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THQ calls Red Faction: Battlegrounds reception a 'disappointment'
During an event today promoting SyFy's Red Faction: Origins tie-in movie, THQ's creative / biz dev director Lenny Brown shared with Joystiq his thoughts on the reception of the recent download-only release in the franchise, Red Faction: Battlegrounds. "I think it's a little bit of a disappointment," he told us bluntly, with the bulk of that letdown caused by the game's Metacritic score, currently sitting at 49 out of 100. "I think what's most disappointing for me," Brown said, "is how sometimes the prose of the reviews don't match the final score. Someone will say something not necessarily glowing, but you think you're tracking along a 7, and then you get a 4." Our own review gave the game two out of five stars. "That's not talking about the fairness of the score of this game in particular," he clarified. "It's not the best game in the world, but it's not a 5. It's a satisfactory experience that leads into the bigger game. And I think just because of what we're trying to do, that's innovative, and I think that alone deserves a 7."
THQ and Random House team up for new transmedia IPs
Hot on the heels of the Homefront prequel novel, Homefront: The Voice of Freedom, comes THQ's announcement of a partnership with Random House Publishing. The agreement between the two publishers will see the creation of "original intellectual properties for publication across multiple mediums." The first such property is said to embrace the publishers' strong suits -- games and books -- with other mediums to be explored in future IP. THQ also has big plans to build out story franchise bibles with Random House Worlds, the book publisher's "IP creation and development group." Bungie's Halo franchise is a prime example of a game's universe being expanded and curated through novels, and it's a "transmedia" success story that other publishers are likely to covet. If THQ wants to hasten its success in both games and novels, maybe it should get cracking on that romantic, teen-cyborg-vampire saga set during World War II.
