THQ is Back

In 2013, publisher THQ went out of business due to financial problems. Rights to company’s titles were spread across different companies: Deep Silver and Sega got Saints Row, while Nordic Games claimed the likes of Red Faction, Supreme Commander, and Darksiders. Eight years after its formation, Nordic Games is now called THQ Nordic.  

Take a look at what the company has to say about its resurrection in the official press release:

This is not your standard press release. Instead, we would like to make this corporate statement regarding our company Nordic Games reincorporating to THQ Nordic.

It all started out in Sweden in 2008 as a mini-venture to self-publish such illustrious titles like Dance Party Club Hits, Kart Racer and Truck Racer (just to name a few) on PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii. The following year, we landed We Sing, a million-plus selling karaoke franchise for Nintendo Wii. In 2011, with our first of many acquisitions to come, Nordic Games began its transformation from small scale, two-platform games publisher to a multi-platform, multi-genre global player.

One could say the most defining moment for our company happened in 2013, grabbing headlines like; “Who the FUCK is Nordic Games?”, “Darksiders Gets Bought By…Nordic Games?”, and “Nordic Games explains who the f they are, plans for THQ assets”. Funny enough, back then, this was so true. Until that point, we had been a low profile publisher uttering expletives of our own along the way, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in the international gaming media spotlight. We knew then, with great certainty, that we’d just made the best deal in our company´s history.

Nordic Games By The Numbers

Since our formation in 2008, we proudly look back on 8 years of continuous growth on all (!) aspects of our business, not just the bottom-line. During that time, 16 individual IP and franchise acquisitions were concluded, resulting in a catalogue of more than 250 actively sold games, over 60 trademarks, hundreds of web domains and a few patents for hardware and software.

61 game development projects were initiated and have launched, and most importantly, we have created 82 jobs (if you include external development teams this number amounts to 325) and pride ourselves on our very, very, very low staff fluctuation, which basically amounts to zero.

Two development studios were setup – one located in Phoenix, Arizona (let’s hope Donald Trump reads this), the other one in Munich, Germany, and we have managed to grow our group wide team size from 2 in 2008 to 84 team members today.

Introducing THQ Nordic (the KISS part)

Whilst we take great pride in our Swedish roots and accomplished a great deal under the Nordic Games masthead, we decided it was time to incorporate the THQ name. Those key brands will continue to shape our business in a meaningful way going forward, and THQ Nordic represents a core approach of doing much more than “owning” a highly competitive portfolio of IP. We cherish them, and align them with the very best development resources to expand upon them with the level of experience that communities and established fan bases expect and deserve. Side note – another upside to this whole rebrand thing is we don’t get asked about the Nordic Game parties at Gamescom anymore – it was the other guys who threw them.

With this rebrand we are entering the next phase in our company’s evolution.

As of now we have 23 game projects in development, 13 thereof have not yet been publicly announced, but are sure to be in the next months. Needless to say, the majority of these projects are based on former THQ owned IPs and franchises.

As far as the logo design is concerned, Lars Wingefors, founder and owner of THQ Nordic (formerly known as Nordic Games) would like to say this:

“As for the new logo design, we literally stumbled across it when browsing some art files, after we bought the THQ trademark and figured: why not? We hope the reception from our partners is less ambivalent but we’re OK either way. We invite you to our Gamescom booth to play our games and see the logo in large-scale format.”