Should i scare people and say, Coh2 Mordern Combat heh. ehh but i won't. I'm still praying for at least a race dlc pack.
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Should i scare people and say, Coh2 Mordern Combat heh. ehh but i won't. I'm still praying for at least a race dlc pack.
No qaurter back men, only forward or we will hold this line forever!!!
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Row Row Row Fight the Powha
#152
Thought a bit of finance perspective would be appropriate here... (WARNING: WALL OF TEXT AND FINANCIAL GARBLY-GOOK)
I do think too much emphasis is being put on the nominal stock price here, especially for a small cap company trading in the sub-$1.00 range. The key thing you have to keep in mind when evaluating public companies (aka stocks) is that the stock price does not reflect how the company is doing - it's a reflection of how people FEEL about how the company is doing. In other words, when the stock drops (or rises), it means that, in aggregate, the investors of the company have a more negative (or positive) outlook. It's not quite accurate to say that things have gotten worse/better when the stock moves, that's simply the market's perception that things will or won't get better. Small cap companies in particular are much more vulnerable to wild swings in price (aka volatility) due to news and emotions.
NASDAQ is not trying to 'fire' THQ or kick them off of the exchange because of what's happening in the company. That's totally, totally wrong. What's actually happening is that the NASDAQ has a requirement for all the companies that trade there to maintain a price of at least $1.00. THQ has 180 days to get the stock price over that amount. If they don't, they don't get 'kicked off,' they'll do what's called a reverse split. Basically, they combine their shares so that investors have fewer shares, but the shares are worth more each. The value of the company and the value of your investment itself does not change during splits and reverse splits, only the stock price. The actual dollar value of the stock is almost wholly irrelevant.
With that being said, THQI's price plummet over the past few years is alarming and a serious cause for concern, but a dropping price alone can't kill a company. There are a couple of reasons that a falling stock price can affect a company:
1) It makes the company vulnerable to acquisitions. As the value of the company falls, it makes it much easier for a competitor to buy the company outright. To give just one example, since someone brought up EA - EA's market cap (total value of outstanding company stock) is currently at 6.14 billion USD. THQ currently stands at 41.71 million. That means EA is nearly 150 times the 'size' of THQ. If it wanted to, EA could raise capital to buy THQ outright. This is a direct threat to THQ's current management, who would likely lose their jobs as EA has far too much management already. Other THQ employees - especially producing employees like game programmers would likely keep their jobs. It is an indirect threat to us gamers that love THQ and Relic games, though, as any games produced by those studios would likely be influenced by EA management, possibly negatively.
2) It pisses off investors. Investors can't directly influence a public company like THQ. However, they hire and fire the Board of Directors, and the Board of Directors hires and fires the company senior management. If investors are losing money, eventually they are going to replace the Board with someone who will make some changes. This can be good or bad. Sometimes, investor pressure can force management to make some tough calls that will help position the company for the future. We've seen some of that already - the CEO pay being slashed in half is a VERY good thing. Mr. Farrell does not need a $750,000.00 paycheck when his company is doing poorly. Those funds are much better spent on company operations that produce revenues. Layoffs are a mixed blessing - most companies have a lot of really irrelevant jobs that only get trimmed when times are bad (middle management is usually a great place to look), but many times the baby goes out with the bathwater and operations can suffer as a result. Investor pressure can also force management to make short sighted decisions though. The Board could sell off major pieces of the company (like, say, Relic) for a large cash influx and a change to streamline operations.
3) Employee Flight. Many key employees rely on stock options as part of their income. As the stock price declines, they effectively take a pay cut. This is inevitably going to cause them to think about jumping ship. Other game studios and publishers might try to lure key employees away from THQ during tough times.
4) It makes it more difficult to raise capital. Companies don't truly go out of business until they run out of cash to pay bills or default on their debt (fail to make interest payments). Virtually all public companies rely on a combination of debt (bonds) and equity (stock) to fund their operations. THQ has $100 million in outstanding debt that they have to pay interest on. As the company value shrinks, it makes it trickier for the company to raise cash to fund new projects and to pay bills, salaries, and interest on that debt. One of the recent news reports says that THQ is going to tap a revolving line of credit. This tells us that the stock price so low, it's not a good idea for them to sell more stock, and raising new debt will be too risky, so they're going to use the credit card instead.
Going to stop myself here before I lose my entire night doing a full equity analysis. Key takeaway here - a low stock price is a big warning sign, but not the end of the world. THQ is clearly in trouble but they are not on the verge of collapse. This next year might very well be make or break for them, though. You really need to take a look at and analyze free cash flow, operating cash flow, leverage, the current ratio, and especially the income statement and project figures into the future to really make that judgement call. It would be inappropriate for me to make any reccomendations on THQI as an investment, but as a gamer, I don't think we have to worry about Relic disappearing overnight.
Well, that was informative. So, THQ is not doomed, they just need to make less uDraw and more Spess Mareen and they should be fine assuming no one tries to buy them out?
#154
Ok, lets assume stock price doesn't mean anything for the moment.
THQ's first big title of the year, UFC3, has landed. It's sales put it at number 1, but their a 1/3rd of what the first title in the series sold.
Also, rumour articles about the closure of the Japanese THQ division are circling around websites too.
Still no good news for THQ, still no new game announcements.
You should check out Priority Vox Channel Secundus, a blog!
Do not want to look like a prick now, nor do i wish anything bad toward people at THQ, but frankly, i do not care, whether this is true or not. Somebody on the first page said, it would be shame, because Relic, Volition etc.. are such fine studios and indeed they are...but they were great, before they became part of THQ brand and i fail to see, why they could not stay this way in case THQ would go down. Actually, IMHO in long-term it could help them, as believe digital distribution and self-publishing is the future, they could finally return to what they used to be best, being creative... right now, they are tied with the THQs marketing plans and this can lead only to more and more sequels of DoW or CoH or whatever is the Volitions biggest game right now... therefore no chance for sequels of such classic games like Homeworld or Freespace, nor a chance for something fresh and new and creative...
Would be so, so much better than more WW2. I'd have played CoH a lot more if it had been something like Cold War gone hot. I'd be perfectly happy if I never played a WW2 game again.Should i scare people and say, Coh2 Mordern Combat heh. ehh but i won't. I'm still praying for at least a race dlc pack.
To be honest, i never thought i'd miss WW2 games, but with so many "modern combat" games nowadays, i really do.
And how many "modern combat" games are there, apart from CoD and, recently, Wargame:EE?
- sincerely, the Sign Painter
They went and destroyed ace combat to capitalize on modern war, the two hawx games, medal of honor, battlefield... it's a pretty long list.
Those Halcyon Days...
#160
I will never miss WW2 games. I'm so sick of WWII I avoid anything that uses it as a setting... Movies, TV, games, everything. It has to be something fucking amazing to get me to consume media using that setting. It's just overplayed. Massively, massively overplayed.
"Fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain."
-The Maestro Sartori, Imajica by Clive Barker
Hardly what I'd call a lot, then, with the exception of the FPS games. I'd welcome a good RTS game by Relic regardless of setting, though.
I think It'd be nice for there to be a WWI game,
WWII is overdone and so is modern combat,
so unless we want a first person medieval game (sounds pretty cool actually)
then we should give some love to WWI,
BTW, does anyone know any good WWI games?
#163
It's weird to me that people compare "Modern Combat" to "WWII", when one is just a tech level that can have any sort of story or setting, and the other is a specific conflict scenario.
And even the tech level in "modern combat" is fluid, since it seems to be a catch all term for near past through near future tech games.
Other than a few games I cant think of many that would be covered under "Modern Combat", it seems far less than the amount of games set during WW2. Honestly those that dislike Call of Duty seem to take issue with any games now set in a more modern combat theater which I frankly prefer, for instance if COH2 is set in a more modern era I'd be much happier than it being WW2 or WW1. I swear its just people jumping on the anti-COD crowd bandwagon half of the time
(Formerly "The Herald")
"The bible is like an EULA. People just scroll past everything and click "I agree" without reading it."
-Moe
Fine, replace 'Modern Combat' with 'War On Terror set sometime after 9/11 that likely will escalate to involve a super power like Russia or China.' I know which title I prefer.
The fact is, I'm tired of running about random middle eastern countries getting chased by AK-47 toting rebels riding a red flatbed truck. I really am. I'm really excited for Wargame, purely because it explores the Cold War era, which is something that is very rarely brought up simply because it's hard to have a Cold War action game that doesn't result in 'oops nukes, the end'. It actually requires a massive amount of thought to make plausible which is why I'm looking forward to the Singleplayer in Wargame to see what they come up with.
I also fancy a WW1 game. Set perhaps in 1917-1918, just as stormtrooper tactics and submachine guns started to make an appearance. There could be all kind of espionage and stealth missions and then your bog standard over the top at some point as well, fighting alongside some old fashioned tanks. Or how about a game set in the Spanish Civil war? Or The American Civil War? Or an RPG set in 19th Century Revolutionary France- That could get mental.
The fact is, there is a massive number of places that games could be set. I wonder how many rounds in total I've shot, in all the games I've played, with an MG42. It literally must be in the millions.
"Celtic fans right now sit in silence and watch, and hope that the damage doesn't get any worse from this Graham Carey free kick. Away by Wilson. Teale. Still options waiting in the middle for St. Mirren...OH, AND THEY HAVE ANOTHER ONE! It's stunning! It's absolutely stunning at Hampden park! And it's Steven Thompson, who scores his thirteenth goal of the season, and that might just be the goal that takes St. Mirren into the league cup final!" - 27/01/2013
#166
Cold war era games are technically part of the "modern combat" genre.
The thing about modern warfare games that I absolutely despise is that they all try to emulate Call of Duty and are poorer for it.
Look at Ace Combat Assault Horizon. They destroyed an incredibly rich original universe that had so much more to offer for a goddamn terrible game that tries to capitalize the popularity of the genre by moving it to the real world (because modern gamers are stupid little kids who have no imagination) and remove almost all of the original gameplay that made Ace Combat famous. Now it's 'fly in circles until you're behind the enemy to initiate a quicktime event' and poor copies of CoD's helicopter gunner and AC-130 sections.
Goddamn shame.
#168
Stingra, a point of note. If you are playing games today, you are also a modern gamer. Don't be so quick to stereotype
Failing that, what are we doing talking about how much we like combat games in a thread about THQ presumably going under?
I am an Iron Warrior! Iron Within, Iron Without!
I agree with Ewokz. I see why people are fed-up with modern warfare setting, if biggest games currently like CoD and Battlefield are set in that era. But if we talk specifically about RTS genre, they need to acknowledge, there are basically only 2 RTS games in last 10 years, which could be called modern warfare games - Command and Conquer Generals and Act of War. You could perhaps count World in Conflict, but i do not consider that game part of RTS genre. Other than these 2-3, i do not recall anything similar, just crapload of sci-fi, WW2 and fantasy/history stuff. Therefore, even if i was fed up with CoD, Battlefield etc.. myself, i would still welcome modern warfare strategy game over another StarCraft, Universe at War, DoW, SupCom, CnC Tiberium, End of Nations, Earth 2160, etc... etc...
C&C General was definatly not 'modern warfare', it was sci-fi of a campy variety.
In this regard, everything that's about fictionous conflicts is science-fiction of a campy variety.
Well, it had no robots, no aliens, no UFOs or walking ships... i do not think it had to be completely realistic to be called modern-warfare game. Surely you can see difference between it and all the other games i mentioned.
I am not even referring to the story, I am referring to the technology. You had orbital death rays, tractors that spewed toxic sludge, missile launchers with toxic sludge-tipped warheads, floating drones with lasers, actually lots of lasers allround, cloaking devices, and a huge bunch of other stuff.Originally Posted by Misiok
Yes, but at the same time it had F22s, Commanches, A10s, B2s, Abrams lookalikes, T80 lookalikes, Tomahawks, Chinooks, Hummers, etc.. that is far more than any of the RTS games i mentioned.
Anyway, even if we agreed its not a modern warfare game, my original points stands... there is not enough RTS games with modern warfare theme.
Sounds totally legit
You must be the change you want to see in the world.
-Mahatma Gandhi
#176
It's been explained a few times in this thread but just for you, one more time. Studios like Relic and Volition are 100% owned by THQ. If THQ goes down, so do they, because they *are* THQ. Unless THQ sells them off before it collapses, which is possible, but unlikely if they want to keep their assets up.Do not want to look like a prick now, nor do i wish anything bad toward people at THQ, but frankly, i do not care, whether this is true or not. Somebody on the first page said, it would be shame, because Relic, Volition etc.. are such fine studios and indeed they are...but they were great, before they became part of THQ brand and i fail to see, why they could not stay this way in case THQ would go down.
Last edited by White_Pointer; 22nd Feb 12 at 4:38 PM.
Sorry, when i registered the topic for the first time, it was already 3 pages long and i did not feel like reading through it in its entirety. In any case, it is not unsolvable situation. THQ might want to keep their assets, but if they are going down, their options may be limited, i mean they may be forced to sell some of their assets to save at least some money or to survive. It is true though, if they sold it to another publisher house like EA or Activision, nothing would probably change from my perspective as someone, who wants more Homeworlds and Freespaces.
#178
Technically, anything they haven't sold when they get to the point of bankruptcy, they'll be forced to sell by the courts. At auction.
That doesn't mean the studio will be sold whole. The employees could easily be let go with the selling being primarily on assets.
Yeah, i can't see how Relic falling into the clawed grip of EA which is famous for devouring studios whole, and then spitting their rotting cancerous carcass after they've squeezed every last ounce of talent and potential can be a bad thing for Relic. Not sure about Activision, all i know is that milk their franchises until no one wants to buy them and that there was a shitstorm about some studio that used to make the Call of Duty games, but i think it's fair to say that we wouldn't see the 40k ip being developed by Relic if it goes under ActiBlizzard's flag, just because of all the bad rep Blizzard has with the 40k community, which i still think is unwarranted. In short, i think it would be horrible if Relic was bought by Activision or EA, especially EA.It is true though, if they sold it to another publisher house like EA or Activision, nothing would probably change from my perspective as someone, who wants more Homeworlds and Freespaces.
Either way, i doubt we'd see another Homeworld game, but, i do think that THQ will survive, Darksiders II will probably make them some money.
Come to think of it, what exactly IS Relic for you guys? A set of specific people? A design philosophy? The CoH/DoW/Homeworld/etc. franchises? How bad would THQ going under actually be?
#182
I wouldn't particularly care, as I think Relic has long since lost their awesome.
Relic as an entity is one of the few remaining AAA developers still doing RTS games and doing them differently. Losing them would be terrible for the industry, I fear, as then we'd really only get Starcraft-alikes.
#184
As a quick tangent - how does a company get bought, assuming it does not want to be? Just having the money should not alone make me able to buy THQ, surely?
#185
It depends... If its stock is publically traded, and you can find enough people willing to sell you theirs, you could accumulate 51% of it and technically control the company.
If a company goes bankrupt, the courts force them to sell all their assets to the highest bidder in order to pay off their debts before cancelling whatever is left.
So in certain circumstances, yes.
To be honest. I think CoH3 should be a sequel towards the Cold war after WW2 that would be perfect. Unlike CoD who went from WW2 right to Modern Warfare(Cod is all over the place). There are too many Modern Warfare games right now it would be boring to play the same type all over again. I hope relic include an expansion pack for Soviet missions in CoH2, that would be great!
"Space is full of mysteries. For every planet there could life, for every dust there is history, for every galaxy there could be danger waiting for you to explore."
In certain cases, courts could also decide that the buyer is doing it for the purposes of establishing a monopoly and would prevent the sale.As a quick tangent - how does a company get bought, assuming it does not want to be? Just having the money should not alone make me able to buy THQ, surely?
The company could also initiate share buy backs so that it either holds the majority of the shares and gifts them to the board (provided the board wants the company to continue as is, rather than just get their money and go) or cancel the shares, so that the cost of getting control would be higher. For a (somewhat silly) example, if you had 100 shares outstanding and your company was valued at 100 dollars, the cost per share would be $1 so someone would only need to buy $51 worth of shares. If you reduced your outstanding shares to 25, 51% would be 13 shares, and at $4 each, they'd have to fork over $52 instead of $51. If you wanted to be really ridiculous, you could buy back shares till there were only 3 outstanding, and then the buyer woul dhave to fork over $66.66. If that's too much for the buyer, then you've effectively blocked someone from buying the company.
This works because the underlying value of the company hasn't changed, despite any shenanigan you might pull with the number of stocks. So long as the market still thinks the net worth of the firm is $100, buying back shares to drive up the cost for individual shares (and thus the cost needed to get 51% of them) will work so long as you can drive the price high enough. It DOES, however, require you to spend more and more cash, unless the holders of the stocks are willing to give it back to you at cost.
#188
If you thought it couldn't get any worse for THQ... notable lawsuit incoming.
The tip-off apparently came from Kevin Dent again, he's got to be THQ's official Job by now.
One step closer to the end of the decadent Eldar race.
[...] the reason we don’t like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops. We don’t want to do that [...]
Heh, it's not like we expected them to succeed in making a proper 40k MMO, did we? Guess it's only better in the fact that it probably won't be pay to play, unless their 'premium' idea is to charge us to play single-player (40k RPG anyone?) or multi-player with shitloads of DLC's.
I wonder if this will minimise the amount of playable races.
#191
Wow. Dropping 39 relic employees over this shift away from the MMO. For a small developer, that's gotta hurt.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
So, it will be the era of collect 20 Chaosletter Asses Skyrim/Amalur/Etc. style?
#193
So, essentially, "We were looking for a business partner to throw in the initial capital to get Dark Millenium off the ground (since, you know, we're broke), but since that didn't materialize, we're taking all the assets from the game and throwing it haphazardly into a single-player game with no plot and bare-bones multi-player modes that we'll add to through DLC over the course of a few months, then drop all support, just so the whole venture isn't a complete financial bomb. Oh and btw, we're sacking some people because we can't pay them. Toodles, THQ."
I was genuinely interested in Dark Millenium but now...ugh. THQ is tanking hard and nothing they support is going to be a quality product because they're going to rush it, lay off the higher-paid Devs (i.e. the good ones), and then drop support earlier than necessary.
Homeworld 3 kickstarter time then?
#195
i dunno. if they can pull a decent SP experience out of this i'll be happy. but it still smells of dustwars -> hw2 all over again
#196
MMO to Single Player? How does this even work? How many people work at Relic? 39 fired seems like a big number to me.
#197
Kingdom of Amalur wasn't that far off from being an MMO in style and I could see an existing MMO project being converted into something along those lines.
In Soviet Russia, forums moderate YOU!
Sorry to hear this for the Relic folk. The times, they are a'changing.
#199
At this point, the only bright star is Darksiders 2 (after the terrific and wonderful Darksiders). I'm very much looking forward to it, and I hope its a big enough success that it gets THQ, Relic and Vigil all back on their feet, and that the games coming after (from L4D devs turtle rock, devils third and patrice whatever his assains creed name is) will also be successful.
It also says something that the huge success of Saint's Row the Third hasn't stopped this happening. That worries me.
As for DMO, the complete and total lack of any news means that this is not at all surprising. We haven't had screenshots in a while, and with the MMO market horrifically overpopulated, and critical reaction "lukewarm" at best (oh this might look ok hur dur) I think its possibly one of the hardest but best decisions.
My thoughts go out to the displaced folk on this one.
#200
Saints Row the Third shows how bad of a shape THQ is in actually. The game, while good, feels very rushed and incomplete compared to the second game in the series. During development a good portion of Volition's staff were laid off so the game had a much smaller content development team.
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