THQ outlines new business plan

Brian Farrell, THQ's president and CEO, outlined the company's new business plan to reduce cost and refocus on five key areas of the games industry.

Speaking to investors during the publisher's earnings conference call, Farrell revealed that the company would focus on fewer, bigger core gamer titles, and further develop its fighting line of games with WWE titles and growing the UFC franchise into "a global videogame brand".

"Our goal is to improve performance and deliver profitable growth in fiscal 2010," explained Farrell.

"The quality bar for core gamers continues to be set higher and the cost to deliver this quality has increased significantly. As a result we have reduced the number of core gamer games in our pipeline but will increase our developer budgets where appropriate to compete at the highest levels."

THQ will also attempt to make its kids business more profitable, capitalise on the emerging family gaming segment, and attempt to move key brands into the online gaming market.

"More gamers are buying and playing games online, our strategy is to make targeting investments in extending key brands including company of heroes online , WWE online, and our Warhammer 40,000 MMO," he said.

Farrell further discussed plans to cut studio staff by 250, saying that it was all part of the publisher's effort to reduce costs last through the global economic slowdown.

"This week we discontinued a number of titles in our product pipeline that did not meet our strategic objectives," he said, "as a result we have closed five of our studios and reduced staff at two others."

"These actions resulted in a headcount reduction of approximately 250 people which is approximately 17 per cent of our studio staff... Over the next several weeks we plan to reduce both cost and headcount in our corporate and global publishing organisations."