Saints Row: Drive-By 3DS announced

Saints Row: Drive-By 3DS coming
Saints Row: Drive-By has been announced for Nintendo 3DS as the newest game in the series and the first game in THQ’s outlandish open-world sandbox series to hit a portable console.

Absolutely nothing has been revealed about the game, except the title which is simply “Saints Row”.

What is known is that the game was originally meant to be a stereoscopic 3D Xbox Arcade Live Saints Row game, which made it an easy and cost-productive port to the 3DS. It will also be coming for Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network.

Hopefully the game will sell well, as Nintendo has gone to great lengths to get games like Saints Row onto the 3DS to improve their image to core gamers who may consider the upcoming Nintendo system “kiddie”. Thus Nintendo actually approached THQ and requested to have Saints Row on 3DS.

It is also known that Saints Row 3DS is a cheap way (by their own admission) for THQ to promote the upcoming Saints Row 3.

Here is the direct quote from THQ’s Danny Bilson:

“Now, we know how those go sometimes: sure, the first party wants it, but is it really going to work? The interesting thing about the game is we were already making it. We were already making it as our Xbox Live game and in 3D also. It’s designed for 3D already. So the 3DS version is an incremental cost. It’s not a big startup cost. Anything in a transmedia play has a column called marketing in it. It’s also a marketing tool. So how does that game model for us? I believe it will do great, especially if Nintendo is going to go mature and really do a big mature campaign on it. It’s a killer game. It’s got all the weird humor of Saints Row, and also its existence is part of the marketing plan to sell Saints Row 3. Also, all these games have hooks where, if you play it, it unlocks things in Saints Row 3. If you play Saints Row 3, it will unlock things in the 3DS game or the Xbox Live game. I don’t know if I was clear about that, but all of our extension properties all connect and unlock things in each other.”