The Sinking City
New twist in the story linked to the battle between Frogwares Interactive and the publisher Nacon: The Sinking City has been (again) removed from Steam after being republished on Valve's online store on February 26th.At the moment the game is not available on Steam, trying to search The Sinking City in the search bar does not get any results while the Steam page of The Sinking City indexed on Google refers to the home page of the marketplace.
We do not know however why the game has disappeared from the store: The Sinking City has been removed from Nacon or from Valve? It must be said that in the last few hours the title has been flooded with negative reviews, some of which contain insults and threats against Nacon.
Let's summarize the story: At the end of February (after a dispute over rights of exploitation of the game between Nacon and Frogwares) The Sinking City is back for sale on Steam published by Nacon without any reference to Frogwares among the credits. The developers recommend that potential buyers stay away from this version, stating that they will soon clarify what happened.
That said, at the beginning of March the studio accuses Nacon of having pirated The Sinking City thanks to the work of one of the own internal studios and to have relisted the game without any authorization. Nacon for his part defends himself by stating that he has not pirated The Sinking City, a few hours later, however, the title disappears from Steam. Difficult to understand what exactly happened but we will probably know more in the next few hours, remember that Frogwares dragged Nacon to court for the second time in a few months asking for compensation of over 700,000 euros from the transalpine publisher.
'The Sinking City' developer says its game was illegally uploaded to Steam
Among the many other games that came out on Steam last Friday was a title called The Sinking City. In normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have stood out. It’s a game from 2019 that earned mostly average reviews. However, its developer, a studio named Frogwares, says The Sinking City was uploaded to Valve's storefront by its previous publisher without its consent.
On Monday, the studio shared a lengthy blog post and video detailing its allegations against Nacon. In short, Frogwares claims the company purchased a copy of the game from a competing storefront and then went on to hack and upload it to Steam. The developer said this is Nacon’s third attempt to publish a pirated version of The Sinking City and this latest one came after the company issued it a 48-hour ultimatum. According to the studio, the Steam release of the game features several telltale signs that had it been altered, including missing logos and UI elements. Frogwares was able to examine the config files using its own encryption key, which it appears Nacon didn’t change when it reuploaded the game.
© Frogwares The Sinking City“To be clear this is hacking and when hacking has the purpose to steal a product and make money with it, it’s called piracy or counterfeiting,” the studio said. “In order to achieve this goal, programmers with serious skills need to be involved. This is not DIY work by inexperienced people, this is done by programmers who know [the] Unreal engine well.”
The two companies have been involved in litigation over TheSinking City since 2019. That’s left the game unavailable on some platforms. The studio believes Nacon will attempt to publish the hacked version of The Sinking City to other storefronts. Nacon addressed the allegations in an update on the game’s steam page. “We regret that Frogwares persists in disrupting the release of the Sinking City. 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,” it said.
As of the writing of this article, The Sinking City is still available to buy through Steam. Frogwares said Nacon will have to face 'legal consequences' for its actions.