Restoring the rights to The Sinking City: what’s going on

In a post on Steam, the developer Frogwares announced that it has now become the sole publisher of The Sinking City, which was released in 2019. As a result, they will be updating their stores with the latest version of the game in the coming weeks.
Frogwares started developing The Sinking City in cooperation with the publisher Nacon. However, disagreements arose, and later financial disputes, in particular over unpaid royalties. In 2019, the game was released on the Epic Games Store. Then Nacon launched the game on Steam on its own, although the developers believed it was illegal, even calling this version “pirated”. After that, the parties went to court, and probably now they have come to some kind of compromise solution.

Copyright dispute: the vicissitudes of the game’s history

In 2021, Frogwares entered into a dispute with Nacon, the publisher of the game on PC, over copyright and unpaid royalties. As a result, The Sinking City was removed from PC, Xbox One, and PS4. Then it returned to Steam, but it was removed again because it was an allegedly hacked version from Nacon. It is not yet clear what led to the dispute. But the developer only said:

We are happy to finally put this behind us and look forward to sharing more news about the future of the franchise.

Frogwares warns that saves from the old PC version will not be compatible with the updated one. They also plan to release a new DLC called Merciful Madness, which will only work with the new version. While Frogwares is best known for the Sherlock Holmes series of games, The Sinking City is a detective story set in the world of Howard Lovecraft, taking place after the events of The Shadow of Innsmouth.