The battle between French publishing giant Nacon and The Sinking City developer Frogwares is heating up with some very public accusations being thrown online.
To get you caught up, Frogwares initially accused Nacon of withholding contracted funds for the production of The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian action-adventure game where you play as a private investigator looking into a supernatural flood that hit an isolated Massachusetts town.
Frogwares terminated their contract with Nacon, which resulted in The Sinking City being delisted from Steam, but Nacon then took Frogwares to court and a Paris Court of Appeal ruled that until the case can be ruled on the original contract must stand. This resulted in The Sinking City getting put back on Steam on February 26.
Frogwares has since told fans of their games to not purchase the Steam version of The Sinking City and instead buy it from other platforms. Nacon responded today to say that they "regret" Frogwares' decision to keep "disrupting" The Sinking City's sales on Steam.
"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,” wrote the French publisher. “It was Frogwares that relied on our marketing and promotion teams, representing thousands of hours of work and several million euros worth of investment."
Nacon then accused Frogwares of trying "play the victim" while also trying to "revise the terms of the contract to their sole advantage." Because of Frogwares' "lack of cooperation," The Sinking City's Steam version comes without cloud saving or achievements, two features that Frogwares says were actually finished from the final version of the game.
Today, Frogwares has gone on the offensive by accusing Nacon of cracking and pirating The Sinking City from another platform in order to release on Steam. "Our former licensee Nacon has cracked, hacked, changed our game’s code and content, and illegally uploaded our game The Sinking City to Steam on February 26, 2021," Frogwares wrote on their blog, "in order to commercialize it under their own name without our knowledge."
To prove their point, Frogwares created a nine-minute video outlining all the actions Nacon allegedly took to publish The Sinking City on Steam. This involved Nacon purchasing a version of The Sinking City on Gamesplanet and then altering it illegally to distribute on Steam. But because the version Nacon used wasn't meant for Steam, features like cloud-saves and achievements didn't work.
The video and blog post goes into further details on just how Nacon hacked The Sinking City, and how Frogwares is certain that the French justice system will eventually rule in their favor. These accusations are all still untested in court.
March 3, 2021 Update: Publisher Nacon has since responded to the allegations wedged by Frogwares accusing the entity of pirating the game, but maintains that Nacon is the "sole exclusive distributor of The Sinking City game on STEAM."
In a statement on the company's website, Nacon continued by adding the publisher has "contributed to the financing of development and the payment of royalties to FROGWARES to the tune of 8.9 million euros to date (including the full payment for a version of the game for STEAM), making the global investment far above 10 million euros when integrating the marketing costs."
Nacon maintains that it paid Frogwares all amounts due and adds that "unless FROGWARES is acting in bad faith, it has no reason not to make the game available to NACON on STEAM." The statement from Nacon also mentions that Frogwares continued to resist its legal obligations to the publisher, going so far as to leave Nacon out of Steam listings despite previous legal battles through The Paris Court of Appeals ruling with Nacon.
Previous statements from Frogwares did not mention prior court rulings, and Nacon highlights the financial difficulty the developer has caused. You can find the full statement via Nacon's official website.