Publishers PQube accused of withholding money by a second studio

rockpapershotgun.com:

Another indie developer has come forward publicly with allegations that UK-based publishers PQube have withheld money from them. Thai dev team Corecell claim they’ve only seen some of the minimum guaranteed money agreed when they signed the European console publishing rights to their action-puzzle game AeternoBlade 2 over to PQube in 2019.

Corecell say they attempted to resolve things with PQube but that didn’t work, and they had to terminate the publishing agreement in 2020. Since then, Corecell have tried to regain the rights to AeternoBlade 2 from PQube to no avail. Corecell allege that PQube did offer to return the rights to the game, but only if they would agree to keep the situation secret.

Here’s Corecell’s original statement in full:

Dear gamers,

It has been tough for us for the past three years. We have struggled to recover since we signed a publishing deal with PQube. But now it’s time we came out with the truth. Hopefully, this will help other indie game developers to avoid what has happened to us and inform our fans about our situation.

PQUBE has published AeternoBlade II on Nintendo Switch, PS4, XBox One in Europe since October 2019 under a publishing agreement with us and agreed to pay a minimum guarantee to us. However, PQUBE only paid a small part of the minimum guarantee of the signing milestone by the time we sent them the game and they never paid the remaining milestones. We have been trying to resolve this issue with PQUBE but were unable to reach a solution, leading us to terminate the publishing agreement around September 2020. However, PQUBE has refused to return the publishing control on the console platforms back to us and continues to sell and take all revenues from AeternoBlade II.