THQ Nordic buy up Saints Row and Metro

THQ Nordic, publishers of the Darksiders games and recent jankfest Elex, have bought Koch Media, the companies have announced. Koch are the father-company of Deep Silver, who publish games like Saints Row, Metro, Dead Island, and Homefront: The Revolution. That means THQ Nordic now own alllll of those bad boys, among others. Due to all the combined plates this company now spins, they could now make a game where the hero of Mighty No. 9 fights jazzy paint-monster De Blob in a doomed bid for supremacy on Mars, aka, Red Faction 3. Although, they probably shouldn’t do that.

The deal was dealed for 121 million European seashells (“euros”). In terms of studios, it means THQ Nordic are now the lieges of Volition and Dambuster studios (developers of Saints Row and Homefront: The Revolution, respectively) both of whom are working on unannounced games.

Koch and its underlings “will continue to operate as independent entities”, says the new boss company. “However, THQ Nordic sees potential for revenue synergies and margin improvements, e.g. from partnerships from both groups’ IPs, assets, and development capacity .”

That’s just a reminder that they have ultimate control over what games are made in the long-term, on top of everything else. The document detailing the buyout goes on:

THQ Nordic will closely monitor and delegate resources to support Koch Media’s Games business in order to ensure quality and a healthy return on investment on its large in-house development projects. Following less successful launches in recent years with substantial write-offs in the business area (primarily Agents of Mayhem and Homefront), Koch Media has made significant organisational changes in its management, internal steering and control, technology, as well as its selection process for development of IPs.

Let me just put that through the corpspeak translucidator.

Ah, yes. I see.

It says here: “The Koch gang probably won’t make another Agents of Mayhem, because it was a bad thing and we want money, not bad things. They also probably won’t do Mighty No. 10.”

I remind you that our translucidator has been known to jump to conclusions and misapply information, to the point where its speculations and translations are functionally pointless. Remember that time we fed it the minutes of an EA shareholder meeting and it just spat out reams and reams of paper with one tiny “KILL” printed on each page in comic sans? That was odd.

This business-ing is all part of the ongoing dance of capitalism. THQ Nordic is a resuscitated hybrid of the old THQ, which used to own the rights to some of these games anyway, such as Saints Row. It's hard to keep up, but here's the short version:

People are still making videogames.