The contract was terminated earlier this year, but the publisher was still receiving revenue from the sales of The Sinking City, forcing Frogwares to withdraw the game from stores. The studio claims that Nacon owes about € 1 million.

According to Frogwares, the original licensing agreement for The Sinking City was signed in 2017, two years after the game began production. The document stipulated that Nacon (then Bigben Interactive) would have the right to sell and commercially promote the game on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store). The publisher also pledged to invest in the development of the game, but leave the intellectual property and a share of sales to Frogwares.

Although development was completed on time, Nacon, according to Frogwares, was hundreds of days late with each milestone. In mid-2018, the publisher acquired another studio working on a similar game based on the Howard Lovecraft universe – Cyanide. After that, Nacon allegedly demanded the source code of The Sinking City from Frogwares. When the developers refused, the money stopped flowing for more than four months.

The Sinking City ultimately released on June 27, 2019, after which Nacon informed Frogwares that it was canceling the previously approved clauses. For the development studio, this meant that it would not receive a share of the sales of the game: “Retroactive cancellation due to late delivery of a product already on the market is unacceptable. It was then that our litigation began. “

The publisher also claimed intellectual property rights, including in Bigben Interactive’s prospectus before Nacon went public. The mention of Frogwares has been removed from the covers of the console versions of The Sinking City and some promotional material. A tabletop RPG on the game was also created and distributed with an incorrect copyright notice and without notifying the original developers.

The studio notes that at the time, the publisher even began buying up dozens of domains associated with The Sinking City and its previous Sherlock Holmes games, without the team’s notice. In August 2019, Frogwares filed a lawsuit against Bigben Interactive. It was only then that the studio began to receive earnings reports, although they were ” incomplete and undocumented, ” which made it difficult to know how many copies of the project were sold and to check the revenue.

In addition, Nacon assured Frogwares that the console maker had not paid royalties for The Sinking City in over five months, despite the fact that the same company immediately paid the developer directly for other games.

After 11 months of no “satisfactory response” from Nacon, on April 20, 2020, Frogwares terminated the contract. Then the publisher said that this cannot be done due to the emergency laws in France, aimed at protecting businesses from the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, according to Frogwares, force majeure still allows you to terminate the agreement: on July 17, 2020, the studio confirmed its innocence on this issue in court.

But even after the deal was canceled, Nacon continued to receive money from the sales of The Sinking City, with the result that Frogwares removed it from stores. The game is currently only available on the studio’s official website and through several direct partners including Origin and Nintendo eShop.This isn’t the first time Frogwares has faced publisher abuse. In the past, the developers had problems with Focus Home Interactive, which, according to the studio, refused to transfer control of game pages on digital platforms after the expiration of the contract, which is why the authors again had to withdraw their projects from the sale.