Why would you LOL the end of a great company? This means loss of anymore DoW games and that in itself is a tragedy because they were the only ones that even got near doing it right with Relic. Plus a loss of Company of Heroes. Today RTS games lost some actual innovation to the boring and stale genre.
Relic got picked up by SEGA but still sadface all around. I don't know I didn't think Darksiders got a huge following. I know people played them but there wasn't much talk about the games.
The developers that were sold were all sold intact. I don't expect much will change to titles beyond which publishers video we have to skip when we load the game. Well that and THQ Montreal is probably going to get renamed. Have a read of the GameSpot article on who bought which developers: The South Park game has some legal issues surrounding its IP, so Ubisoft won't be able to do anything with it unless they negotiate something with the South Park owners. So I'm more surprised that Ubisoft placed a bid than the fact that nobody else did. As for Warhammer 40k games, that's another case involving third party IP. However Relic are still intact and Sega do have the rights for Warhammer fantasy games, so it shouldn't be too hard for Sega to secure the 40k license. I've got two questions: - Who are Koch Media ? - Why did they outbid Ubisoft by such a large margin for Volition ?
Ubisoft tried. They offered more than the offered for any of the other developers. But Koch decided to outbid them by quite a lot. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't.
Honestly, $5.4m for Volition sounds like a joke. It looks like Ubisoft just pitched lowball offers at everything and ended up with the names no-one else wanted.
If Crytek does it right then they could have ended up with one of the best deal's from the auction. Everyone else will be required to sell a million copies or more of a new game in order to break even on what they spent. If Crytek sells a million copies of the next Homefront game then they will already be making TONS of money.
How far along in development is the next Homefront game ? Because it's not just the cost of the studio that Crytek needs to pay. They also need to pay any development costs to finish the game. This may have a lot to do with why Vigil didn't sell.
SEGA buying relic is nice, what they are doing with CA is awesome, except, of course, the fact that their games are UNMODDABLE now, freaking basterds. But if they make DoW as good as total war games, i'm all in. Volition is only good for Saints Row, which is good enough tho
I wouldn't blame Sega for Colonial Marines. My understanding is that this is how things happened: - Sega and Gearbox signed a contract for Gearbox to develop Colonial Marines. - Gearbox decided to ignore this contract that they signed and develop Borderlands 2 instead. - At some point Sega got fed up and threatened legal action over this breach of contract. - Gearbox gets contracts Colonial Marines out to a crap developer. The only thing I'd blame Sega for is the false advertising. But only if Sega knew it was false, instead of taking Gearbox at their word when they said that the 'demo' footage was accurate. As for DOW 3, Relic/Sega might not get permission to make it.
I remember reading about that. Sucks either way. I would think the deal was with Relic from Games Workshop and not THQ. So hopefully it'll stay in place. I'm still super pissed about 40k Online getting trashed. No need for DoW3 to get scrapped too.