hello, i have published a game on steam using a publisher back in 2015, i got some bucks from the game until mid of 2016.
i have asked the publisher for the sales stats a lot but the publisher has never shown anything to me, i always received the same answer “the sales were bad” or “lots of refunds”.
two or three months a go i got a email from a marketing team, offering services to sell video games and they sent me the names of few games they has sold and they told me to check the sales stats on steamspy, i checked those games and also checked my game.
i got a big surprise, because my game has lots of more copies sold, i have put the error margin on steamspy on 30%, the discount of my game thought the months and also has covered the bundles sales, after thinking a lot on all of this i realized that the publisher didn’t pay me for all the copies sold.
i tried to contact steam telling them the backstory for the problem and they told me that the publisher is the only one that can authorize steam to let me see my game sales stats; after that i asked again the publisher that i wanted to see my stats an the publisher told that steam can’t authorize to see the sales stats to third party’s; i told the publisher that steam told me that he can authorize me to see my stats but after that the publisher told me that he will try to authorize me on steam, but he never did it.
after all of this story, my question is very simple, what are my options to make a claim to the publisher?
thanks in advance for your time and all your help.
Edit: In future it’s a wise idea to have the lawyer look before you sign the contract. Lawyers will often struggle to get you out of bad contracts (unless the contract itself is illegal). But they can easily prevent you entering bad contracts.
I will give you a different opinion. First, read your contract so you know what you agreed to. You might be able to use your knowledge of the contract and a threat to contact a lawyer to get what you want.
So what exactly does your publishing contract say? Surely you get access to proper reports? I’m shocked a publisher will not even give you a monthly report or anything like that.
Which publisher is this, out of interest? Sounds like the scum of the earth.
Yeah! As the others have said, lawyer up. It’s really upsetting to see game devs fall into this situation. I would strongly suggest reading everything and anything put under your nose to sign. If you are not clear on anything, then you should absolutely run it through someone with a legal background. It will save you so much hassle in the long run.
You might well be out of luck then. Unless there are hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, pursuing suits across international borders isn’t worth the effort.