Frogwares in Trouble; The Sinking City Pulled From Stores
The Sinking City has disappeared from the stores. Developers from Frogwares published an open letter, in which they explain that the blame for this situation lies with its publisher - Nacon. At the same time, the devs convince that they are doing their best to get their work back on sale as soon as possible.
- After The Sinking City was pulled from the offer of many stores, Frogwares informed about breaking cooperation with Nacon (previously known as Bigben Interactive);
- The devs explain that this was caused by numerous breaches of contract by the publisher;
- The devs intend to make sure that the game in question reappears as soon as possible wherever possible.
As you may have noticed, The Sinking City has disappeared from the offers of many stores. In an open letter published on their website, the developers explain that the reason for this is that they were 'forced to terminate the contract with their licensee [Nacon, formerly known as Bigben Interactive - editorial note] for several breaches of our agreement because of several violations' of its provisions. The devs argue that they intend to make every effort to ensure that their work reappears wherever possible as soon as possible. At the time of writing this news, the title can be purchased, among others, on Frogwares store (in a DRM-free version for PC) or on Nintendo store (in a version for Nintendo Switch).
The above paragraph, however, is only a shortened version of the description of the situation, which was shared with the players by Frogwares. Below we discuss the content of the open letter published by the studio in a little more detail, which describes in detail the problems that developers have faced in recent years.
Conflict between Frogwares and Nacon
Let's start with the fact that, according to the devs, long before the launch of The Sinking City, Nacon was behind with payments (sometimes for 'hundreds of days'), while they met all their commitments, delivering subsequent milestones on time. As if that wasn't enough, the publisher later began to resort to such acts as attempts to force the devs to share the source code of their work with a 'competitive team' working on another game inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's prose. Besides, the company did not provide the developers with sales forecasts for The Sinking City. Instead, after the release of the game, the publisher sent a message to the studio that it canceled the acceptance of earlier milestones, which in practice meant that his employees would not receive any money from the sale of their work.
In August 2019, the devs filed a lawsuit, after which the publisher began to, among other things, send them incomplete financial reports and buy domains related to the Sherlock Holmes and The Sinking City IPs. What's more, without their knowledge, the publisher created a tabletop RPG based on The Sinking City, which it then made available for free, and even distributed false information that the publisher was supposed to own the IP.
After many perturbations, Frogwares terminated the contract with Nacon. The problem is that due to erroneous information spread by the publisher, currently "various partners (...) are sometimes confused, overly cautious, or preemptively delist the game themselves while dealing with our [studio's - editors note] requests to return full control of the game to Frogwares". As the devs say, the request to pull The Sinking City from all digital game stores, mainly to stop the money from the sales going to Nacon, was their last resort.
Let's remind, that it's not the first time that Frogwares and publisher of its projects went separate ways in an unpleasant (to put it mildly) atmosphere. We had a similar situation last year, when the cooperation of the Ukrainian team with Focus Home Interactive came to an end.
