The day before yesterday a game appeared on Steam. Not a peculiar thing. Yesterday it was gone from Steam. A peculiar thing. The game was Paper Monsters, by developers Mobot Studios/Crescent Moon Games, which came out in 2012, published by the oft-troubled Strategy First. Crescent Moon had no idea the Steam publication was happening. With a new version of the game having just cleared Greenlight, and due to release this Summer, they had no intentions of seeing the older game on Valve’s store. It wasn’t until another developer asked them why the game was now on sale that they learned of it. And then learned that it had been put there by Strategy First – the publisher they tell us they had a contract with that stipulated no Steam publication, and indeed the publisher they say has yet to pay them at all.
And they’re not the only ones.
Crescent Moon quickly took action, alerting Steam users that they should not buy this version of Paper Monsters, and appealed to Steam to take it down from sale. Steam quickly complied, and it’s now gone. All that now remains are the community pages, and Mobot’s appeal. When we got in touch with the studio to find out what happened, they told us that they were shocked to see their older game on sale.
“It’s an old version, and not the version we have been working on after it got approved on Greenlight. We were shocked to find out that it had been released on Steam. We were able to contact Valve and get it removed quickly – thank god.”
They go on to tell us that their contract with Strategy First gave the publishers the rights to publish the PC game on all platforms, except for Steam. Crescent say that Strategy First then emailed a few hours after it had gone on sale to tell them they’d done it. They apparently said,
“After several pitches we managed to get the game on steam. As stated papers Monsters recur is yours. While we can still go live with Paper Monsters. By having two products you will generate additional revenue.” [sic]
Revenue is not something, say Crescent, that is in abundance from SF. In fact, they allege that so far they have only received a single cheque from the publisher, for $200. A cheque that they further allege “was invalid”. How much they’re owed, they’ve no idea, because they tell us that SF has yet to send them a sales report. Despite this, the game is still for sale on SF’s site.
It’s $200 more than Vertigo Gaming say they’ve received. Developer David Galindo says that he has yet to receive even a bouncy cheque for his game The Oil Blue, published by Strategy First.
Galindo tells us that SF approached him about publishing his game on a variety of sites, including Steam, which was just what his small, independent project needed. Galindo explains,
“We signed a contract that SF would have full publishing rights on all websites except for my own, Gamersgate and Desura (where the game was already published).”
So far, so good. And then?
“That was the very last time I would ever have any contact with them.”
Galindo claims that multiple emails asking for sales reports, information, and so on went unanswered, despite the game being available on Strategy First’s website. Except, well, sort of. The game information on their site, he tells us, showed images of a first-person shooter, while Oil Blue is a action-simulation game about drilling for oil in the ocean. But despite this, the game was selling copies. Galindo says he was receiving support requests, and eventually found the game on sale at 50% off on another distribution site. He estimates a couple of thousand dollars of sales. Money he needed.
With no joy getting a response from SF, Galindo says he sent an email terminating their contract, and again, heard nothing. A year later, when joining in a thread with some other developers who also say they weren’t paid by the publisher, a senior developer got in touch with Galindo to offer help. It was, he told him, during a time when Strategy First were having financial woes. This developer rattled some cages, and the result was an email from SF promising to send Galindo a sales report. The email read,
“Hi
This week we will send sales report. If the product doesnt generate atound five thousand. We wait until tje next period”
As you might have guessed, Galindo says he never received any sales report. And his contract makes no reference to there being a need for $5,000 to be made before he’d received any payment – it instead states that he’d be paid quarterly, along with receiving a quarterly royalty report indicating specific sales figures.
Galindo tells us he sent SF a “terse legal sounding email demanding they take my game off their website” months ago. The game is still on sale on Strategy First’s website for $20. (You can buy it directly from Vertigo Gaming for $9.)
Strategy First still has the game available on various other distribution sites, and Galindo is having mixed results with trying to get them to stop selling it.
This is certainly not the first time developers have reported such situations with Strategy First. Perhaps most famously, Introversion Software reported that they were no longer receiving royalty payments for sales of Uplink in 2004. At that point SF had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, with a reported debt of over $5m. In the Spring of 2003, royalty payments stopped reaching the oft-troubled developer, leaving what Introversion’s Chris Delay said were “tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid royalties.”
Black Hammer Game say they went through similar in 2004 with Supremacy, telling GameDev.net how they had to sever their agreement with them as news of their failure to pay developers emerged. 2005 saw Legend Studios issue a press release that claimed SF had “breached the Software Publishing and Distribution Agreement” for their game War Times: European Frontline, and rather familiarly at this point, that they had “not receive a single sales report, payments for royalties and they practically have not fulfilled a single point in our agreement.” Also caught up in that bankruptcy were Stardock with Galactic Civilisations II, and BattleGoat Studios.
In 2009, Technetium Games claimed that Strategy First had not paid them any money, nor any sales reports for their pinball game SlamIt. In their case, the game came out with significant problems, and due to no responses from SF, they say they were unable to patch the Steam version.
Then there’s Pollux Gamelabs, i-Deal Games Studio, and now Crescent Moon and Vertigo Gaming.
After filing for bankruptcy in 2004, the company was acquired by Silverstar Holdings, who then also bought Empire Interactive in 2006, forming a collaboration between the two publishers. However, come 2009 Silverstar Holdings was removed from the NASDAQ, and a company review found “substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” Strategy First has certainly had some troubles.
It seems that the pattern from 2005, and 2009, appears to be repeating again, with developers reporting no payments, refusals to send out sales or revenue reports, and a complete inability to communicate with the publisher. We’ve had the same problem, contacting them via a number of email addresses, and have so far had no response. We will keep you up to date with anything we hear.
Big thanks to NeoGAFfers.
