THQ Nordic has been pumping out games and ending up in headlines a lot these last few months. Not only has the developer/publisher been snapping up rival studios at a fevered pace, with their most recent acquisitions carving a path across multiple genres. One of these being Piranha Bytes, the makers of Risen, Gothic, and most recently, ELEX. The other major acquisition is of course Warhorse Studios.
It seems as though THQ Nordic is looking to make the best of both worlds in terms of both publishing and developing. They’re snapping up properties and studios at such a rate that one could be fooled into thinking their building something huge. We don’t know what their plans are, but we’ll learn a bit at E3 2019 as they have two games ready to announce at the event.
But whatever their gameplan for the future is, it’s going to be something big and ambitious if I had to guess.
Part of this game development strategy is seemingly a “shotgun” approach. The publishing side of things just inked a deal with 4A Games on an upcoming, still undisclosed, AAA-project. It’s not the Metro franchise though, at least we think, details are kind of scarce on the actual project. Although speaking of the Metro games and Metro Exodus, 4A Games did reveal that Metro Exodus was the largest game launch so far in the history of the franchise as a whole.
The thing that many people are wondering about is what else is going on at the company. It turns out, that during a recent investment and roadmap in a presentation for their earnings report, the press and gamers learned about a bunch of previously unheard of or forgotten projects.
We can see mention of unknown projects with Volition and Coffee Stain as well as the aforementioned 4A Games. But we also get a glimpse of new games and/or DLC for franchises like Dead Island, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Wasteland and more. The mention of Dead Island 2 is pretty interesting, as many thought the project dead since it’s been through so many studios with almost nothing to show off. I have to wonder what kind of state that game is in.
All in all, there’s apparently at least 80 different projects in the works across THQ Nordic and all of their partners and subsidiaries. That’s a freaking lot of games, and yes, according to the report, more than half remain complete unknowns.
