Topic on Talk:The Sinking City

The wiki is not a personal blog and it does not take sides by artificially creating distinctions between game versions. Even more so when the legal disputes between Nacon and Frogwares appear to be ongoing.

We should treat the article as any other, simply pointing at the editions available on each store and listing the differences. From then, a Deluxe Edition having more content than the standard edition is nothing out of the ordinary in terms of what we see across stores all the time. The Ultimate Edition of Control and its lack in some of the notes is a good case in point.

"After a preliminary court ruling found the publishing contract termination by Frogwares unlawful, the developer made the game briefly available on Steam during the day of January 5, 2021. The game returned to the platform on February 26 with Nacon as the publisher, followed by the developer advising against purchasing this version."

I see pro-Nacon bias here. Supposed justification for Nacon's actions is included ("preliminary court ruling found the publishing contract termination by Frogwares unlawful"), but no reasons for "developer advising against purchasing this version" are given, other than an external link to PC Gamer article (which skips most of the technical data that suggests how Nacon may have obtained and modified their build of the game in an illegal way). Also, the first sentence effectively makes an allegation that "the developer made the game briefly available on Steam" as a direct response to the preliminary court ruling, even though there are no sources that can confirm this claim.

You can see bias all you want but this is not a place for your personal views. The cited article states "In January 2021, a preliminary ruling in the matter found that Frogwares had terminated its contract with Nacon "in a 'manifestly unlawful' manner," and thus ordered its terms restored. Accordingly, The Sinking City was returned to Steam and other storefronts". Our article does not even say as much, simply saying one was done after the other.

The data on SteamDB https://steamdb.info/app/1151760/ suggests that the Jan 5th release was self-distributed by Frogwares, and had nothing to do with Nacon. The fact that it shipped with Merciful Madness DLC further confirms this. Regardless, there are no official sources that explain what really happened with that release, which is why I wanted to describe it simply as "It appeared on day X and disappeared on day Y".

I see that the article now contains mentions of both the court ruling and allegations of piracy. Which is fine for keeping it balanced, I guess - but doesn't it go against the goal stated right here, in the first comment of this thread (simply list the versions and their differences while avoiding the ongoing dispute between publisher and developer)?

Which leads me to my main question: why does https://steamdb.info/app/1151760/ (and its Steam Community link) keep getting deleted from the article? Every other release of the game, past or present, is listed here - but not this one.

Your edits were incorrect in stating that the Frogwares version was removed on January 8, as now supported by a link to the package history on SteamDB. The prices graph and user discussions also back it up.

As for the inclusion of the community link, I don't think it holds much value considering the game appears to have been available for less than 5 hours, with the maximum concurrent players count being 6 and the store page no longer being available. It would not be relevant to the only available Steam version today. We can include it right away if the store page reappears at that ID.

I made a mistake about January 8th because I was looking at https://steamdb.info/app/1151760/history/ and not https://steamdb.info/sub/392563/history/. Sorry about that. While this release disappeared incredibly quickly, it was arguably a lot more legitimate than what's available on Steam right now. If the allegations of piracy are true, of course (they definitely are true on a purely technical level, regarding the way that build was put together). Also, that release ended up being far more popular than it may seem at first, due to the reasons that shouldn't be discussed on PCGW.

We do not take sides or speculate within our articles. The last known (and relevant) court ruling covered by the media is in the article and the rest is just the involved parties making accusations or documenting their perspectives. Steam allowed the Nacon version to exist and so had the court according to numerous reports from reputable sources.

To further explain what I meant by artificial distinctions, it is undeniable that there is a Nacon version and a Frogwares version of the game, but repeatedly noting this distinction on the wiki without a necessity, as opposed to letting the reader follow the links and see for themselves, is artificially putting more emphasis on the differences. It's like putting a "Valve gets a share from the release" note next to a Steam availability row and "Epic gets a share from the release" next to an Epic row. While true, what are we trying to achieve with the statements? The wiki does not exist to lead or discourage. It's hard to think of a company that hasn't been deemed immoral by some gamers, and every person may have their own reasons to boycott one thing or another, but these things should be outside of our platform focused primarily on technical details.

In this case, the article already describes the differences in the downloadable content and the save cloud support. Achievements are currently not within the scope of the wiki, although the subject has been discussed in the past, with the possibility of covering them still up in the air.