"It has been tough for us for the past three years"
Image: Corecell Team
Corecell Team has released a statement today detailing issues with publisher PQube, who is responsible for publishing AeternoBlade II for the developer in the West.
The team are accusing the publisher of failing to pay a complete minimum guarantee, and — according to Corecell — is refusing to pay the remaining milestones. These accusations follow Toge Productions and Mojiken Studios’ joint statement last week on issues regarding the release of A Space for the Unbound.
Here’s Corecell Team’s statement in full:
Dear gamers,
It has been tough for us for the past three years. We have struggled to recover since we signed a publishing deal with PQube. 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.
PQUBE has published AeternoBlade II on Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One 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. We have been trying to resolve this issue with PQUBE but were unable to reach a solution, leading us to terminate the publishing agreement around September 2020. However, PQUBE has refused to return the publishing control on the console platforms back to us and continues to sell and take all revenues from AeternoBlade II.
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. We knew something was not right, but as a small independent developer, we could not afford to pay legal fees to fight the case in another country. We have contacted each platform to ask for the return of our publishing control. So far, only Nintendo and Sony have taken our game off their Europe stores, and we still have not received any revenue from the sales in Europe.
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 contents for AeternoBlade II. 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.
Thank you so much for understanding,
Corecell Team
Specifically referencing Toge Productions’ statement last week, Corecell reached out to the developers in solidarity:
@ASFTUgame you are not alone— CORECELL OFFICIAL (@AETERNOBLADE1) September 1, 2022
On Twitter, Corecell has insisted that it does “not wish for negative and harmful action toward PQube”, and that the company wants to return to work on its games.
We’ve reached out to publisher PQube for a response and will update this post as soon as we hear back from them.