Publisher PQube is under fire once again from another developer claiming funds have been withheld.
Last week Coffee Talk developer Toge Productions released a statement explaining issues with the publisher that left the team “feeling manipulated and exploited”.
Now Corecell, the Thai developer behind AeternoBlade 2, has released a damning statement against the publisher to “help other indie game developers to avoid what has happened to us and inform our fans about our situation”.
PQube has published AeternoBlade 2 on Switch, PS4, and Xbox One in Europe since 2019 in agreement with Corecell, which claims the publisher agreed to pay a minimum guarantee.
“However, PQube only paid a small part of the minimum guarantee of the signing milestone by the time we sent them the game and they never paid the remaining milestones,” reads the statement.
“We have been trying to resolve this issue with Pqube but were unable to reach a solution, leading us to terminate the publishing agreement around September 2020. However, PQube has refused to return the publishing control on the console platforms back to us and continues to sell and take all revenues from AeternoBlade 2.
“Pqube offered to hand over publishing control to us only if we agreed to keep this matter secret, but we no longer wanted to be involved in any more deals with PQube,” the statement continues. “We knew something was not right, but as a small independent developer, we could not afford to pay legal fees to fight the case in another country. We have contacted each platform to ask for the return of our publishing control. So far, only Nintendo and Sony have taken our game off their Europe stores, and we still have not received any revenue from the sales in Europe.
“Because of this incident, we had to do various additional works to recover from our financial situation. We promise that we will soon be back to patch the problems and continue to release new contents for AeternoBlade 2. We are always thankful for everyone who has been supporting us. We want everyone to have fun with our game, satisfied with our product. We hope our fans understand our situation and hope you will continue to support us.”
The developer followed up its statement on Twitter, stating: “We do not wish for negative and harmful action toward PQube. What we want is to explain our situation to our fans, get our game back, and move on.”
It also tweeted Toge Productions saying “you are not alone”.
Eurogamer has contacted PQube for comment.
In response to Toge Productions, PQube said it had funded the developer “over and above” the grant and that Toge Productions has “sought for some time to unilaterally enforce unreasonable revised terms.”
www.eurogamer.net
