Kaos Studios

~ the obit ~

Kaos Studios opened in New York City in January 2006 as a THQ subsidiary, with around seventy people and a specific brief: make a military shooter that could sit on the same shelf as Call of Duty and Battlefield without being either of them. It shipped two games in five and a half years and was shut down three months after the second one came out.

The first was Frontlines: Fuel of War, out in February 2008 on PC and Xbox 360. It was set in 2024, in a war over the last of the oil, and its structural idea was the frontline itself, a moving boundary on the map that both teams pushed at rather than a set of fixed objectives. It reviewed as competent and sold well enough to justify a second project.

The second was Homefront, and everything about it was louder. The premise was a unified Korea occupying the United States in 2027, the story was written by John Milius, who had written Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now, and THQ marketed it as its next big franchise rather than its next game. It came out on 15 March 2011, sold a million copies in its first week and landed at 70 on Metacritic. THQ had shipped over 2.6 million units into stores. Neither of those numbers was a failure by any ordinary reading, and neither was the number the company had told the market to expect. THQ stock fell twenty-six percent that month.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ desert combat ~

Before any of this there was a mod. Desert Combat was a total conversion for Battlefield 1942 that stripped out the Second World War and replaced it with the Gulf, new vehicles over new maps, given away free by a group who called themselves Trauma Studios. It was, for a stretch around 2003, more played than large parts of the retail shooter market, and it did the thing mods occasionally do, which is to demonstrate a commercial appetite the industry had not noticed. Digital Illusions bought Trauma in 2004 and closed it the following year. THQ picked up the people in 2006.

~ what homefront took down with it ~

THQ announced the closure on 13 June 2011. The development team was moved up to THQ Montreal, which was to take over the franchise, and Crytek UK ended up making the sequel instead. Homefront had not flopped. It had done roughly what a decent new shooter does, at a moment when THQ's finances required it to do considerably more than that, and the gap between those two facts was the entire problem.

What happened next is in the THQ grave and does not need retelling here, except for one line of it. When the publisher went into bankruptcy in December 2012 and its assets were auctioned off the following January, the Homefront franchise, the thing Kaos had been closed in service of protecting, sold to Crytek for 544,218 dollars. Ubisoft paid two and a half million for THQ Montreal and its hundred and seventy staff in the same sale.

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