was enjoying a nice little comeback there for a while between the recent releases and Guerrilla. Shame.
"Given that the title now in two successive versions has just found a niche, we do not intend to carry forward with that franchise in any meaningful way," Farrell said.
And this is coming off a successful SyFy partnership too. Ouch.
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