Atari SUED for Stiffing Developers on Royalties - The Know Game News - YouTube

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ASHLEY: Welcome to the Know, I'm Ashley Jenkins,

GUS: And I'm Gus Sorola.

ASHLEY: Welcome back from the winter break

GUS: Woo! ASHLEY: I mean, if-if you had one,

ASHLEY: We did, you may have noticed, since we were... not doing news, and we were doing, like, round-ups,

of like, "what was the end of the year, what's the beginning of the year, [whispering] because they were all recorded in december.

GUS: Oooo

GUS: [incomprehensible]

ASHLEY: But... yeah. W-well, last year, now it's the new y- know what is confusing?

ASHLEY: But we're back! And we're ready to do the news for y'all

Whole new year!

And it's starting off with some fun stuff.

ASHLEY: Because-- GUS: I hope--

GUS: - I hope there's news.

ASHLEY: There might be news.

And it might have something to do with your tramp stamp.

ASHELY: [to GUS ]because it's about Atari. Get it?

Because Atari may be stiffing an-- an developer of an iconic sim franchise.

Uh, that, at least, is what Frontier development which made Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 is claiming.

GUS: Frontier is saying Atari still owes it back royalties from the 2004 game, a lot of royalties,

Like... 2.2 million dollars, a lot.

ASHLEY: Th-That is A LOT of royalties.

ASHLEY: That fight is part of a long history of lawsuits over the Roller Coaster Tycoon franchise.

And an even longer history of developers that say that they've gotten screwed by publishers, so,

this one should be fun, really par for the course.

GUS: Yeah, the relationship between Atari and Frontier started in 2003 when Frontier struck a deal

with Atari to develope Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, and some other games according to TMZ, which broke the lawsuit news- [ASHLEY looses it]

ASHLEY: [through laughter] TMZ...

GUS: [confused] TMZ? ASHLEY: Yeah! [laughing]

GUS: [speaking very loudly] Should I have that big coffee cup and laugh obnoxiously?

GUS: [fake laughs so obnoxiously the mic doesn't like it]

ASHLEY: [calmly] No, that's just you.

GUS: Guh- Stay out of our world, TMZ.

This is your only warning.

ASHLEY: Yeah, you should stick to entertainment, although they DID also break I think the lawsuit between Lindsey Lohan and GTA, so,

you know, every now and then, they-they pop their heads up in a really weird way.

ASHLEY: Anyway, then, Atari went bankrupt in 2013 and Frontier said they stuck it out with the [incomprihensible] publisher and mended its contract with Atari,

Again, according to TMZ.

GUS: Atari, though, is back in the black now, starting last April Frontier started to think it was getting ripped off, TMZ reported,

GUS: Just, nyeh, it's never gonna sound natural. ASHLEY: It's never gonna sound natural!

GUS: [shouting] It's never gonna sound right!

ASHLEY: Who - who actually journaled over there?

ASHLEY: Uh, Frontier cited sales stats from unidentified website that showed it should have gotten 3.3 million dollars in royalties from Atari,

BUT, got 1.1 million dollars.

hmm, the math checks out

GUS: Frontier said it asked for an audit but atari said: No.

ASHLEY: Now- GUS: [very quietly] they can do that?

ASHLEY: [sighing] Yeah, I guess. Apparently.

Well, w-not- NO, but. yes.

ASHLEY: In a statement to Eurogamer, Frontier Chief Operating Officer David Walsh confirmed Frontier was persueing a complaint against Atari.

GUS: That's very polite.

Uhh, quote, "We have attempted to resolve this issue without legal action since April 2016," Walsh said.

"We have so far been denied our contractual right to audit by atari,

and we are unfortunately left with no other way to resolve our concerns.

ASHLEY: Now, part of the issue here is that Valve doesn't exactly publicly release sales figures for games on Steam,

which leaves devs in the dark about how their game is doing,

Especially if they have to go through a publisher who may or may no be withholding royalties,

in order to get that information.

GUS: Mmm, tricky.

Uh-While Frontier didn't name the website it got stats from, it's a decent bet that Frontier could be talking about Steam Spy.

ASHLEY: That's the third party site that's not technically affiliated with Valve, in any way,

but it takes data from Valve's user profiles,

and then uses that to extrapolate sales and ownership information for games across the platform.

It was developed by blogger and podcaster Sergey Galyonkin whose compared Steam Spy to something like a political survey.

In that he's taking a sampling of users and then there's a margin of error in his results.

GUS: "It's not a 'sales tracking device,' Galyonkin said, 'it's merely a polling service, that estimates the number of owners by polling user profiles. It's a bit like an election survey.'"

ASHLEY: But AGAIN, since Valve doesn't release its numbers, it's all educated guess work, and really, Steam Spy is one of the more consistent

ones that we have to work with.

GUS: Nyeah. And according to Steam Spy, the planet(?) version of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 was released in 2008

has more than 800,000 owners, and over 30,000 players in the last two weeks.

ASHLEY: Of course, this is hardly the first time that a developer has accused a publisher of screwing them out of royalties,

happens all the time.

GUS: Mmhm, Last year, Decent and its two sequels were pulled from GoG because another controversy over royalty payments.

Descent's creators said that publisher Interplay owes them tens of thousands of dollars from Descent 1 and 2.

And apparently that dispute still hasn't been ironed out, because the Descent games are still aren't available on GoG.

ASHLEY: Yea-uh- yeah, th- GUS: I think I played Decent 1 when I was in High School.

ASHLEY: Yeah, those games been around a while.

ASHLEY: Uh- in 2013, 3D Realms to Gearbox Softwear over Duke Nukem Forever with 3D Realms saying it was owed more than 2 million dollars in unpaid royalties.

ASHLEY: On the brightside, something tells us there won't be any lawsuits with Gearbox or anything over Battle Born's unpaid royalties since you can't sue over what doesn't exist.

ASHLEY: Also I think they made it themselves GUS: They did-they did.

ASHLEY: But that's- But that's not- But that's besides the point!

It's when it gets a little-in there.

ASHLEY: Yeah. GUS: Too soon.

GUS: Uh, in one of the biggest examples of these kinds of lawsuits, a former division president at Rockstar sued parent company Take Two Interactive Software

saying it owes it more than 150 million dollars in, drumroll,

ASHLEY: Eh? What is it? What could it be- GUS: Unpaid royalties! ASHLEY: Oh, there it is.

ASHLEY: Uh, Roller Coaster Tycoon is an iconic franchise, no doubt, but it actually has an equally long history of lawsuits? All by itself.

GUS: The franchise dates back to the late ninties when it was developed by creator Chris Sawyer.

He created the first two games of the series and still owns the IPs and Trademarks,

while licensing to Atari the rights to create and market new games.

ASHLEY: And then back in 2005, Sawyer himself sued Atari, also claiming, they hadn't paid him enough royalties.

GUS: Back then, the series had made about 180 million dollars,

30 million dollars which went to Sawyer, but he claimed he was still owed about 4.8 million dollars more.

ASHLEY: That... particular lawsuit ended in an undisclosed settlements.

GUS: And Atari itself sued Sawyer back in 2007, claiming he had worked with Frontier to develop an enhanced version of Roller Coaster Tycoon 3,

which it planned to license to a third-party publisher,

that also ended with an out-of-court settlement.

ASHLEY: Now, all this is kinda a sign of the times that the video industry keeps getting bigger and celebrity developers increasingly clash with their publishers

- Does anyone remember there was this recent messy split between, uh, a company called, uh, Konami, and a developer you may or may not have heard of called Hideo Kajima?

GUS: Cel- ASHLEY: Anyone? GUS: Celebrity developers, huh?

ASHLEY: Anyone? GUS: [mumbling]

ASHLEY: Aow, haha!

GUS: Uuh As for Atari, Frontier, the two already butted heads last year when Frontier's newest Roller Coaster Sim Planet Coaster went head-to-head against Atari's Roller Coaster Tycoon World.

Planet Coaster got pretty good reviews to 84 on metacritic, Roller Coaster Tycoon World, not so much,

It was pretty universally panned and got a poultry(?) 43 on metacritic.

ASHLEY: That's saying something.

Atari hasn't commented on the Frontier lawsuit, as of yet, but we'll keep ya updated.

GUS: What do you think of Frontier's lawsuit? Do you tend to side with developers or publishers, let us know in the comments.

ASHLEY: And for all your gaming and studio-versus-publisher news, be sure to like this video and subscribe to The Know.

ASHLEY: We've got a whole year's worth of news to bring ya know!

GUS: I think- like, wasn't there a Roller Coaster Tycoon game that just came out on IOS like two weeks ago,

like they re-packaged Roller Coaster Tycoon 1 and 2 ASHLEY: Ah, yeah,

GUS: I wonder who made that... time to find out.

GUS: It's not a sales tracking service. He said.

[both laugh]