THQ has closed Kaos Studios, the developer of its core first-person shooter, Homefront.

When asked about rumours regarding the studio’s closure, Zach Wilson, a level designer and writer at Kaos, tweeted, “That's what I'm hearing, that Kaos is shutting down, details to come. Most of the devs already have jobs with new studios anyways.”

This was followed by, “It'll be interesting to see how THQ corporate spins this one,” and, “I hear the studio got a box of Saint's Row-branded dildos with a note that read ‘Go f*** yourselves.’”

 

THQ’s share price has fallen 20 per cent following lacklustre reviews of Homefront, a game the publisher had positioned to compete with the likes of Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Battlefield.

At the time of writing, THQ’s shares have fallen 21.04 per cent.

Homefront is currently scoring 72/100 on review aggregation site Metacritic.

 

Kaos Studios, the developers of the upcoming first-person shooter Homefront, have defended the length of the game’s singleplayer campaign after reports circulated that it only lasts five hours.

Speaking with Eurogamer, creative director and general manager David Votypka said, “We've seen really expert players race through it pretty quickly – five hours, a little less. We've seen players take eight to 10 hours to play it. So it's a range, there. It depends who you ask.”

Votypka insisted that the game’s length was comparable to the games it intends to compete with, namely Activision’s Call of Duty and Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor and Battlefield titles.

 

THQ has announced that it’ll be holding a fake anti-North Korea protest to try and generate hype around its upcoming first-person shooter, Homefront.

The pretend protest will see hired actors marching across the Golden Gate Bridge and end at Yerba Buena Gardens, opposite the venue of the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Center.

Our latest experience with the shooter left us with some reservations ahead of its imminent release.

 

If you want to pose an uncomfortable question to a member of Microsoft’s Xbox team, ask them what they would most like the Xbox 360 to be remembered for: Gears of War or Kinect. On the one hand, Epic’s third-person shooter series has not only managed to sustain the machine’s relevance to a bevy of core gamers, it has also provided something of a developmental road map beyond Halo. On the other, the company wants the machine to pull in families whose gaming sensibilities are more likely to be informed by Farmville than Fenix.

Such is the tightrope Microsoft walks when pitching the Xbox 360 in 2011. Its Xbox Showcase event in San Francisco on Friday (NZDT) erred more on the gamer side of the equation – but not by much.

Here are some of the more notable titles on show.

 

In its third quarter financial report, publisher THQ announced that shooter Homefront has slipped by a week to March 15th in the US and March 18th in the UK.

It also announced that Warhammer 40,000 MMO Dark Millennium will be release in 2012 alongside the Guillermo Del Toro collaboration inSane.

Both WWE Online and Company of Heroes Online have been cancelled and the publisher has closed its Korean office.