Thinking of boycotting Topware games right now.

Cheers mate :)
If you have a steam account please consider commenting here :)

http://steamcommunity.com/app/281130/discussions/0/624075482725081987/

Well, i hate to be "that guy" but i doubt anything will happen, i don't see major (videogames) news websites picking this story (or popular forums like neogaf), besides, Topware Interactive is rather unknow to the majority of the people so the backlash won't be as big as if it was one of the big companies (Ea, Ubisoft, Activision, etc).

And, in some way, this is what greenlight did right, giving the indie developer the option (if voted) to publish the game by themselves, unfortunatly that also meant that all kinds of garbage become available on the Steam store...

And the publisher's game even has 3rd party DRM. Not that it's relevant to the discussion, but it puts the publisher on an even worse light for me.

uhhuh, thats really messed up way to do business :S

Wow. That's absolutely revolting. I hope this gets more coverage and justice can be served.

How would you go about that?

I have 2 or 3 of their games on steam. I'm wondering if I should post negative reviews on all of them and link them to this article.

Ouch... just... ouch...

Oral agreements should probably only be made on a one-on-one level, usually something like 'buy this for me and i'll get you dinner tomorrow night' type of thing. For anything that is a financial stakes or a larger company, you want a written contract... Although it doesn't help the person who had the oral contract got fired for some reason.

But still for them to blatantly invalidate a contract and try to hold it up in court...?

I hold slightly less faith in corporations now; And although i give kudos to steam for trying to help the dev team from the publisher's insane actions, i can't help but feel sad :(
If you can still add custom tags, i'd add a tag, something like #OMG_TOPWARE_PUBLISHER_SCREWING_DEVS_DONT_BUY, it would get the message out and either be filtered out as spam or someone curious enough would do a search and find the article in question.

I wouldn't put negative reviews on games just because Topware is the publisher. But i would definitely want to do something...

Hmmm i say contact (on Youtube) TotalBiscuit and Rich at ReviewTechUSA (he also has a Facebook page), enough people watch them that it would definitely reach a lot more people. I also keep watch of AlphaOmegaSin.

This is why if I want to publish something, I do it myself. It is harder to get publicity, but at least you don't suffer from stupid conditions as well as getting robbed.

I can only marvel at the amount of self-restraint these devs showed.

If someone had done something like this to me, somebody would be dead by now.

I don't think I would be capable of accepting such a great injustice being done to me and going unpunished.

There, a small outlet to express your dissatisfaction:

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/take_topware_interactive_games_off_gog

Voted!

Also please consider posting your feelings here :

http://steamcommunity.com/app/281130/discussions/0/624075482725081987/

+1! Let's hope we can at least raise some awareness.

This is totally beyond belief.

I'd always remember Topware's one published game, Septerra Core, as my very favorite, so I think they kind of cool guy, apparently not at all, even far from it.

I don't think I'm capable into law issues, but I gladly will spread the news so everybody will stay away from this creep publisher.

From a more positive side, I browsed whole lot things about Alkemi studios, and apparently they're kinda working on amazing game right now, (thank god this cool team is able to survive) I hope this one will get a lot more positive result because the game is just simply amazing o___O it's shmup with some smart playing style, great presentation too. and that soundtrack, holy..

check it out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJML_CaevU and the official website www.drifting-lands.com

This is TopWare though, I might be mistaken but I think they have previous form on scumbaggery with indies.

I think it was them who approached the modders making Jagged Alliance: Wildfire to make it an official expansion, but when it was released they flat out didn't give any of the profits back to the creators of the expansion.

I mean how many years has it been since TopWare have even published a game? They sound to me like a another Interplay, one failed CEO and a few people desperately getting by with Steam/GOG sales of their backlog, occaisonally hatching some scam so they don't become homeless.