THQ cuts 240 staff as CEO halves salary
Brian Farrell takes pay cut as company prepares to hand out $8 million in severance pay
Troubled publisher THQ has confirmed it is cutting 240 jobs at the same time that CEO Brian Farrell is to reduce his salary by 50 per cent.
Farrell's salary will drop from $718,500 to $359,250, with the job losses costing THQ $8 million in severance pay. The company will also have to abandon some fixed assets at the cost of $2.5 million and terminate contracts at a cost of $500,000.
The job cuts are across the sales and administrative teams and were initially announced last week although not in any significant detail.
This week Nasdaq warned the publisher that it faces delisting if it cannot raise its share price to $1 per share.
The company has been in the process of reducing headcount, studios and game projects over the past three years as it struggles to transition to a digital business.
Liam, UDraw wasn't the "wrong" here at all, although it didn't help things much that so much went into bringing it to other platforms after the Wii version (which was OK, but dated and more so by the time it hit the PS3 and 360).
Anyway, yeah, I'm getting a Midway meets 3DO vibe here as well and I expect some IP to be sold off at some point, but I'm not sure if it'll help much in regards to stopping the delisting process...
That being said, I wish the best to the 240 affected, this is sad news. It seems every month or so, the number of jobs getting cut and the number of jobs created in this industry is out of balance. That’s 240 highly trained talented individuals re-injected back into the industry for employment, from which graduates in the past 3 years have to compete with.
THQ’s extremely attractive IP line up has huge (or in some cases already have) growth potential. Darksiders 2, Saints row, Homefront, Warhammer franchise and the UFC titles are all fantastic ips. Hopefully…. actually, let me correct myself, I know the guys at Crytek will make Homefront an highly ranking metacritic, multimillion dollar generating game that contributes the company’s boost back into growth. Unfortunately for me though, With all these cuts and refocus on the company’s production pipeline, I fear the IP that I love; company of Heroes – a game that plays, looks and competes with titles in 2012 even though it’s a 6 year old game, will most likely get shelved and gather dust for years to come.
When I designed the MUSICtm / MTV Music Generator range of products we could have fallen flat on our faces too, but we were lucky - people embraced the products. You never know until you try!
I wish them all the best for the future.
I think this UDraw Device was really interesting, but I never really got why they designed it. I mean this thing must have cost a ton right? So one million sold is not really a lot.
@Tim Wright: Please don't get me wrong: I really appreciate it that someone in this franchise orientated industry is doing something new. But as a publisher I would take such a risk if I have money to burn. If you are activision, go out and try those toys stuff (which worked). If not, who cares, you just did more than 1 billion with Black Ops (in these times). But THQ always were kinda short on money, right?
No offense, I am really just interested in how much marketing you should put in a game.
If we are talking about Homefront. They must have knew that this is a quite good, but not a CoD competing game. Why are you covering whole San Francisco during GDC (basically all cabs were covered) with Homefront? Sure you wanna get a piece of the cake, but as a company I would never spend such a high amount of marketing budget for a completely new IP if I know that I need to sell 2 mio. copies to just break even. Or am I completely wrong?
Would you say from a business perspective it's efficient to put all your money in marketing and just a slice share in the development? Homefront seemed to be really unpolished and not really finished - if you have played it, you know what I am talking about. It had a lot of cool ideas with all those drones and stuff, just didn't play out enough.
Edited 1 times. Last edit by Nic Wechter on 3rd February 2012 8:52am