Frogwares Studio’s Sergey Oganesyan posted an open letter on the company’s blog on August 25th to explain why The Sinking City has just disappeared from most platforms. It’s a detailed read, calling out shorted payments from publisher Bigben Interactive/Nacon and their subversion of Frogwares intellectual property. There’s plenty of detail if you’re so inclined but Oganesyan himself offers a ‘short version’, stating simply that “we were forced to terminate the contract with our licensee for several breaches of our agreement.”
Fortunately, Frogwares was able to publish the game on several platforms themselves and those versions — on PC through Frogwares, Origin and Gamesplanet, and on console for Nintendo Switch — remain available today. The Epic Games Store and PlayStation 4 versions have both been delisted and while the Xbox One edition remains available as of this writing, it is likely to disappear soon.
The studio remains hopeful that The Sinking City will be back on those platforms someday but it may take some time given the legal proceedings. The post concludes “we will inform you as we reappear on more platforms on our social channels“.
For the time being I’ll get the game added to the site and look forward to marking it “relisted” down the line.