Frogwares has issued a public statement detailing how the actions of former licensee partner BigBen Interactive / Nacon has led to the delisting of The Sinking City from multiple storefronts.
The statement comes at a time when Frogwares is officially celebrating 20 years of video game development. In celebration, the team set up sales across multiple platforms and stores for some of its most known games. However, The Sinking City is not one of these games and has instead been noticeably removed from multiple stores.
Wael Amr, CEO at Frogwares, said:
“We did our best to deal with this quietly and amicably but to no avail. Even after court rulings in our favour we are still being roadblocked in simply being allowed to sell our own game. Fans of our games keep asking for answers and quite frankly we are so tired not being allowed to tell them the honest truth. Hence our public statement.”
Frogwares has also shared some details about its unhealthy partnership with Bigben Interactive/Nacon.
“We asked on multiple occasions to see sales forecasts, but the figures sent to us were not consistent. We weren’t sure of how potential sales could turn out, meaning that we were not able to properly plan our future. Were there any sales deals arranged? We were not sure. Only the exclusivity agreement with Epic Games Store gave us some respite, as we knew what we would receive due to the minimum guarantees in Epic’s contract.
On June 27, 2019, The Sinking City came out on Xbox One, PS4, and Epic Games Store. That was a great day for us. And once the game was released, we received a letter from Bigben/Nacon that the milestones that were previously approved are being canceled, meaning that we would not receive any profit from the sales of the game. A retroactive cancellation on not delivering a product on time that is already out in the market is not acceptable. That was when our legal battle began.
We filed a lawsuit against Bigben/Nacon on August 2019 and, incidentally, only then we started to receive income reports, though incomplete and undocumented. So it was not possible for us to see if the revenue was correctly calculated or even how many units we sold. At some point we received a statement claiming that one of the console manufacturers hasn’t paid royalties for more than 5 months, while actually the same console manufacturer paid our royalties from other games without any delay in the same period of time.
Furthermore, we were surprised to find that copyright notices on box covers and storefront pages were legally incorrect, creating a perception that it was not Frogwares which was the owner of the IP.
Our Frogwares logo was removed from some of the PS4 and Xbox One game’s cover and other marketing materials and we only were mentioned on the reverse side with the technical partners, again, creating a perception that we were neither the authors, nor the owners of the game.
Dozens of domain names for our Sherlock Holmes and The Sinking City brands were bought by Bigben/Nacon without notifying us. “
You can read Frogware’s full public statement here. Nacon has not responded yet to Frogwares’ allegations.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Their games are awful.
not all lord putin the magnificent, this game in particular, siking city is quite good. Can i get a russian citizenship after this ?.
why is it good? I saw some gameplay for like an hour, its slow boring, ugly, with nonsensical dialogues and repettive.
Its actually good. But no handholding OPTION for this kind of open world games led into boringness and frustration. An investigation type games with huge map+bad map marker design+find your own clue what to do next=big mistake (for modern games). I prefer them to take Dark Corner of Earth style gameplay rather than making huge open world empty map.
Agreed. The game is quite good. I’ve played and finished it. But the open world, lifeless NPC’s inhabiting it, same layout for buildings in quests, not enough enemy types and scares. They should have focused more on story and making more linear gameplay than this.
Wow, Nacon are total trash company and should be sued into oblivion for this behavior.
blame epic for the fraud deals
I feel bad for them. Game being good or bad has nothing to do how they should treat this dev team. Shame on them. I’d like to know Nacon’s/Bigben’s side of the story in the article. Would’ve been « fair » in my pov.
the sinking studio
Now we know why you took the exclusivity deal. Because the game I followed for 3 years in its development, SUCKS! It got released and or SUCKED. TERRIBLE GAMEPLAY, that is why games like this take epics way out. CAUSE YOU SUCK!
trash devs
this is pure bulshit! and i have proof ! i have a conversation on facebook with the devs , defending how the deal was a good thing with epic , they also trew the cut excuse , and a bunch of bs, i contacted them because i bought the game for pc at gamestop and i did not knew at the time the game was a epic spyfraud exclusive , i gave the game away in the local store because gamestop’s policy does not take pc games back, but i was mislead buying the game bacuse the price tikets and tags on the back where covering all epic fraud logos, i went to facebook and told the devs how disappointed i was even for the box where was no dvd , just a code, now here comes the interesting part, the devs told me they have no clue a boxed pc version even exists! how could someone that makes a game has no information that such product exists???its purely idiotic!
Terrible news. They should contact Epic Games, I’m sure Epic would be happy to act as a publisher on their next title and give them a fair deal.
c u c k
“exclusivity agreement with Epic Games Store”
The precise moment I stopped giving a f*ck about them.
Frogwares? They pulled the same stunt last year, complaining that another publisher (Focus Interactive) did the same thing and delisting their games (Sherlock Holmes) – see https://www.dsogaming.com/news/focus-home-interactive-delists-numerous-games-from-frogwares-developer-responds/
Epic, make piracy great again.
Yeah sounds like they should sue….letter of the law and all that. It’s the comments that are becoming GOLD…good Lord people are so angry these days. I get epic hatred, the Bend the knee, and as much as I dislike apple…I hope they clean epics clock, epic signed the deal, knew before hand what was what…anywho
why are we so angry? is there anything we like? And if someone else doesn’t like it, why do we feel compelled to hate on them? And vice/versa . Introspection fellers..we’re carrying around a lot of ugly, sure the worlds a mess…but WE are the reason its a mess.
Soon in our righteous anger were not going to be able in good conscience use windows….cause they’re evil…or macOS cause they’re evil…everybody is going to be running 500 – 3000 dollar red hat rigs…but Linus will do something evil too. Then what? Unix??? ATT has been evil for quite a while…they got busted up for it.
Let’s be honest the removal has nothing to do with Nacon being bad, it’s because Timmy Tencent made you do so legally.