Corecell, the developer of AeternoBlade 2, has accused publisher Pqube of withholding funds from the company. The allegation is that Pqube has only paid a small part of the minimum guarantee and never paid the remaining milestones.
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The game development company stated that every day had been a challenge for the past three years since the contract with Pqube. The team has shared a statement in order to reveal the truth, warn other devs, and inform the fans.
AeternoBlade 2 was published back in October 2019 on multiple platforms. The agreement between Pqube and Corecell stated that the publishers were supposed to pay a minimum guarantee, which wasn’t even paid in full.
The remaining milestones were also not paid, so Corecell terminated the agreement between the companies on September 2020. Pqube didn’t honor the termination of the contract and didn’t release the publishing rights back to Corecell. The London-based publisher is still selling and making a profit off of the game.
Pqube then offered to return the publishing controls to Corecell in exchange for their discretion. The devs were to sign another agreement to keep this matter a secret. Corecell declined and decided to go public with the problem. Toge Productions also had a similar problem with Pqube, which they also went public to recover.
The statement shared from Corecell’s official Twitter account was finalized with these words:
“Because of this incident, we had to do various additional works to recover from our financial situation. We promise that we will soon be back to patch the problems and continue to release new content for AeternoBlade 2. We are always thankful for everyone who has been supporting us. We want everyone to have fun with our game, satisfied with our product. We hope our fans understand our situation and hope you will continue to support us.”
A small development company such as Corecell wouldn’t have the financial resources to go to trial, especially in another country. So instead, the company demanded publishing controls from the platform owners. Reportedly, Sony and Nintendo responded by removing the game from their Europe stores, but Corecell is still yet to gain any revenue from the game’s launch in Europe.
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