Frogwares marketing manager Sergey Oganesyan has released a statement about their The Sinking City drama and now I see why they make detective games.
According to Oganesyan, the reason they have been warning people away from purchasing The Sinking City on Steam is because the version available there is a pirated copy, cracked by publisher Nacon without their permission. The Sinking City was delisted from Steam back in August 2020 as part of Frogwares’ ongoing legal proceedings with the French Justice against Nacon regarding lack of payment and attempts to steal their IP, so they were a little surprised to find The Sinking City back on Steam on 26 February.
So, Frogwares did some investigation and, according to the development studio, discovered that Nacon had purchased a copy of the Deluxe version of the game (which includes additional content Nacon never paid for) from Gamesplanet, done a hatchet job of altering the config files (after acquiring the secret encryption key), then recompiled the game, put it back on Steam, and… hoped nobody would notice?
But Frogwares did notice and they’ve detailed the alleged changes in their most recent blog post. Changes mostly involved branding, and not any actual game content, although, in the process of reuploading the game to Steam, it lost all of its achievements (smooth).
https://youtu.be/VYTSt5oOr5g
As if all this alleged audacity wasn’t enough, it seems Nacon also requested keys from Steam so that they could sell their bootleg game on platforms where they have no rights to do so. Go big or go home, I guess. Before you go shouting at Steam, Frogwares mentions that they “were in no way informed of the game’s pirated state” when the new copy was uploaded.
I don’t know about you, but I am very much looking forward to Nacon’s explanation for all this.