Back in 2021, I wrote about the dispute between the Ukraine-based indie dev studio, Frogwares, and BBI/Nacon. I first talked about the situation in general… and then Frogwares reached out to me to make some corrections, so I did so in another post.
Either way, for anyone who isn’t in the know, here’s a quick recap:
- Frogwares who are known for their work on the Sherlock Holmes games started work on The Sinking City and formed a contract with Nacon (formerly Big Ben Interactive) who would grant them funding for specific milestones in exchange for the rights to distribute the game on various platforms.
- BBI/Nacon bought another studio who also were working on a Lovecraftian horror game. Because of that, they wanted Frogwares to hand over their source code to work on that game instead of The Sinking City.
- When Frogwares refused this agreement, Nacon decided to stop paying out any of the funding that they were contractually obligated to pay out.
- At some point after multiple court cases, their contract is terminated and Nacon decides to sell an older version of the game on Steam, thus breaching the exclusivity agreement that Frogwares had with Epic Games.
- Frogwares continues to take down The Sinking City via DMCA. They still haven’t gotten paid and Nacon is no longer their distributor. Nacon then continues to pirate a copy of The Sinking City, re-releasing it onto Steam with all logos of Frogwares removed. Frogwares then tells people to not buy the game and Nacon took them to court.
The whole situation is incredibly bizarre and convoluted with multiple court cases. Some of the stuff in that timeline may actually be in the wrong order, so if you wanna know more details about it, check out the second link up there.
The more important thing, though, is that Nacon lost the court case. Frogwares, the developers of The Sinking City, have won their case and are now able to sell, publish and distribute the game themselves without any interference from Nacon.
As such, the latest version of the game will be made available on Steam, Epic Games, GOG and Gamesplanet within a few weeks.
This latest version comes with optimization and bug fixes but existing owners of the game on Steam and Epic Games will have to keep in mind that…
- due to technical reasons, old saves won’t be compatible with the latest version,
- existing owners of the game will be able to keep playing the old version until February 28th, 2024,
- there will be new saves available soon for anyone that wants to download and use them,
- and on Epic games, players can download and use Frogwares’ saves.
I like that players can keep playing the older version if they already started to do so. The willingness of Frogwares to provide alternative saves for folks who started playing and who may lose their old saves in the update is pretty great.
What a great start into the new year!
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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I actually bought Sinking City two days ago thinking the dispute would never resolve. Now I feel bad and I hope Frogwares gets their money. I went ahead and bought every Frogwares game on Steam to support them at least a little bit.
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I believe the devs get the money through Steam. They only recently went public about the court ruling and stuff, so all should be good, and you should get an update soon! :)
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