There are always new studios coming up to try and change the world of gaming through their unique titles. But some years back, an unexpected studio arose in the form of 38 Studios, which was headed up by legendary baseball pitcher Kurt Schilling. He put the team to work on an RPG that would eventually be released called Kingdoms of Amalur. And the game was successful…but…the studio made some bad choices financially, and thus had to be shut down, and that left the future of the franchise up in the air.
However, new life was breathed into when THQ Nordic bought the rights to make the next Kingdoms of Amalur title. The team is made up of industry veterans, and so gamers are really excited. But one thing many are wondering is, “can they re-release the original game?” Well, the answer to that is “no”, but not because they wouldn’t want to, but because the rights to distribute that game still belong to EA.
For in a chat with Eurogamer, a representative of THQ Nordic commented on the situation that they are now in:
“At this stage we ‘only’ acquired the intellectual property,” THQ Nordic mentioned to the site. “Given our track record, we know what the burning questions (remaster, remake, port to current-gen systems etc.) are, but we decided do not answer those specifically as we tend to put our heads together first and then do our homework, and only start to talk about anything once we feel confident and very familiar with the franchise.”
This is actually very typical when it comes to franchises being bought out from the original dev team. It’s a money issue as well as a business one. It’s still could happen, but right now, that would depend on what EA wants to do with the title.
