Shooter fans will no doubt remember the superb Devil Engine, and with good reason – it’s one of the best blasters on Switch. However, the studio behind the game, Protoculture Games, insists that it hasn’t seen a penny from sales of the title on either Switch or Steam and that embattled publisher Dangen Entertainment is refusing to sign the IP back over.
Dangen, you may recall, ran into trouble late last year when its CEO stepped down following allegations of inappropriate behaviour, harassment and bad business practices. At the time, Protoculture revealed that it no longer had access to Devil Engine on Switch or Steam, and this resulted in the delay of the game’s ‘Ignition’ expansion.
Fast forward to the present, and it seems that nothing has been sorted out in over six months. Protoculture’s Sinoc, who is one of Devil Engine’s lead developers, has revealed that Dangen is still withholding payment for sales of the game and the long-awaited Ignition expansion is still very much in limbo. In addition to this, he states that Dangen is still refusing to relinquish control of the game to Protoculture.
Dangen has responded to the accusations online, with the company’s Head of Operations, Dan Stern, saying:
I have sent 11 emails to the developers and Jeannie Park, their representative. I received one reply on December 18th, which called my proposals “favorable”. After that, I received nothing until May, even after I sent a pre-signed cancellation contract in January in which Dangen gets no revenue after termination. During this time, Dangen sent all sales reports on time, but received no invoices (which are required by law in order for us to pay them). We also saw claims that Dangen threatened heavy legal action (which I never did) and that I refused to give the titles back to the developers (which my emails show to be false).
Sinoc has since responded to this statement, saying:
The negotiations were primarily being handled by Jeannie (who wanted to remain anonymous through this, so good job outing her) as she did all the buisnessey stuff, I wanted to be left out of the CC so I could focus on my next project (It’s truckin along).
The threats against us obviously weren’t in the emails, but in person at TGS and hearsay from secondary sources. I know they’ll say ‘X employee doesn’t represent us’ but we couldn’t exactly take any chances.
We can’t send an invoice (which they constantly reference) because that’s the legal equivalent of saying ‘yea this is totally legit’, but since they forged numbers the first time there’s no way in hell we’re gonna trust them again on that.
The cancellation contract they reference would have us pay a bunch of superfluous costs we never agreed to and some we can’t even source, in addition to other very restricting clauses. Since they don’t respect the original contract, we weren’t going to enter into another.
We’ve been speaking with our lawyer over the past couple months on how to proceed further. Nothing has changed until we announce it has.
Sadly, it would seem this whole sorry business is no closer to being solved, and that means Devil Engine fans will have to continue to wait in order to get their hands on the Ignition expansion.
We gave Devil Engine 8/10 when we reviewed it, saying:
It seems almost customary to include the phrase ‘Not for everyone’ in any review of a niche genre game, and while that certainly applies to Devil Engine, it has at least been designed in a way that encourages even the weakest players to keep trying and learn from their mistakes… if you’re a fan of this style of game – and you’re crying out for a title in the Thunder Force vein – then Devil Engine is well worth a look.