5/20/2023 0 Comments The sinking city game release date![]() In August 2019, Frogwares filed suit amid “incomplete and undocumented” income reports. ![]() That was when our legal battle began.” The post-launch legal battle Frogwares continues, “A retroactive cancellation on not delivering a product on time that is already out in the market is not acceptable. Only a month after launch, Frogwares says that Nacon sent a letter stating that Frogwares wouldn’t receive any profits from game sales. Once Frogwares released The Sinking City, the issues intensified. They sell the game-not develop and co-create it.”įrogwares refused to comply, and in response, Nacon allegedly withheld payments for four months. Once again, BBI/Nacon does not own the IP-they are a licensee. Once BBI/Nacon bought out a competing studio working on another Lovecraftian game, they dictated that we give them our source code for The Sinking City. “The lack of commitment to honor the financial obligations soon turned into ongoing pressure. The letter even talks about Nacon funding a competing Lovecraftian game, where it asked Frogwares to contribute its source code. Frogwares describes waiting hundreds of days for payments, and once the game properly released, inaccurate and inconsistent sales figures. ![]() The Sinking City released on June 27, 2019, but the problems began before that. The agreement also laid out that Frogwares would own the intellectual property. The Sinking City has been delisted on Steam, the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store, and the PlayStation Store, but there are still ways to grab a copy (more on that in a minute).įrogwares, known for its work on games like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and The Devil’s Daughter, signed a contract with Nacon in 2017 to produce The Sinking City. The terms of the agreement were simple: Nacon would fund development, and Frogwares would release the game on Xbox One, PS4, and Steam. In a twist, though, it wasn’t Nacon who removed The Sinking City-it was Frogwares. The letter paints a grim picture of the video game industry for AA developers, with unpaid royalties and plenty of legal strong-arming. Nacon was formerly known as Bigben but formed a new entity last year ahead of an IPO.In an open letter to fans and media, developer Frogwares laid out multiple issues with Nacon (formerly Bigben Interactive) that lead to the removal of The Sinking City on most digital storefronts. However, looking at the listing for the game on PS4 at the time of writing, Nacon is still listed as publisher. The PlayStation version of The Sinking City was re-released mid-February with "different publishers," Frogwares announced. The Sinking City reemerged on the Xbox Store in early January 2021 following a decision from the Paris Court of Appeal which ruled that when Frogwares removed the game from storefronts, it "terminated contract in a 'manifestly unlawful' manner." The title was initially pulled from stores back in August 2020, as Frogwares claimed Nacon owed the studio around €1 million in royalties. It also accused Frogwares of wanting to "revise the terms of the contract to their sole advantage."įrogwares retaliated, accusing Nacon of having cracked a copy of the game downloaded from another store and illegally uploading it to Steam. Nacon responded in a statement, saying that due to a "lack of cooperation" from Frogwares, that version of The Sinking City only lacked some Steam-specific features such as cloud saves and achievements. The studio said at the end of last week that the version of the game offered on the store was not created by Frogwares, and asked players to not buy it on this platform. At the time of writing, The Sinking City can't be found on Steam. The Sinking City has now been removed from Steam, following an ongoing dispute between developer Frogwares and publisher Nacon.įrogwares had to issue a DMCA takedown in order for its own game to be removed from the store, Vice reported.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |