I beg to differ. The Udraw brought THQ down, not its IPS. Saints Row 2 or 3 sold over 2.5 million on Xbox 360 consoles. Thats not nothing. I think it would be a great strategy from Nintendo to get these IPS and attract the 'hardcore' gamers to their platform as to them, Nintendo still has the kiddy image. 

All in all you're right that the udraw is the culprit, but the latest drop of 50% is due to Darksiders failing to break even at 2m.

In favor of your argument thought, it's reasonable to speculate that Nintendo would be able to lower the break even point by injecting their money-making philosophy on the IPs, if acquired.

I know Kowenicki has a heart attack when a company's shares fall by anything more than 5%. I think he may be dead looking at THQ right now :/

I don't particularly follow economics that much, but can someone explain to me what THQ can actually do at this point to stay alive?

A company stays alive as long as it has enough cash on hand to pay its workers, day-to-day expenses and interest on loans. That's the only thing it needs, so if it can acquire that cash through credit or selling off assets or from its products over Christmas that's good enough.

Surely they can't sell of assets forever? Those are only short term solutions :S

Is there any long term one?

I really wanna know what ate up Darksiders 2's budget. It has very little cutscenes, everything is repetitive (Textures, gameplay, etc). It's artificially longer than the first, but it's so much smaller.

Uh. Make games that people want to buy?

If I was in charge I'd start lots of small, cheap projects cloning classic 2D games of the past for sale to home consoles at $40. Same gameplay and mechanics, all new content, and highly polished (which should be possible with a team of 10-20 unlike modern games). Some of them will succeed, because the markets for many of those games are empty (classic Final Fantasy, Castlevania, Zelda, who knows).

You're not just buying a company for $10 million, though, you're buying a company and its debts for that price. Heavens knows how deep underwater THQ is right about now.

No, Darksiders II was supposed to be that title. South Park is just the last thing they have left, outside of Saint's Row 3 DLC.

THQ has zero debt and $36 million in on hand cash (up from $20 million at the end of the 2nd quarter but that is because of the sale of the UFC licence to EA) according to there 3rd quarter report. It's only because of lack of short term confidence that there market cap has crashed (it's $7 million as of this post) which is not surprising with no high profile games for release in either the holiday period or 1st quarter of next year.

Interesting. Of all companies I wouldn't have guessed that THQ was debt-free. Thanks for the heads-up!