Frogwares, the creator of The Sinking City, have now gone on record talking about how its publisher Nacon has cracked and pirated their own game from them.
The Sinking City Developer Accuses Publisher Of Stealing & Uploading Game to Steam
On the Frogwares website, the studio has gone into detail on what has been transpiring about the recently re-released version of Thye Sinking City on Steam.
Here is a piece of that post that explains the current situation.
“So on February 26th 2021 to our great surprise, we found a new version of The Sinking City was uploaded to Steam and launched. But Frogwares didn’t deliver such a version. And this is not the first time something like this has happened. Alain Falc, Nacon owner and CEO warned us on December 28th 2020 in writing that, ‘You have 48 hours to upload a new Steam master otherwise we will use all solutions available within the law and the contract.’
48 hours later, Nacon purchased a version of The Sinking City through the site Gamesplanet and uploaded it to Steam like it is a Steam version. So immediately after his ultimatum expired, Nacon broke the law and breached the contract. We informed Steam of this and prevented the game from being released because it was obvious that it was a stolen version of the game.
So today, we discovered yet another unknown version of our game and what we found is that Nacon; a publicly listed company in Paris, valued at around 700 millions euros, https://www.boursorama.com/cours/1rPNACON/ is yet again behind it. This is now Nacon’s 3rd public attempt to publish a pirated PC version of our game with a previous attempt being made via Utomik in February 2020 and the attempted upload in December 2020.”
The version that is currently available on Steam has clear distinct differences. First off the Gamesplanet logo has been replaced by the Nacon logo, the loading screen has also made these changes.
After Frogwares dug into this more it appears that the executable file has a similar name but a different file size, which indicates that changes have been made to the file. This further points to Nacon decompiling the game and making changes, which can only be done by using a secret key created by Frogwares since the game’s content is archived in the Epic Unreal Engine encryption system.
The post goes on to talk about these changes and provide evidence in even more specific detail. Overall Frogwares states that:
“There are long-term damages we need to take care of, Nacon unpacked our data, stole our source code, and used it. Nacon can create a new version of The Sinking City using our assets; they can resell, reuse, recycle our content and our tools etc.”
Frogwares has begun the process of taking legal action against Nacon.
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