THQ Committed To UFC Licence

THQ’s head of marketing John Rooke has reaffirmed the publisher’s commitment to the UFC brand, despite the latest instalment in the series selling below expectations. Discussing the latest title's disappointing sales, Rooke commented:

"We've had Red Dead Redemption released one week before us and that sucked, to-date, probably three quarters of a million units from the market. The economy is still in decline - we haven't come out of recession yet, with VAT set to go up and the government looking for 40 per cent budget cuts... people are nervous about spending."

"There was that macro-setting, plus we were around the World Cup, which takes out a lot of consumer spending as well. You could even put into there the iPad launch as being on the same weekend - so a lot of things are coming on to it."

"When Red Dead had shipped about 5 million we'd shipped about 2.6 million units of UFC globally - so it's still a massively successful game... just that the expectations might have been that little bit more. You have to step back a bit and recognise that."

"We're absolutely not walking away from the brand - we've got a long term commitment to it as we've shown with things like UFC Trainer, and it won't be long before we start talking about UFC 2011, I'm sure..."

With over 4 million copies of UFC 2009 sold, the series is a significant entity in the publisher’s catalogue, and UFC 2010 is not alone in selling below expectations, as most big games this year have done the same.