THQ Partners To Distribute Codemasters Titles In North America

The year-old Partners branch of THQ will handle American distribution for games by British developer Codemasters, best known here for racing franchises including DiRT 3 and F1 2011, the company has announced. THQ Partners will handle distribution duties for those three titles as well as Operation Flashpoint Red River and shooter Bodycount, which saw its creative director, Stuart Black abandon the project and Codemasters last July, saying a "broken agreement" with the publisher led to his departure. THQ Partners was announced a year ago; vice president of THQ Partners Tim Walsh told Gamaustra at the time that its goal was to "provide select developers and publishers access to THQ’s global retail and online publishing network." THQ Partners offers marketing services to the companies it works with, but Codemasters will handle its own marketing for these four titles. The agreement does not extend beyond the four listed titles, which are all to be released in 2011. DiRT 3 and Bodycount are for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; Operation Flashpoint Red River is for those platforms as well as PC, while F1 2011 will hit PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS and Sony's as-yet unreleased NGP portable. "Bringing together THQ's world-class publishing and Codemasters' highly acclaimed titles is a win-win situation for both companies," said Tim Walsh, Vice President, THQ Partners in a statement. "Our goal is to offer Codemasters a custom distribution solution so they can outsource the functions they don't need to own." "The THQ Partners initiative truly resonated with us," added Rod Cousens, CEO of Codemasters in the same press release. "THQ stands as a publishing force in North America and provides us the mindshare, commitment and resources of their organization to successfully drive Codemasters products in this very important market."