Red Faction: Armageddon has decreased the publishers confidence in the franchise. During an investors call this evening, THQ CEO Brian Farrell described the Red Faction franchise’s reach as “niche,” and that consequently its no longer worth pursuing.

“Given that that title, now in two successive versions, has just found a niche, we do not intend to carry forward with that franchise in any meaningful way,” Farrell said. According to Farrell, the recently released Red Faction: Armageddon “did not resonate with a sufficiently broad console gaming audience,” despite its “passionate niche following.”

“In today’s hit-driven, core gaming business, even highly-polished titles with a reasonable following like Red Faction face a bar that continues to move higher and higher,” he said. “Moving forward, our core game titles must meet a very high quality standard with strong creative and product differentiation, appeal to a broad audience, and be marketed aggressively.”

The Red Faction series is a series that spans over multiple titles and platforms. And, after Red Faction Guerrilla’s critical success, another installment was inevitable. That said, THQ have announced the next installment into the series, Red Faction Armageddon.

In Armageddon, an “apocalyptic cult” has transformed the surface of Mars into an uninhabitable wasteland, forcing humanity to live in a network of subterranean mines and tunnels. Even worse, Darius Mason, the grandson of Alec Mason and Samanya, and the new main protagonist, is eventually “tricked” into opening a mysterious shaft, unleashing a horde of evil mutants.

As Darius, the player is then tasked with fighting back the mutants, freeing colonists from cocoons that the mutants have trap them in and venturing back to the surface to fight against the cultists. Lucky, this all done with the aid of an “evolved” version of the “Nano Forge” weapon, meaning that the world is once again destructible.

A THQ rep has confirm with us today that Red Faction: Guerrilla has been given a release date of June 9, 2009.

Along with that, we were told that a demo will be releasing on April 23th with any GameStop pre-order of the game, which gives you about three weeks before its release date. 

In Red Faction: Guerrilla, the protagonist Alec will be able to run, jump, hijack vehicles, and use weapons to traverse across the open world of Mars and fight the EDF (Earth Defense Force).

Weapons in the game will include; machine gun turrets, rocket turrets, remote charges, a sledgehammer, machine guns, along with many others. Red Faction: Guerrilla will feature a third-person point of view - all previous Red Faction games were played from  a first-person perspective.

Attention all PlayStation 3 owner who are planning to get their hands on the PlayStation 3 version of the game Red Faction: Guerrilla. The games Associate Producer Sean Kennedy has just admitted to CVG that the extra help was needed to bring the PlayStation3 version up to speed with the Xbox 360 version. Kennedy even stressed how hard Red Faction: Guerilla is pushing the current-gen technology and then says that the lack of memory on PlayStation3 causes a additional headache.

“I mean, to be honest, we are pushing the Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 to the limits,” he says. “I mean, not only has it been a balancing act making destruction work with the gameplay and making it all come together in a cohesive way that’s fun, but it’s been a balancing act getting the game to run on the systems.”

[Volition: We struggled with PS3 Red Faction via CVG]