THQ Consider Picking Up A Penguin

This is admittedly a bit of an “ooh a thing may be happening sort of at an unknown point in the possible future”, but I’m frankly quite fascinated by the moves THQ are making as they battle to fend off moneypocalypse. The Humble THQ Bundle was divisive, what with it not involving the DRM-free indie games that Humble has become synonymous with, but one thing it seems to be is a sign of THQ striving to court a PC audience after long years of being very much console-focused. The PC-only Company of Heroes 2 appears to be a very big deal for them (and Metro: Last Light too, a preview of which I’ll bring you later this week), but now they might maybe perhaps possibly be going one further – they’re talking about Linux support for their games. This is not the usual MO of a large publisher.

Talk of THQ becoming penguin-friendly arises as a result of a Twitter exchange between a Linux user and the publisher’s bossman Jason Rubin. He replied with this: “Got the Linux message load and clear via #HumbleBundle feedback. Evaluating cost/benefit as we speak.”

Which promises nothing, as the last thing we should expect from THQ right now is for them to spend any cash they don’t absolutely have to, but for the often gaming-starved open source OS’ growing userbase it must be a delightful thing to hear anyway. Couple this possibility with Valve’s gradual adoption of (and possible move to) Linux as a platform and perhaps we really could be looking at more than a token number of PC gamers parting ways with Windows.

Frankly, I am very tempted myself – I’m just trying to work up the will for a day of setting everything up. And I’ll take Linux over Windows 8 any day.