Volition: Saints Row: The Third’s Success And uDraw’s Failure Cancelled Each Other Out

We know publisher THQ made more than a few missteps during its existence, though none can quite match it with uDraw, the drawing peripheral that’s fortunes on the Wii were not replicated on the Xbox 360 or PS3. That said, THQ had its wins, including Saints Row: The Third, but all the good from Volition’s title was gobbled up entirely by uDraw.

An interview with Volition producer Jim Boone over on Strategy Informer tells the frank tale of how THQ’s obsession with uDraw essentially “invalidated” the success of Saints Row: The Third. So dire was the effect, it had Boone and the rest of the company wondering if the uDraw signalled THQ’s “death blow”. Turns out it did.

From Strategy Informer:

“When you have a failure of that magnitude coupled with a success of that magnitude, I mean basically all our success was invalidated by that, it was tough to look at that and think ‘Is it just business as usual then? Or did we just get dealt a death blow?’ That was where I think the… it wasn’t clear at that point, but that’s when [then THQ president] Jason Ruben came in and things started to change, because we were worried that things maybe weren’t going to work for THQ, but Jason was awesome.”

It’s easy in hindsight to see where THQ went wrong, but even then, you can’t help but imagine what the high-level meetings around the future of the uDraw were like just after its success on Wii. Surely someone with even basic knowledge of the PS3/Xbox 360’s core markets could have seen that the device just wasn’t a good fit?

Guitar Hero, it wasn’t.


THQ’s UDraw failure “invalidated” Saints Row: The Third’s success
[Strategy Informer, via Reddit]


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