The Sinking City-10

Frogwares accuses NACON of pirating The Sinking City, NACON accuses Frogwares of not respecting its contract [UPDATE]


Frogwares has published yesterday a lengthy post in which it accuses NACON, its former publisher, of cracking and pirating The Sinking City. On the other hand, NACON accuses Frogwares of not respecting their contract.

Let’s start from the beginning. On February 26th, NACON published a new version of The Sinking City on Steam. According to Frogwares, the publisher has pirated and cracked a version of the game from Gamesplanet.

As Frogwares claimed:

“In order to make changes Nacon had only one way: to decompile or hack the game using a secret key created by Frogwares since the totality of the game’s content is archived with an Epic Unreal Engine encryption system.

To be clear this is hacking and when hacking has the purpose to steal a product and make money with it, it’s called piracy or counterfeiting. In order to achieve this goal, programmers with serious skills need to be involved. This is not DIY work by inexperienced people, this is done by programmers who know Unreal engine well.”

On the other hand, NACON issued the following statement. According to the publisher, it has every right to release The Sinking City on Steam (at least for now). While there is a legal battle between NACON and Frogwares, the courts have already given the green light to NACON to publish The Sinking City on digital stores.

“For the release of The Sinking City on Steam, published by Nacon, Frogwares posted on Twitter urging players not to buy it. We regret that Frogwares persists in disrupting the release of the Sinking City. It was Frogwares who came to Nacon to request financing for the development of the game, and to date, more than 10 million euros have been paid to Frogwares by Nacon. It was Frogwares that relied on our marketing and promotion teams, representing thousands of hours of work and several million euros worth of investment. Now that the game has been fully developed, and published, largely thanks to Nacon’s money and work, Frogwares would like to revise the terms of the contract to their sole advantage. It’s easy to play the victim, but all we seek is that Frogwares respect its commitments both in the contract and as demanded by the courts.”

UPDATE

Valve has delisted The Sinking City from Steam.