It’s been a very, very long time (almost a year) since we’ve heard anything at all about Tomonobu Itagaki’s Devil’s Third from Valhalla Studios and frankly we thought the third-person action game which takes inspiration from Ninja Gaiden was actually dead and buried. Well actually, I just forgot about the game but that’s not good manners.

Apparently though, THQ is having discussions with other companies regarding Devil’s Third. The men in suits didn’t go into too much detail in their latest earnings call yesterday but enough was said.

“The profitability profile for Devil’s Third no longer met our internal threshold and we are currently in discussions with third parties regarding the future of this title,” CEO Brian Farrell said.

THQ provided addition information on the call. “There were a couple of unforeseen events that happened in the development of Devil’s Third,” Farrell explained. “One was the company that Valhalla was using for the engine went out of business so we had to assist Itagaki-san and the team with a new engine and it took a fair amount of time and cost a fair amount of money.

“There’s also been a substantial appreciation of the yen against the dollar. Those increases in development costs just reduce the profitability when we ranked all of our product releases when we underwent our restructuring; the profitability of Devil’s Third was not competitive with our other releases.”

Farrell added: “We think it’s an excellent franchise. We’ve really enjoyed working with Itagaki-san. We’re going to explore other alternatives with both him and others to make sure this product comes to market.”

So it looks like THQ is looking for a cheaper alternative because Itagaki-san is running them out of house and home. Frankly, nobody has seen enough of Devil’s Third to say whether any of this is worth it but the game definitely looked decent and worth making.

eGamer