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On Thursday I had a phone call with a publishing executive about Carmageddon. The guy talked through THQ Nordic's goals and views of buying the IP and let me ask any questions I had. It was very informative as to understanding their goals and confirming some things we had speculated about, though a lot of the technical questions were not able to be answered as the guy was entirely on the publishing side of things and didn't have any experience with the technical side of development or the situation of source code, website, etc. None the less he seemed enthusiastic about follow up on those questions with those who were in the position to deal with it.
Here is a summary of the call:
They have no immediate plans for the IP, but they really think it's great and want to do it justice so they will probably take a year or two before the start the ball moving with a new game
They want to get a good understanding of the IP and what makes it fun and great
They will offer development of the next game to Stainless first
They understand the community is important and want to keep in it going, however as no developer is assigned to the IP that means there's no community manager right now
They are 100% in support of modding and want to continue to facilitate it
In regards to the Website, they don't want that content to be lost at all and want to restore it but need to investigate the situation and see what the state of it is.
In regards to the unreleased patch they similarly need to investigate it and see what the position is, the guy was unaware of anything being a publishing guy and not technical so needed to discuss it with people on the technical side
In regards to the source code, they do not "generally" give out source code but it will be investigated to see what can be done.
They want to support the legacy games but again need to investigate what the position is with them all
They are going to meet up with Batwick and Matt at GDC to talk things over with Stainless and learn as much as they can about Carmageddon
They feel it's their job as publishers to reach out to the community in this manner
He said he'd like to keep in touch, so that gives us an avenue of communication
The key takeaways are that they bought the IP because they like Carmageddon as gamers and want to take their time to do the series justice in a couple of years once they properly understand it all and have a good plan, rather than buying it to cash in on the name quick and cheap with their suits seeing dollar signs. They also sound very committed to keeping Stainless involved if Stainless want to be.
Most of all it is very encouraging that they want to keep the community in tact and support the modders who have kept the series alive for 20 years. So while nothing of any note is likely to happen in the next couple of years it sounds like Carmageddon is in good hands with THQ Nordic.
