Frogwares claims that the version of The Sinking City on Steam is not theirs

The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian horror detective game from Ukrainian studio Frogwares, returned to Steam on Friday after a month-long absence. But Frogwares claims that the game being sold on Valve’s platform is not really the game it made – the latest development in an ongoing dispute between Frogwares and Nacon, the French company that published The Sinking City.

“Frogwares did not create the version of @thesinkingcity that is on sale today on @Steam,” Frogwares said in a tweet on Friday. “We do not recommend purchasing this version. More news coming soon. “

If you look at the Steam page for The Sinking City, you will see an ad posted on Friday morning saying that the game “is now available on Steam”, offering a 60% discount next week. The publishers control what appears on a Steam list, and it appears that Nacon wrote this post to alert potential customers that the game had returned to the platform.

But Frogwares used a clever tactic to infiltrate its message on Steam: the News section of a product’s Steam page pulls tweets from sources, including the official Frogwares account, which is like the tweet mentioned above asking people not to buy the Steam version of The Sinking City … appeared on Steam. (It doesn’t appear there anymore, but here’s a screenshot we made.)

Image: Valve via polygon

At the moment, the official Frogwares website has links not to the Steam list, but to a version for sale on Gamesplanet. The listing on Steam has a huge discount – $ 16 after the 60% discount, compared to $ 42.49 on Gamesplanet. Frogwares has not confirmed this information, but recent customer reviews on Steam claim that the version of The Sinking City being sold there is not the most updated iteration of the game.

This development is just one of a series of conflicts between Frogwares and Nacon since The Sinking City released in the summer of 2019. The game disappeared from most online stores in August 2020 due to a dispute over royalties. At the time, Frogwares stated in an open letter that Nacon owed the studio “about 1 million euros” and had published deceptive marketing that indicated that Nacon was the developer of the game.

In October, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an initial decision saying that Frogwares illegally terminated its contract and ordered Frogwares to “refrain from any action on breach of this contract, [and to] refrain from any action that prevents this continuation. ”This decision led Nacon, in early January, to ask distributors to start selling The Sinking City again. The game returned to the Xbox Store at the time, and is now back on Steam, as well as on PlayStation Store; is also available on the Nintendo Switch. Nacon noted in its January statement that the legal battle “is still pending in French courts for several months”.

We have contacted Frogwares, Nacon and Valve to comment and will update this article as soon as we have news.