The Sinking City is back on sale at least for now -apkrig
Last August, we briefed you on a complicated dispute between Frogwares developers and Nacon, formerly BigBen. During the development of The Sinking City, the developers said there should have been repeated breaches of mutual agreements by the publisher, mainly due to late payments for employee salaries. However, the developers said that the publisher punished them for failing to pass on the source code, even though Nacon had no right to it under the agreement, and allegedly the Frogwares should have been completely cut off from any profits from the sale. The reason was the failure to meet the deadline for publication, which the developers, according to them, met, and therefore considered the cancellation of the right to part of the profits from the sale to be completely inadmissible.
However, Nacon defended himself in his statement, calling the developers’ claims untrue and unprofessional, and admitting that everything would have to be decided by a court. At the same time, the Frogwares resorted to unilaterally withdrawing from the mutual agreement and, above all, to remove the game from distribution so that they would no longer lose money, so that the dispute actually went to the lawyers. However, the first results can be slightly surprising if you sided with the developers – Nacon succeeded in the first point and the Paris court ruled in his favor, which the publisher informs through a press release. “The court ruled that Frogwares terminated the contract in a” manifestly illegal “manner and the result is its continuation until the expiration date, or until a decision on breach of contract is made,” Nacon said.
As a result, The Sinking City can now be purchased in the Xbox version, and should soon appear on Steam and the PlayStation Store.
The Paris court has also ordered developers to refrain from any action that would impede the implementation of the signed agreement with Nacon, which will lead to the return of The Sinking City to digital distribution in the coming days. “Nacon continues to defend its rights and follows up on court decisions requesting that [digitální] the platforms started selling The Sinking City again, so no one was held hostage in this situation, ”says the publisher. As a result, the game can now be purchased in the Xbox version, but should soon appear on Steam and the PlayStation Store. However, Nacon points out that not all parts of the game can work 100% because they have no control over them as a publisher. “It depends on the goodwill of Frogwares to manage some of the elements, especially those related to online gaming,” Nacon explains, although he doesn’t say what the online features of a single-player game are. Probably only encounters the synchronization of stored positions and progress in general, which would not be a problem as a result. The emphasis is that a large part is controlled only by the developers, but of course it also aims to fix bugs, if any appear in the game.
Frogwares’ statement is currently unavailable, and as it appears from social media activity, the developers are currently focusing on the completion of the upcoming Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, which we also announced last year.
