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

The sinking city, a detective story by Lovecraftian from the Ukrainian studio Frogwares, returned to Steam on Friday after a long absence. But Frogwares claims that the game being sold on Valve’s platform is not actually the game that made it – 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 for sale on @Steam today,” Frogwares tweeted Friday. ‘We do not recommend purchasing this version. More news coming soon. ”

If you are looking at the Steam page for The sinking city, you see an announcement posted Friday morning saying that the game is ‘now available on Steam’, offering a 60% discount for next week. Publishers control what appears in a Steam list, and it appears that Nacon wrote this post to warn potential customers that the game has returned to the platform.

But Frogwares used a clever tactic to sneak its message to Steam: the news section of a product’s Steam page retrieves tweets from sources, including Frogwares’ official account, and the previous tweet asking people to not the Steam version of The sinking city … appeared on Steam. (It does not appear there anymore, but here is a screenshot we took.)

Image: Valve via polygon

At the moment, Frogwares’ official website does not link to the Steam list, but a version for sale on Gamesplanet. The listing on Steam is heavily discounted – $ 16 after the 60% discount, compared to $ 42.49 on Gamesplanet. Frogwares did not confirm this information itself, but recent customer reviews on Steam claim that the version of The sinking city sold there is not the latest version of the game.

This development is since then only one of a series of conflicts between Frogwares and Nacon The sinking city launched in the summer of 2019. The game disappeared from most online store windows in August 2020 due to a dispute over royalties. At the time, Frogwares claimed in an open letter that Nacon owed the studio “about 1 million euros” and that he had published misleading marketing indicating that Nacon was the developer of the game.

In October, the Paris Court of Appeal issued an initial ruling stating that Frogwares had terminated his contract unlawfully, and ordered that Frogwares “should refrain from any action regarding the breach of this contract, [and to] refrain from any action that impedes this continuation. The decision led Nacon to ask distributors to start selling in early January. The sinking city again. The game returned to the Xbox Store at the time, and is now back on Steam as well as the PlayStation Store; it is also available on Nintendo Switch. In his January statement, Nacon noted that the legal battle “is still pending before the French courts”.

We contacted Frogwares, Nacon and Valve for comment, and we’ll update this article as we hear.