After showing a $35 million loss for 2007, THQ CEO Brian Farrell declared that some changes were in order to allow the game publisher to return to the black. In an analyst call, Farrell was frank about the problems that the company faced in the previous year.
The principal factors, according to Farrell, were a lack of quality and a flooded market:
Aside from a few of its PS3 and 360 releases, particularly Juiced, Stuntman and Conan, being "simply not competitive" and showing "insufficient game quality," Farrell said the year showed the "most crowded market for kids in recent memory," particularly from Nintendo's first party output and music-related games.
To prevent low quality games from hitting the market, THQ is following through on three initiatives to combat the perceived issues of 2007:
The first of these was to prepare a more competitive slate of titles, as outlined in its financial results. The second was to bring in new management talent to product development, along with a four stage greenlight process that would not let games through until they met key competitive technological and gameplay feature benchmarks.
In addition, the company is planning to reduce the staff by 200--primarily cutting away staff focused on last-gen systems--while also growing the overall headcount of the company:
In light of this, though, the executives said that by year end, the company planned to increase its overall headcount from around 2400 at the end of last quarter to just under 2700.
The ramping up at THQ would occur, according to Farrell, around staff in its unspecified "key studios" that are working on "key products" for next-gen platforms.
At times like these, it's nice to hear that companies have a plan of some sort. And I'm sure it's extremely comforting to Farrell that he isn't the CEO of Midway. Because I hear times are getting real lean over there. Eating house pets lean. Which might be what the 200 laid off staffers end up resorting to.
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