PQube, a games publisher that has over 50 games on Steam, has been accused of engaging in "predatory practices".
Toge Productions and Mojiken Studio, who are currently working on the slice of life adventure game A Space For The Unbound, accused PQube of some pretty shady behaviour on Twitter and in an official Steam news post.
In the statement they mentioned that PQube had left them feeling "manipulated and exploited" leading to a terminated agreement. According to Toge and Mojiken, the people at PQube pulled in funding from a diversity fund that's supposed to help underrepresented game devs. However, instead of giving it to the developers they hid it and then used it for their own gain, including using it to negotiate an increase in their own revenue share from the developer.
We've heard about and seen plenty of pretty terrible publishing agreements over the years, but if this is true this is a pretty new low for a publisher to use the position of a developer for their own gain in such a way.
Have asked PQube for a statement, will update if they reply.
Update: PQube sent us this statement:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.We have honoured all obligations of our publishing agreement and have supported Toge Productions at every stage of product development throughout their delays and difficulties. This support has included offering significant further funding, over and above grant funding, to support development, porting and marketing. Toge Productions have sought for some time to unilaterally enforce unreasonable revised terms to our agreement and it is disappointing that, as a result of not achieving that and despite PQube's significant efforts to accommodate this, they have sought to deal with the matter in this way. We will respond through the appropriate channels.
Quoting: pbIs there a way to filter out topics irrelevant to, nomen omen, gaming on linux? This one is more about developing on windows...It’s industry news and the publisher has multiple Linux games.
Quoting: pbIs there a way to filter out topics irrelevant to, nomen omen, gaming on linux? This one is more about developing on windows...
You could fitlter out the 'Meta' tag in your account profile it will then hide all these from the news feed you unless you specifically look at 'All'
Quoting: GuestI know nothing about "games publishing" but in my mind, a games developer is someone who wants to make games, while a games publisher is someone who wants to make money... off someone else creativity, talent, and hard work.
Yes and no, if you are a games publisher then you really want to make money of your own creativity, talent and hard work when it comes to publishing which is a whole different talent than developing. Now that is of course the ideal naive version and I'm not saying that this is how every single publisher works (which this very article shows) but lets not pretend that publishing is "not work" or "not worth anything" or every single dev out there would be self published.
Now happen to get your game showcased on some big YT channel and sales will handle itself without a publisher, but that is the exception, not the rule.
Quoting: GuestI know nothing about "games publishing" but in my mind, a games developer is someone who wants to make games, while a games publisher is someone who wants to make money... off someone else creativity, talent, and hard work.
Yeah, but the publishers usually are the ones funding the development, fully or in part, and they usually would like to get their money back. It's not that the developers don't get anything in return.
Quoting: Cmdr_IrasYou could fitlter out the 'Meta' tag in your account profile it will then hide all these from the news feed you unless you specifically look at 'All'I wouldn't really advise that, unless you only ever want news on specific individual games, as Meta covers everything not about a game directly.
Quoting: Liam DaweQuoting: Cmdr_IrasYou could fitlter out the 'Meta' tag in your account profile it will then hide all these from the news feed you unless you specifically look at 'All'I wouldn't really advise that, unless you only ever want news on specific individual games, as Meta covers everything not about a game directly.
Maybe it needs another tag? "Industry News" or something, fro non-Linux related stuff that's still interesting to many people here?
Quoting: GuestQuoting: F.UltraNow that is of course the ideal naive version
More than naive I'd say delusional: Tencent, Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft... do I really need to go on?
Yes all those provide services for developer houses, they also sometimes do shitty things, the two is not mutually exclusive. If they don't provide a service, why do you think that dev houses uses them for publishing of their games?
Quoting: GuestQuoting: F.UltraIf they don't provide a service, why do you think that dev houses uses them for publishing of their games?
Why do people all around the world choose to get exploited every day working under unfair conditions? Because they can't really choose! Your childlike vision of the gaming industry, and to an extent of the whole society we live in, is so sad...
I agree with the first two phrases but dislike the last one.
(To what I can remember, it's especially incorrect for F.Ultra, BTW.)
Quoting: GuestQuoting: F.UltraIf they don't provide a service, why do you think that dev houses uses them for publishing of their games?
Why do people all around the world choose to get exploited every day working under unfair conditions? Because they can't really choose! Your childlike vision of the gaming industry, and to an extent of the whole society we live in, is so sad...
So who forbids you from self publishing in Steam, The Epic store, GOG and foremost itch.io? True that there are people all over the world being exploited by ruthless employers, but does this really mean that all wage jobs are equal to slavery (mine sure as hell aren't) and that employers at base are evil parasites on society?
You seem to have a very black and white world of the world, reality is always complex, and much more diverse than so.
I also just noticed that you included Tencent in your list, they are not a publishing house, they are just investors (in this case) holding 40% of the share votes of Epic. And the others on your list are not pure game publishers, they all started out as game developers but then started to self publish when they got big enough and once that worked they started to publish other companies games and then when they got really big they started to straight out purchase dev houses.
So to be honest I don't think that your grief really is with publishers but with something else and you are just confusing that "else" with game publishers.
You also for some reason have a tendency to leave small personal attacks/snarks in every single comment, does that make you feel stronger somehow?
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