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Apogee Suing Gearbox Over Unpaid Royalties For Duke Nukem Forever
jones_supa writes "Apogee Software/3D Realms alleges that Gearbox has refused to pay more than $2 million owed to 3D Realms from royalties and advances Gearbox received from publishers for Duke Nukem Forever. In a lawsuit filed June 7 in Texas district court, 3D Realms insists that its agreement with Gearbox permits it to conduct an audit of Gearbox's royalty statements, which the studio has not allowed. 'Gearbox is simply stonewalling here in an improper attempt to conceal information from 3D Realms that it is absolutely entitled to receive,' the suit alleges. The company also alleges that Gearbox has refused to pay the agreed-upon portion of revenue Gearbox received after Duke Nukem Forever was released. 3D Realms has asked for a jury trial. This suit is apparently the end result of a friendly deal gone wrong."
I thought you had to sell copies of a game for that to happen.
Hideki!
...but they sure can sue.
I was honestly surprised reading this headline. Had to go look the game up, I thought it was still never released.
Is there a Gearbox game that is NOT controversial?
And don't say Borderlands. *coughccough*codehunters*cough*
They'll pay you in the same amount of time it took you to release DNF.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
... it's the end of a company, kept afloat by sales of one awesome game and overinflated egos, that has been mucking around without any clue for over a decade going wrong.
Somehow it feels as if 3Drealms now becomes the SCO of the games industry. They had something, screwed up, lost everything, and now try to use the courts to grab every straw and every chance to make money they do not deserve.
George Brussard, face it: You had it all and fucked up due to your own incompetence. Suck it up.
Wow people are even dumber than I thought.
Do i have to wait 30 years for ROT to come out again?
just wondering
Any "agreed upon portion" of 0 is still 0.
After hearing news stories about DNF for years and years, thinking it was dead, having it revitalized and release, and then seeing how much crap it actually was...I for one don't want to read another story about it. Seriously, get over it.
Gearbox just spit in an envelope and return.
Anyone else not seeing the comments in the A350XWB story?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The Duke Nukem Forever story just keeps. Getting. Better.
(*snorting-milk-out-nose*)
Theirs. For releasing such a horrible thing.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Oh, you want a cut of the profits??
*rummages in pockets, produces crumpled gum wrapper*
In my experience, when a "Can't Miss" deal like this goes bad, the probability that one side will do something sleazy is directly proportional to how friendly the parties were at the outset.
Spend 15 years on development of a game that was so over-hyped and rediculously re-designed everytime a new game technology came out, then pushed on the back burner only to be re-animated every so often, promises made and broken over and over? Seriously, who could possibly imagine that someone would sue some one?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
They may have sold a lot, that's not the same as selling them at a profit.
My DVD copy was GBP0.99 (about US$1.50) delivered and was returned shop stock. They couldn't reduce it enough to sell in store, couldn't shift them at £5 soon after launch, £2.50 not long after that.
It's fair to say this was a disaster on total units sold compared to publisher expectations and an even bigger disaster on revenue. With an unknown amount of copies heading for landfill or sold at little profit or even a loss, Gearbox will be delaying any accounting as long as they can. Wouldn't be easy clawing back any royaltly overpayment and there's no future income from this turkey.
Gearbox ripped off Sega big time by taking the contract to develop 'Aliens:Colonial Marines' (A FPS action game) and then using the money to create their own, mega-successful 'Borderlands' games, while farming out the A:CM contract to a developer with a long history of terrible work. Sega has been too embarrassed to sue (and would have to explain why its management of Gearbox permitted this arrangement), but the crooks at Apogee smell blood in the water, and think Gearbox will simply pay Apogee to go away. Big mistake!
Duke Nuke-em Forever was a bigger unnecessary disaster for Apogee than was Postal 3 for Running With Scissors. By this I mean both companies had just one major IP to keep them afloat, masses of willing fans that would buy the next instalment, and the funds to easily create that anticipated game. All either company had to do was turn out a half decent product in a reasonable time frame- child's play.
Unlike Postal 3, Duke Nukem Forever wasn't total trash, just very very mediocre, unremarkable, and insanely late for the quality of game it proved to be. However, Gearbox showed the title far more love than they ever gave to the Aliens game, so Apogee should be more than pleased by Gearbox's unsuccessful attempt to salvage something from the years of wasted work. Indeed, in a sane world, another Duke game would have been put into immediate production to keep the IP alive, but Apogee is far too incompetent to do even this.
In court, Gearbox will have an easy victory (there have been a number of cases like this recently, and all have been lost by the incompetent idiots attempting to extort cash). Meanwhile, Gearbox, after years and years of horribly mediocre work for other people, can now expect Borderlands 3 to both make them a fortune and win even more love from fans of the franchise. If Apogee had had the brains to pay to have someone turn DN into a semi-open world shooter like Borderlands, they too would be rolling in the cash.
I mentioned Postal 3, because Postal 2 was the perhaps the first title on the PC to successfully implement the semi-open world model used in Borderlands (and also used the Unreal engine- albeit an earlier version). Sometimes, companies refuse to even push at an open door, and by doing so proudly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
PS fans of DN know that the biggest mistake made by Apogee was to turn their back on the wonderfully politically incorrect nature of the titular character, and feel embarrassed by the core values of the franchise. One should always listen to fans (you know, the ones whose spending pays for wages) rather than gaming 'journalists' hoping one day to be 'upgraded' to 'proper' publishing.
this summer coming to a theater near you:
Duke Nukem Forever
It was never meant to live, now it just won't die.
Life is pretty darn short to waste on video games.
Sorry but its true, and yes the truth hurts. Makes me unpopular, but there it is.
Includes listing the stakeholders in a project very realistically. If you estimate that for a key stakeholder pulling the plug on a positive continuation of some project is cheaper than the continuation, it is risk which can not be ignored.
I work in a consulting company and even the most rudimentary one day course in PM would give you enough skill to deny accepting DNF as a project to manage or even contribute. An incredibly high number of risks with a 100% change of hitting. If sth is 12y late then you can be sure there will be lawsuits and stakeholders scratching out their eyes on the high expectations not realized. My experience says: If software is so late, and nore than one company/team is involved the allegations on whos fault it was get ugly and a random time (e.g. when the revenue gained is sumed up and some manager in one of the teams is held liable), and if there is no expectation on a sucessful colaboration then there is also not hesitation to escalate up to a lawsuit.
The gameplay was pieced together from whatever scraps were laying around, glued together kinda.
The multiplayer was so laggy, it sucked on lan, lol.
Using a dedicated server, decent gameplay was possible, but barely.
It really sux compared to Crysis3 @ 5700x1200, lol.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
It's fair to say this was a disaster on total units sold compared to publisher expectations and an even bigger disaster on revenue.
It was definitely neither of those.
For the amount of time and money Gearbox sunk into it they probably were profitable in the hundred thousand units, and given how little time they had it I'm sure publishers were thrilled that they managed to ship a product at all after so many years of a useless money pit.