Raise your hands if you remember reading about a game called Devil's Third. Anyone? Anyone at all? This action-adventure game was to be the frirst game to come out of Valhalla Game Studios, the studio formed by infamous producer Tomonobu Itagaki after leaving Tecmo under less than amicable circumstances.

After first making its debut at E3 2010, the game hasn't made much of an appearance save for occasional interviews by Itagaki at various points throughout the past couple of years, with the latest interview done last year. Unfortunately it looks like THQ has different plans for the game going forward as during an investor conference call, the company revealed that the game was not going to meet the profitability targets that the the publisher wanted for the game, chiefly due to the strength of the Japanese yen against the US dollar.

However, another key point related to the game's seeming lack of progress was also revealed during the call, as the third-party that was developing the rendering engine for the game and Valhalla Game Studios went out of business during the early development of Devil's Third, which forced THQ to make the call to shop the game to other publishers and developers or risk losing millions of dollars with no possibility of the game being released between now and 2013, or even being released at all.

With those two bombshells revealed, its not a surprise that THQ now wants someone else to take the game off of their hands and quick, taking into account their recent financial difficulties. Now that Valhalla Game Studios is potentially facing having its only title taken from them, questions are being raised regarding what exactly Valhalla Games was doing for 2 years that would have forced them to delay showing any progress on a game first announced in 2010.

Now I ask, what do you make of the whole situation?

via GameSpot

Humberto Saabedra is the Editor-in-Chief of AnimeNews.biz, PhoneNews.com and an occasional columnist for Ani.me. He can also be found musing on his favorite 2D girls at @AnimeNewsdotbiz.