At its most recent conference call, in between announcing how much money it's been haemorrhaging over the past year, games publisher THQ announced a few interesting facts about its Wii compatible graphics tablet, uDraw, which we liked quite a lot when we reviewed it a few months ago.
Make yourself a talented artist - now in HD.
In the 2011 fiscal year (that's up until April, for all the non-accountants out there), the company shipped some 1.7m uDraw units to shops around the world. That's a lot of graphics tablets sitting in the hands of happy families - and that's enough to encourage THQ to release uDraw on the Xbox 360.
As THQ CEO Brian Farrell put it - "Today, I am pleased to announce that we plan to bring exclusively designed uDraw GameTablets to Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 platforms this holiday [Christmas, to me and you]". The company also mentioned that the new tablets will have different designs - presumably to make them more fitting for the Xbox than the very Wii-styled current version.
Having already had four games released for it, including the amazing Pictionary, the announcement of the tablet going multiplatform will surely go a long way to making the tablet a lot more appealing to developers - which in turn will hopefully lead to more uDraw games. That said, we can't help but think there may be another reason for THQ's move. Remember those rumours flying around about the Wii 2, and how it may potentially feature a large touch screen in its controller? If that happens, the Wii 2 will effectively be stealing uDraw's gimmick - which may necessitate a switch to the 360, whose controller-less Kinect would seemingly make a much better bedfellow.
