AeternoBlade II developers Corecell has came out with a statement talking about Publishers PQUBE who have been accused of withholding funds from their publishing deal with the indie developers.
Corecell had released the statement over at their official twitter account about the situation and the troubles that had with the UK-based publishers.
We have important news to share with you.#indiedevmatter #aeternobladeii #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame @xboxuk @PlayStationEU @NintendoEurope pic.twitter.com/AXwphGQYnL
— CORECELL OFFICIAL (@AETERNOBLADE1) September 1, 2022
Edit (7th September) Corecell has released another statement which points out that Pqube are still selling AeternoBlade II in the Xbox game store under their name despite them saying that they have already returned the rights.
The indie developers mentioned that the PC version of the game was never in the contract where Pqube have only the first rights to refuse if Corecell were to make another platform but Pqube had breached the contract by not paying the Minimum Guarantee.
Original Article Continues below:
In the statement, they had mentioned that signing a publishing agreement with PQUBE to publish AeternoBlade II for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to the Europe region back in October 2019 would have PQUBE pay a minimum guarantee from their end of the agreement. But PQUBE had only paid a small part of the minimum guarantee of the signing milestone by the time Corecell had sent the game and was never paid the remainder of milestones.
Corecell had reached out to PQUBE to resolve the issue but was ultimately for naught, which lead to Corecell to make the decision of terminating their publishing agreement with PQUBE in September 2020. However, PQUBE had refused to return the publication control on the console platforms to Corecell and had continued to sell and take all the revenue from AeternoBlade II.
PQUBE had offered to hand back the publishing control to Corecell if they kept to whole ordeal a secret but with not wanting to be involved in any more deals with PQUBE, they had declined. This resulted in the Indie Developers to put in the additional work to recover from their financial predicament which was also the reason as to why there were unable to make new content for AeternoBlade II.
It is also worth noting that this isn’t the first time that Publishers PQUBE had been responsible for bad business practices with them being involved with the misconduct between Toge Productions and Mojiken Studio’s A Space for the Unbound.