Corks are popping over at THQ offices as they've secured an extension to their license for Warhammer 40k from Games Workshop for "all relevant platforms". THQ's Dawn of War series from Relic Entertainment has sold over 6.5m copies to date. Space Marine is next in line, followed by MMO Dark Millennium Online.
THQ has announced that they have extended their licensing agreement with Games Workshop to keep making games based on the tabletop miniatures RPG/wargame. THQ has produced such licensed games as Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and will be releasing such games as the MMO Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium and shooter Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.
Publisher THQ has revealed their financials for the fiscal year now passed and they record a loss of $136.1m, while net sales were in fact stronger at $802.3m. Q4 '11 didn't perform as well as the previous year's, but Homefront is attributed as their 'primary drive' for success. The new IP has had a "solid start".
THQ core games boss Danny Bilson has teased the first details of Relic's Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War III instalment, revealing it 'combines I and II'. Well 1 + 2 does, in fact, equal 3. That's good math. While it's "going back" to the first two on some things it will give us something we "haven't seen before".
New details have emerged about Relic's highly anticpated real-time strategy game, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III, which was announced a month ago with very little information attached, save the fact it would combine the best features of the original and Dawn of War II.
Analyst firm Forecasting & Analyzing Digital Entertainment (FADE), has reported their prediction for Valve's Steam platform and say they reached $468m by June. That's revenue for the first half of 2011. FADE believe Portal 2 led strong growth clearing $56.4m through 1.1m units. Magicka hit 789k units worth $6.2m.
Robot Entertainment is made up of former Ensemble veterans with Age of Empires to their name. Patrick Hudson of the studio still believes real-time strategy can be big business. He admits though it's "changing a lot," and he's not sure where "it's going to go." The days of selling millions of copies at "50 or 60 bucks as a PC game" are gone; PC retail not there.
Developer Relic is working on Company of Heroes 2, which means there's little time for a full production of the next Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War instalment, but that's okay. The studio are "doing some rethinking" about how they approach RTS; what's the "best way to present" the strategy genre? There'll definitely be more "RTS 40k stuff," says Danny Bilson.
Machinima has released a new behind-the-scenes video for Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn details how the Warthog chase was shot.
With the GameSpy server shutdown affecting every Dawn of War game bar Retribution, online server support for Relic's 40K strategy series would have been essentially wiped out. Unwilling to let that happen, the developer has announced in a Steam community post that it is updating the rest of the franchise, moving server support over to Steamworks so that players can continue to tear pieces out of each other online.
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising is now without Microsoft's Games For Windows Live code as the latest PC patch has replaced it with Relic's own 'Battle Servers' for multiplayer. Leaderboards for Dawn of War II and Chaos Rising are also now separate from each other. These patch has removed three features, such as pausing during an online game.
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