THQ Nordic Purchases Kingdom of Amalur License

It's not unusual for studios to fail, but what made 38 Studios failure interesting was the lead-up to it. The fact that it was the first state-sponsored game company in the US that used taxpayer dollars to produce a consumer product (for the purposes of revitalizing the economy, of course) made it worth looking at, and the fallout over the studio's failure was made all the more dramatic because of it. There were lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, wild accusations... it was so interesting it made you forget the sub-par Skyrim clone the studio had actually made, Kingdoms of Amalur.

It was assumed, broadly, that the Kingdoms of Amalur world (which was supposed to spin off into an MMORPG, before the whole thing went tits-up) was just sort of forgotten and abandoned but now, THQ Nordic has swept in.

Nordic Games is sort of like the vulture of the gaming world. They bought THQ (hence the name) in 2013, bought out Koch Media (of Saints Row fame) and Deep Silver. And in 2017, they bought out Black Forest Games, which made Giana Sisters, which is a game I think I blocked out of my memory on account of the art style being so, uh... "aggressive".

But anyway, now they've plucked another corpse clean: 38 Studios, as THQ Nordic just announced they would be purchasing Kingdoms of Amalur and the aforementioned abandoned MMORPG codenamed Copernicus.

The statement they released with this news was brief, and while they said over Twitter that they were extremely proud to have the license, there's not much else to go off. It can be assumed they want to finish the MMORPG (which was far closer to being finished than you might expect) and get that published, but they'll still have to go out of their way to remind people that Kingdoms of Amalur was a thing.

I'll put my money on HD remake before the MMORPG is re-announced.