Video game maker THQ (NASDAQ: [[ticker:THQI]]) confirmed today the company is closing down its wireless game development unit in San Diego and laying off 31 employees. (Check San Diego’s updated layoff tracker here.)
The cutback is part of a broader consolidation of wireless game development that includes shutdowns of similar operations in the United Kingdom and Germany, with layoffs in all three locations totaling 100. Spokeswoman Julie MacMedan at THQ headquarters in Agoura Hills, CA, confirmed the San Diego layoffs by e-mail.The move is part of new focus at the company’s Minnesota-based wireless division, which concentrates on making games for the iPhone, and as well as other “high-end wireless devices such as smartphones and the N-Gage.” THQ’s wireless division also has an international headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.
THQ makes WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2009, de Blob, Saints Row 2, Warhammer and other games for a variety of platforms, including multiplayer online PC gaming, Wii, Nintendo’s product line, and the PlayStation product line.
The company is scheduled to report its fiscal third quarter financial results Thursday, which cover the three month period ending Dec. 31. THQ disclosed a restructuring in November as part of its disappointing fiscal financial results in the preceding quarter. The company said at that time “THQ plans to focus on fewer, higher quality titles, and to align its organization and cost structure accordingly.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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