cvg

Battling publisher THQ has abandoned work on the next-generation trilogy Insane, the company has announced.

Rights to the Insane license have been handed back to film director Guillermo del Toro, who had been working on the project in a consultant capacity at Saints Row: The Third developer Volition.

Insane had the hallmarks of THQ's outgoing games boss Danny Bilson; an exorbitant and ambitious project tied to the movie industry. No detail on the game was ever disclosed.

The ramifications of cancelling the project, and what it means for development staff at Volition, are not known.

THQ has been struggling after a dismal beginning to 2012 when its major release, uDraw, fell far short of sales expectations. The publisher has issued mass redundancies, salary cuts at executive level, as well as a battle to remain on the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Earlier in the year, THQ decided against publishing the Tomonobu Itagaki game Devil's Third.