RIP THQ – Here’s who bought what at auction
By Ben Skipper on January 24th, 2013
Yesterday afternoon THQ ceased to exist as its assets were auctioned off to bidders including Ubisoft, Sega and Take Two. We can now confirm who bought each of the studios and licenses up for sale.
As expected Relic Entertainment, the team famed for their RTS series’ Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, were bought by Sega.
Sega is currently home to fellow RTS kings Creative Assembly, the team behind the Total War series and who currently hold the Warhammer (not 40k) license.
Koch Media, the publishers of the Dead Island series, bought Violation, Inc and their Saints Row license for $22,312,925. - a big win for them.
Koch also purchased the Metro license for $5,877,551.
Ubisoft bought out THQ Montreal for $2.5 million, in turn gathering up their in development titles 1666 and Underdog.
Ubisoft also won the publishing rights to Obsidian Entertainment’s anticipated RPG South Park: The Stick of Truth which they say is still on for its planned 2013 release.
The saddest news of the auction was that Darksiders developer Vigil Games wasn’t bid on at all, possibly meaning the end of the celebrated studio.
However this morning there was hope as Darksiders lead designer Haydn Daltontweeted: ”There was a shimmer on a slither of hope, that at one point, there’d be a Darksiders 3. Four-player co-op: it rode off into the sunset today.”
This was followed by Atsushi Inaba, head of Platinum Games, tweeting this (translated by Kotaku): “In THQ studio and IP selling off auction, Darksiders is unsold? [We] wanna buy it…on the cheap…”
Platinum and Darksiders? Colour us very interested.
