The Rise and Fall of Embracer (aka THQ Nordic)

[Harry Easter]

Does it mean Piranha Bytes will have bigger budget for Elex 2?

I would hope so. They could do wonders with some extra manpower and money.

 

[Paul_cz]

Maybe. It's probably up to how their games sell, if they sell better than expected, expect larger budgets. If they flop, expect less. THQ Nordic has not yet really had a chance to show how scalable they are with projects and how high they are willing to go with budgets, but with so many projects in production we'll no doubt find out soon.

Since they own Deep Silver now, they will be publishing AAA titles fairly regularly. Studios like Volition/Warhorse/Bugbear/Black Forest/Dambuster are staffed for those. (meaning standard AAA, not RDR2-like 3000 people making it AAA)

 

[unfairlight]

I think to be qualified as AAA today basically requires that your project has 200+ working on it and probably being multi-studio too. Volition and Dambuster come closest, but even those are teetering somewhere on the edge between middle-market and AAA.
I don't think Bugbear is close to AAA in the slightest since they're a small indie in Finland, and I haven't ever even heard of Black Forest.

 

[DeepOcean]

Better than sinking all your money into something designed to appeal to everyone and their mother, then going out of business when it only sells okay.

I agree with you, especially right now as megapublishers with the exception of Sony don't really wanna invest much on single player games, the competition is small of only some big titles a year, you could cut some corners here and there and still release a decent single player game that sells 2 million or so copies, if you sell those games at 40 dollars a copy, even counting steam's cut and taxes cutting that on half, that would be 40 million dollars for a publisher, depending how they managed their budget, they could make a decent buck.

Without mentioning that THQ strategic position on Europe and being fine connoisseurs of euro jank games, allow them to pay east european potato farmer salaries easier. In the end, we will have ukranian, polish and other east european slave potato farmers working hard to bring us incline, as Trotsky said, slavery was more than justified if it was to help the glorious incline revolution, the end justify the means.

 

[LESS T_T]

Now they have acquired Kingdom of Amalur and the canceled MMO Project Copernicus: https://thqnordic.com/node/301

For some reason THQ Nordic applied trademark "38 STUDIOS", the cursed name: http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=88443110&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

 

[vortex]

Possible remaster and/or sequel.

 

[Neanderthal]

Wonder if they're gonna continue Saints Row? As I remember 4 were popular but stumbled a bit wi all new additions invalidating old gameplay, why drive a car or heli when you can run superspeed or fly for instance. Plus I never really bought idea o all petty speeding challenges and escort missions falling to gang leader/mogul/president protagonist, and needing to complete em to wrest control of an area.

Still really fun and exciting series.

 

[DalekFlay]

I'm 100% positive they will "soft reboot" Saint's Row at some point as a wackier GTA again, but who knows when.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

As far as I remember, SR4 was all set in a virtual world or something, so maybe they'd just continue from the end of 3? Anyway, as far as those types of games, I'd be more interested in Sleeping Dogs 2 than GTA or SR, but that seems unlikely to happen

 

[deuxhero]

Nah, 4 has earth destroyed outside of the viritual world. Best ways to continue without dealing with 4's canon are a Saints Row: Vice Kings prequel or some random new guy expanding the Saints to a new town after 2's ending.

 

[Neanderthal]

In Gat Out of Hell there is an option for reboot that is viable, a time rewind where Earth is remade by Nathan Fillion as god, and the Saints are peelers. But yeah 4 fucked up a bit in that respect.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

In Gat Out of Hell there is an option for reboot that is viable, a time rewind where Earth is remade by Nathan Fillion as god, and the Saints are peelers. But yeah 4 fucked up a bit in that respect.

Agents of Mayhem is supposed to be the reboot cop ending.

 

[EruDaan]

And it's fucking shit, what an surprise. The publisher - Deep Silver - at that time had no fucking experience with open world games. They also ruined the Sacred franchise (which, with Sacred 2, wasn't that good anyway but had an solid fanbase that created fan-patches and content up to 2018) by creating the abomination that is Sacred 3. Deep Silver was a shitty publisher, with people making the decisions who had their economics degrees but not knowledge about how to make games.

Another Saints Row wouldn't even need to continue the storyline imho. Put it some years into the future with an grizzled Johnny Gat making the leadership decisions, mourning and bitching about the death of "The Boss", give the player at least two cities, three to four enemy gangs, a ton of vehicles, a ton of weapons, a ton of shit to do like stealing cars, assassinations, vigilante missions, let the player steal tanks, helicopters and by god do not fuck up the cartoonishness of the series (a mix of 2 and 3 would be optimal).

And do not fucking turn Saints Row into something like fucking GTA V. A whole world full of nothing and an almost omnipotent police force.

 

[Abu Antar]

SR series is boring af.

 

[unfairlight]

I liked Saints Row 4. The core gameplay feels right, but it's a bit light on content. I heard SR2 had a lot more content and was better overall.

 

[DalekFlay]

I liked Saints Row 4. The core gameplay feels right, but it's a bit light on content. I heard SR2 had a lot more content and was better overall.

SR2 had a dire PC version so I never played it much, but SR3 is a super fun game with a nice length and good PC port. That's the one most (PC gamers) praise, from my experience.

 

[Modron]

I liked Saints Row 4. The core gameplay feels right, but it's a bit light on content. I heard SR2 had a lot more content and was better overall.

SR2 had a dire PC version so I never played it much, but SR3 is a super fun game with a nice length and good PC port. That's the one most (PC gamers) praise, from my experience.

Modders pretty much fixed sr2 though. Hence the second one getting praise at times. Shame the 4th was obviously a dlc expansion stretched into a full game. Still haven't tried Gat out of Hell because 4 didn't overly wow me, outside of the They Live parody section of course.

 

[Don Peste]

The first Saints Row was great too. 360 exclusive, but it's Xbox One backward compatible too.

 

[DeepOcean]

Indeed, SR 2 was absolutely huge but the shooting was pretty lackluster and really not challenging, the shooting on SR 3 is MUCH better so I had more fun with it despite the massive decline on content, did the modders fix that on SR 2? SR 3 shooting with the content of SR 2 would be a dream game, Volition should have focused on that instead of that terrible game they did.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[Morgoth]

What's the difference between time and standard time?

 

[PulsatingBrain]

What's the difference between time and standard time?

 

[Morgoth]

Awww arigato gozaimasu.

 

[Saerain]

The fun of Saints Row has so little to do with the setting... There's no need to keep stretching out the Saints story as long as the team's expertise makes a spiritual successor possible. Which is what Agents of Mayhem was expected to be, but somehow it turned out more like a Chinese knockoff. Fuck if I know.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

The fun of Saints Row has so little to do with the setting... There's no need to keep stretching out the Saints story as long as the team's expertise makes a spiritual successor possible.

Even sticking with SR, they could still easily go with a more spiritual successor type game than a real sequel. I think making it all virtual super hero shit was a big mistake for 4 (also the fact that it was basically a minigame collection), but as far as a rock-solid continuum for the SR setting or storyline, it's not at all necessary. If they put out something more like 3 than 4, with good game and gunplay, I really don't think anyone is going to give a fuck that the lore gets a bit lost along the way