Gameplay Group Takes Over Them's Fighting Herds And Other Maximum IPs

Apologies for the belated, but very important and potentially incredibly promising news. As of last month, the company calling itself Gameplay Group has acquired the rights to several fighting games that previously belonged to Maximum Entertainment.

This includes Them's Fighting Herds, Diesel Legacy, and the new Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game. For a bit of context, all of these titles were mishandled by Maximum Entertainment with various degrees of severity.

For Them's Fighting Herds, they effectively stopped the active development before developers could finish all the planned content, and as a result, the last DLC ended up releasing in an outright unplayable state. Diesel Legacy was a new beat-em-up/fighting game hybrid from people who previously worked on Skullgirls, but despite apparent quality and good reception from players, it didn't get any marketing and had a very underwhelming launch. Lastly, you might have heard about the new Avatar fighting game being in development. That's the Avatar fighting game that Maximum Entertainment has previously cancelled entirely. The story behind it is fairly convoluted, but it seems like the team is made up of developers who contributed to both Them's Fighting Herds and Diesel Legacy.

As for Gameplay Group International, in an interview with GamesBeat, the founders Victor Lugo and Philip Mayes stated that their entire goal is to give cancelled games and overlooked "diamonds in the rough" a new lease on life. The goal is incredibly idealistic, but they seem to be keeping themselves grounded. They intend to elevate games that have the potential to do great and have already solves the major issues. At the end of the day, it's still a business, so they aren't looking to pick up projects that are "unfixable."

As for how well they fare as the new handlers of these IPs, only time will tell. Their stated goal is admirable, but actions speak louder than words.