Big Huge Cheques

Just crawling off to bed, and a news story arrives from Gamasutra. Rise of Nations (and Legends) developer Big Huge Games have been purchased by THQ. One quote sticks out from Big Huge Games' Tim Train.

"We look at the world as dividing into two camps from a publisher perspective – first are the people who view game production as more of an assembly-line process, whereas THQ are a lot more focused on keeping developer culture intact -- they think it’s a big engine of creativity, especially when trying to develop original IP. Because they're not built on big, monolithic single-location studios, they've got a very worldwide studio system that was very attractive to us when we were talking to them."

While they've an console RPG in the works, there's also mention of another (new) game which helped seal the deal - which, from BHG, you may speculate is an RTS or strategy game of some sort. The deal's an interesting one from a PC perspective. From my perspective, THQ have been heavily supportive of the PC as a platform in recent years (Company of Heroes. Supreme Commander. They even carried on supporting STALKER when many people presumed it was doomed). They now actively own - in the form of Relic and BHG - two of the best RTS developers on the planet. What are they thinking?