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Comment by joshschreuder | Hacker News Reader

This is over 50% of their market cap of $9.6M, and looks like it caused at least a little bump in their share prices: http://tinyurl.com/bwzblvy

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I donated 90% to THQ. The way things are going over there, they need all the charity they can get.

Especially if we still want to see Saints Row 4...

I would dissociate "publisher" and "assets". Even if THQ dies their assets will be passed on to someone else. You rarely see IP completely disappear, just like you do not always see factories being demolished when a company bankrupts. Honestly this is probably better at this stage to see THQ go bankrupt since they have been poor at managing their assets, and let someone else take control and hopefully make more money out of their assets.

> I would dissociate "publisher" and "assets". Even if THQ dies their assets will be passed on to someone else. You rarely see IP completely disappear

Maybe not disappear, but end up in a legal limbo (eg split up to multiple parties), or in a vault of some insurance/investment company which has no interest or clue to do anything with it. While I can't now recall any specific examples, iirc there has been cases like that before.

idk how the Interplay breakup eventually landed, at least some IP managed to get out.

Not all of it goes to them, though. I allocated all of my purchase to charity.

Don't forget that not all of that goes to THQ. There's the default split but I can't find what that was for this bundle. It's 70% to the devs for the Amnesia Fortnight. (Might be higher than normal though)

A little bump being +25%

I had no idea that THQ was in such dire straits. Looking at their Humble portfolio, they have a diverse set of technologies here. It's a real shame that they aren't able to monetize them better. When you look at other publishers, they tend to stick with a single technology, but THQ never had that huge AAA hit that they could keep iterating on cheaply to print money.

CTG Engine, 4A Engine, Essence Engine, GeoMod Engine. There's a lot of technology here. (2 internal) 4A is probably their most advanced.

If I were them, I'd focus on making a CoD clone with the 4A Engine. Perhaps the graphical superiority could appeal to a more hardcore audience that would fill out as GPU technology catches up.

They tried a CoD clone in Homefront, and it did not do very well.

Not having played it, I thought that most of the criticism went to the game's short length rather than the engine.

I would agree with this. I felt that the game was well done, engaging, and fun....but unfortunately it just stops right when the story starts to really heat up. The ending definitely had an unfinished feel for me.

That might be part of their problem. Instead of making a big AAA game they keep reinventing the engine. It seems most really successful game studios have 1-2 engines that they're very good at producing good games on. They may update often but it's rarely an entirely new engine. (See Valve, ID, etc.) Making a new engine for every game can't help their delivery times.

Which makes you wonder, if they are really engine folks, maybe they should be an engine company?

Possibly, I don't know much about the engines behind THQ's games really. To become just an engine company requires a well rounded and adaptable engine. There's probably some market for a superb niche engine but that is a weak position to put yourself in as a company.

They might be reinventing their engine so often because they can't get a good future-resistant engine out of it.

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