After disappearing from digital stores last year, Lovecraftian RPG The Sinking City has returned to Steam. However, Frogwares’ developers have warned fans not to buy it, because it is supposedly not the version of the game they made. It appears that the current version of Steam was placed on the platform by Nacon, publisher of The Sinking City, with whom Frogwares is in a long and complicated legal dispute over the ownership of the game.
In August last year, Frogwares released a statement alleging that Nacon withheld payments during game development, owed Frogwares about € 1 million in royalties (about £ 900,000) and wrongly tried to claim the copyright for The Sinking City . Some storefronts had already started removing the game due to what Frogwares believed to be a confusion about ownership, so the developers themselves removed the game from the remaining stores to prevent sales from going to Nacon. At the time, Nacon “emphatically” rejected the developer ‘s claims and said the dispute was still pending in French courts.
In October, however, these courts determined that Frogwares had illegally terminated its contract with Nacon when it pulled the game out of the sale, and would have to maintain it until the legal dispute was resolved. The Sinking City then returned to the Xbox and Microsoft Store in January. Frogwares also released it on Steam again, except that the version mysteriously disappeared again shortly afterwards.
Now, however, it’s back – but it’s supposed to be a different version of what was released in January.
“Frogwares did not create the version of The Sinking City that is on sale today on Steam. We do not recommend buying this version. More news coming soon,” Frogwares posted on Twitter.
It looks like The Sinking City, which is currently available on Steam, is an old version of the game. A review of Steam states that it is not the same version released by Frogwares in January, and has no DLC, cloud saves and achievements. It is not clear whether Nacon is the one who put it on Steam, although judging from the Frogwares tweet, that is the implication at the moment.
This is certainly a bit confusing. I contacted Frogwares and Nacon and will update this post if I receive a response.