THQ

THQ started in 1989 as Toy Headquarters and grew into one of the largest video-game publishers of the 2000s. Its volume came from licenses: WWE wrestling games, Disney/Pixar and Nickelodeon tie-ins, the kind of branded shovelware that printed cash through retail. Underneath the licensed work it owned real franchises — Saints Row out of Volition, Darksiders out of Vigil, Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000 out of Relic, and Red Faction. Revenue ran near a billion dollars a year at its height, with the publisher’s logo on store shelves across every major console.

The collapse traced to hardware. In 2011 THQ shipped the uDraw GameTablet, a drawing peripheral that did modestly on the Wii and then failed badly on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360; over a million units sat unsold in warehouses, a roughly $100 million hole — about $80M in unsold stock and $20M in price-cut shortfalls. Weak licensed titles and mounting losses followed. THQ filed for Chapter 11 on 19 December 2012, and when no buyer would pay more for the whole company than its parts were worth separately, the studios went under the hammer on 23 January 2013: Relic and Company of Heroes to Sega for $26.6M, Volition and Saints Row to Koch Media/Deep Silver for $22.3M, Metro to Deep Silver, THQ Montreal to Ubisoft, Homefront to Crytek. Vigil and Darksiders found no buyer that day. The “THQ Nordic” that exists now is a different company — Nordic Games, an Austrian/Swedish publisher, bought the trademark in 2014 and took the name in 2016. The brand outlived the publisher; it is someone else’s nameplate, not the company that died.