Volition (company): History and Key Facts

Volition (Volition Games, LLC; formerly Volition, Inc. and Deep Silver Volition, LLC) was an American video game developer based in Champaign, Illinois. It is best known for its Red Faction and Saints Row series. Mike Kulas founded the company in November 1996 when he and Matt Toschlog split up Parallax Software, the developer they had founded in June 1993. At Parallax Software, Kulas and Toschlog had developed Descent (1995) and Descent II (1996) for Interplay Entertainment, which Volition followed with Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War (1998) and FreeSpace 2 (1999), while Toschlog's Outrage Entertainment developed Descent 3 (1999). Volition's Descent 4 was canceled and reworked into Red Faction (2001). The game, as well as Summoner (2000), was published by THQ, which acquired the studio in August 2000.

Following its 2004 move to downtown Champaign, Volition expanded rapidly from 80 employees to 175 by November 2006. With this increased headcount, the studio created the Saints Row series in 2006 and developed two further entries in the Red Faction series in 2009 and 2011. Kulas left the company in May 2011. During the development of Saints Row IV (2013), THQ filed for bankruptcy in December 2012, with Volition and the Saints Row intellectual property (IP) acquired by Koch Media for its Deep Silver label in January 2013. Embracer Group acquired the Summoner and Red Faction IPs, while Interplay obtained FreeSpace. The studio developed the Saints Row spin-off Agents of Mayhem (2017) and the series reboot Saints Row (2022) to no commercial success. Embracer Group, which had since acquired Koch Media, subsequently transferred Volition to Gearbox Entertainment in November 2022 and closed it in August 2023.

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