14 MCV 17/09/10
MCV INTERVIEW BRIAN FARRELL, CEO, THQ
UFC (left), Homefront (pictured) and UDraw (bottom) are part of THQ’s blockbuster 2011 line-up
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So 2011 will still be the year we see the ‘new THQ’?
I know there are a lot of people in our organisation that will say that. But that’s just our industry, right? It’s constant rebirth. I’ve seen Nintendo pronounced dead three times in 20 years. In this industry you are as good as your next product. He who has the best game wins. I don’t want to call it the new THQ because we’ve been on top before, but it feels good to be returning there.
Where do you want THQ to be in three to five years?
I think the biggest thing we can do is build our presence in digital. That’s where gamers are going. And that’s one of the things where we need to be Goldilocks right? Not too far ahead of the consumers and not too far behind. I don’t know if you’ve played Company of Heroes Online – the free-to- play microtransaction game – but I believe in that model. It is an experiment, but a noble one. We also have our Red Faction downloadable mini- game on XBLA and PSN. It is a bit of a marketing tool to keep the brand alive before the big retail launch.
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Wii appears to be in a tough place at the moment. Do you need to be more cautious with Wii? In a way, quite the opposite with the
UDraw game tablet. Some times you have to take a step back. This time last year hardware numbers on Wii weren’t good, and people were saying it was dead. But then holiday arrived and sales shot up. Consumers still know about Wii, it’s still good value, it is still a mass-market product. I love it when competitors say they’re going to de-emphasise it. There’s still a huge Wii market – over 70m users worldwide. With UDraw we don’t need a huge attach rate to do very well.
Do we see big growth
prospects on Wii when it’s been out so long? No. But are there opportunities? Absolutely
Brian Farrell, THQ
Do we see big growth prospects on a platform that’s been out for so long? No. But are there opportunities? Absolutely.
You’ve mentioned you might wait longer between UFC releases in the future. What is this reason for this? Like most responsible companies, we sat down after the last UFC and asked ‘What can we do differently next time.’ We think we got the hardcore UFC fan,
Back when you ”
announced Homefront you said it would have a ten-year lifespan. How can you plan a ten-year franchise?
What we are bringing to gamers with Homefront is that story and emotion. We have all played shooters, and there are some great executions of shooters, but in Homefront you are made to care. You are not a soldier, you are a civilian fighting the bad guys. We haven’t set anything in stone, but this game is about defending the US homeland, and there are a lot of homelands we could be defending over time.
but sales weren’t as high because of the competitor set – with Red Dead launching just before us and taking a lot of money out of the market. The previous year we were the sexy new girl on the street. We were a sequel this year. So we thought perhaps we should give the franchise a little more time. We are not taking a step back, but trying do more over a period of 15 to 18 months rather than just be a day and date annual franchise.
Our whole goal is to build franchises, but that doesn’t mean that every year we are going to pound on that franchise. That is how you kill things in this industry. But if we treat the franchise right, we think we can have a long run with it. If it is eight, ten, 12 years, we will find out.
You’ve been outspoken on pre- owned. How much of an impact has pre-owned had on THQ’s business? It is one of those things of how much money could you have made if it wasn’t for piracy or used games? It’s a tough question because you don’t know. What we saw when we did the online charge for the second purchaser of UFC, we found a pretty good attach rate – it confirmed our suspicion that there are a lot of people participating in used games. We work with GameStop in the US and GAME in the UK. We understand their business models. Our point is that we are making these huge investments in project development, sometimes in licences and marketing, and we need to make sure we capture that value chain. Retail is now thinking about how they can participate in DLC and some of these second user charges that we’re doing. We are not trying to push retail aside. We just need to monetise because it is our investment. We will work with retail, but it needs to be more of a give and take.
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