2019’s H.P. Lovecraft-inspired action-adventure game The Sinking City has been temporarily delisted from certain digital storefronts such as the PlayStation Store, Xbox Marketplace, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. The delisting of The Sinking City was announced earlier today by developer Frogwares, the team also responsible for the Sherlock Holmes video game series following legal conflicts with the game’s publisher Bigben Interactive (now known as Nacon).
Frogwares Studios published a lengthy blog post on the company’s website earlier today detailing the company’s legal battle with The Sinking City‘s publisher, Nacon, as the information is representative of the court proceedings the companies have partaken in since the game’s release on June 27th, 2019. The post opens with the developer stating that in 2017, two years into the production of The Sinking City, Frogwares signed an agreement with Nacon to allow Nacon to sell and commercialize the game on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in exchange for funding the game. Despite this, as part of the agreement, Frogwares claims it would retain all intellectual property rights to The Sinking City across all platforms.
The post continues to detail Frogware’s claims that Big Ben Interactive would frequently deliver payments to the studio “hundreds of days” behind the production milestone dates, with the team even having to issue multiple formal notices to the publisher in order to receive the funding it was owed. Later, after Nacon purchased “a competing studio working on another Lovecraftian horror game,” the publisher demanded that the team give this new studio its source code for The Sinking City which, when Frogwares refused, resulted in the publisher refusing to finance the studio for over four months. Finally, following the game’s release, Nacon canceled all of the production milestones the companies had agreed upon, meaning that Frogwares would see no profit from the game’s sales, prompting the team to finally begin its legal battle with the publisher.
The post also details how Nacon has continued to license products based off The Sinking City and market the game following its release using falsified copyright notices, claiming that it is the owner of the game’s intellectual property. These include a tabletop RPG based off the game and purchasing multiple web domains based off of The Sinking City and Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes titles. Frogwares notes as the end of the blog post that The Sinking City is still currently available through digital platforms such as the Nintendo eShop, Origin and Frogwares’ official website as a DRM-free PC download. These versions were produced by Frogwares and published through different partnering companies.
The Sinking City is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: Frogwares Blog
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