Entering a world of murky legal stuff, brb.
PlayStation’s State of Play presentation featured a number of great games just on the horizon. And one of those that really wowed everyone was Aeon Must Die! by Estonian dev Limestone Games and published by Focus Home Interactive. There’s just one problem: allegedly, Limestone did some skeevy stuff to a number of their former employees.
This trailer was created with abuse, manipulation, theft.
Find out the truth about the development of this game here.
People who have worked on every shot of this are no longer with the company holding IP rights.
Some were not even paid for their work.
This trailer has a pending conflict of IP.
The real IP for the game was stolen from the creators via foul play.
Final reaction of the publisher to this information remains to be seen
This reupload of the trailer, by said employees, features a link to a dropbox account that contains testimonials by several former employees of Limestone Games. And they weren’t all small-time players in regards to the game; they range from the composer and artists all the way up to the lead designer, CCO and creator of the IP, Aleksei Nehoroshkin, who cofounded the studio back in 2016.
And Nehoroshkin’s account might be the most damning. While all of the other accounts highlight the crunch, crummy working conditions, and an inability to requisition better working materials, the CCO is essentially still on the hook for the initial 10,000 Euro loan that was promised by the CEO to be reimbursed by the company (which, of course, never happened). Moreover, their second investor, provided via friend of the CEO, had a number of stipulations for investment, including the use of the CCO’s personal owned flat as collateral. But to cut to the chase, the following is the point that really takes the cake:
CEO approaches CCO and CTO and proposes that they spend more time on their work and not sign all the new paperwork that’s coming in and let him have the ability to sign “meaningless documents” so they don’t waste time on it. CCO still under good impression agrees, the document being multiple pages and no time to go through. Trusting and reassured by the CEO,the CCO signs the paper.
In essence,this paper was to make CEO the sole representative, sole owner of the IP and only member of the board of directors giving almost unlimited rights and levers of control while leaving CCO without any rights higher than any other hired worker. CCO remains a shareholder but is now a normal employee without his knowledge.
In essence, by lying about the nature of the legal documents he had them sign, the CEO swindled Nehoroshkin out of the IP he created, in addition to failing to pay the employees that left the company in June both expected regular pay as well as overtime for the excessive crunch.
Aeon Must Die! is currently on track to be published crossplatform by Focus Home Interactive. But given the nature of the allegations against Limestone Games’ CEO, they’ve announce that they will be performing an investigation into said allegations.
This was a necessary statement, as based on the comments of the trailer above, people don’t seem to understand the difference between the developer (Limestone Games) and the publisher, Focus Home. That said, it’s good to know that Focus Home is taking this seriously, and hopefully there’s a happy ending somewhere in all of this.
Source: Kotaku
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