In the wake of a recent claim against publisher PQube, Corecell Technology, the developers behind AeternoBlade II, has also made an accusation against PQube, claiming the publisher withheld payments.Just last week, the developers behind A Space for the Unbound accused PQube of “exploitative” and manipulative behaviour. Now, AeternoBlade II developers Corecell have made their own accusations against PQube.Another indie dev has made accusations against publisher PQube”It has been tough for us for the past three years. We have struggled to recover since we signed a publishing deal with PQube,” Corecell says. “But now it’s time we came out with the truth. Hopefully, this will help other indie game developers to avoid what has happened to us and inform our fans about our situation.”Corecell says PQube was responsible for publishing AeternoBlade II in Europe since October 2019 “under a publishing agreement with us and agreed to pay a minimum guarantee to us. 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.” The devs claim they have tried to resolve this with PQube but eventually had to terminate their publishing agreement in September 2020; they also claim that PQube wouldn’t give back publishing control on console platforms and that it “continues to sell and take all revenues from AeternoBlade II.”The statement goes on to claim that 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.” Corecell claims that as an indie dev it couldn’t pursue legal action in another country and has asked each platform to return publishing control, with Nintendo and Sony removing the game from their Europe stores, but with Corecell still apparently having “not received any revenue from the sales in Europe.” As a result of all this, Corecelll says it “had to do various additional works to recover from our financial situation.” It further added that it does “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.”PQube has since responded. Its statement was shared on Eurogamer:”We enjoyed working with Corecell on our first project together and Corecell were very happy with the success of this. We were pleased to work again with Corecell on Aeternoblade 2 and, despite delays and quality issues we endeavoured to release the game in October 2019 for them as they requested.At our post launch meeting in January 2020 Corecell acknowledged significant product quality issues and agreed to provide critical fixes in order to make the game commercially viable. Unfortunately, these fixes never materialised and Corecell remained unresponsive. PQube remained prepared to pay the full guarantee for the game, despite the very poor reviews and sales, and to publish the PC version in line with PQube’s option in the agreement. Corecell agreed in March 2020 to provide the PC version to PQube but then proceeded to list and then release the PC version itself without further discussion with PQube.Over the following two years, PQube proposed and sent numerous proposals and supporting agreements to revert rights to Corecell in line with their request but these were not acknowledged by Corecell. Nevertheless, despite all of the challenges and the lack of communication from Corecell, PQube released its rights to the console versions back to Corecell well before the end of the agreement term. We remain open to support Corecell in any way possible.Throughout our 12 years of distribution and publishing history, we have worked with numerous partners and have released over 200 games. PQube have a proud history of working with developers both large and small. From established global IP, to championing independent projects from smaller teams – we continue to publish multiple projects and sequels from our existing partnerships which is testament to the ongoing strength of our relationships and the strong bond between our development partners and our passionate and diverse team at PQube.We have always strived to provide focus and commitment to maximise the results for our partners and to support them fully through all stages of the product lifecycle. When challenges have arisen, as is inevitable over such a long period in the games industry, we have always sought to resolve them in a fair and reasonable way.We will continue to focus our energy on doing a great job for our partners. We continually work to develop and improve all aspects of our business and are fully committed to providing the best possible service and success for all of our partners.”
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