The Ukrainian studio Frogwares commented on the situation around the re-release of The Sinking City on Steam. The developers claim that Nacon has spiraled and modified a copy of the game. At the same time, the publisher believes that the studio, to which she allegedly has already paid over € 10 million, refuses to make contact.
What happened?
- On February 26, The Sinking City became available for purchase on Steam again. At the same time, it was sold immediately with a 60% discount.
- Players were dissatisfied with the new version of the game, which lacked achievements and cloud saves.
- Shortly after, Frogwares studio stated that it had nothing to do with this version of the game and promised to share details soon.
Nacon position
- On March 1, publisher Nacon responded to the developers in a post on The Sinking City page on Steam. The company stated that this version of the game is official and complete.
- According to the publisher, he cannot add full support for all functions to the project, because Frogwares refuses to cooperate.
- Nacon also stated that it has already paid more than €10 million to developers. Earlier, Frogwares accused the publisher of non-payment of royalties in the amount of € 1 million.
- “Now that the game has been developed and released (largely thanks to the money and work of Nacon), Frogwares wanted to renegotiate the terms of the contract in its favor. It is easy to pretend to be a victim, but we are only trying to ensure that Frogwares complies with its obligations as required by the court,” Nacon said in a statement.
- According to Nacon, she returned The Sinking City to Steam “for the fans.” The company also noted that it would prefer to maintain a respectful partnership with Frogwares.
The big answer is Frogwares
The studio released a video on its official YouTube channel and also published a text version of its statement on the website. The main theses of the developers can be found below:
- Frogwares claims that back on December 28, Nacon CEO Alain Falc gave developers 48 hours to provide a new master copy of The Sinking City. Otherwise, the publisher promised to find another solution;
- Two days later, Nacon bought a copy of the game on Gamesplanet and uploaded it to Steam. Frogwares considered this a violation of the contract and prevented the release;
- according to Frogwares, the version released on February 26 is also pirated. The publisher allegedly asked his employees to hack and modify the game;
- the studio discovered that Nacon had removed the Gamesplanet logo and changed the loading screen. The publisher also removed from the main menu the advertisement of another Frogwares game and the “Play More” item leading to an external site and necessary for license verification;
- Frogwares drew attention to the fact that Nacon changed The Sinking City executable file. The size of the game also corresponded to the Gamesplanet version — 17 GB versus 30 GB for the original version;
- due to errors when modifying files, the version of the game from Nacon lost achievements and other Steam functions;
- the studio also discovered that a modified version of The Sinking City was uploaded to Steam by the founder and managing director of the Belgian studio Neopica, which was bought by Nacon last year;
The full Frogwares post, where the studio provides many screenshots and explanations, can be found here.
Now Frogwares hopes that it will be able to bring Falk and Nacon to justice for “intellectual property theft.” The final decision will have to be made by the court, which may last for several months or even years.