Mystery solved? "Anonymous industry source" reveals unpaid royalties as reason for BG:EE takedown

Last month, we learned that due to unspecified "contractual issues" with Atari, former Bioware developer Trent Oster and his company, Beamdog, had been forbidden from independently selling Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and from developing its sequel. Today, a newspost at GameBanshee seems to finally set the record straight on why exactly this occurred. I quote:

Two weeks ago we reported that Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was pulled at Atari's request, and also noted that Atari was selling the title on Steam themselves. Now that we have been contacted by an industry source that requested to remain anonymous, we might know why.

Apparently Beamdog hasn't paid Atari the royalties that they were owed, which led the publisher to ask them to pull the title from their services, and delay both Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition's patch and the release of the sequel's remastering.

However it has to be noted that the circumstances surrounding this aren't clear at all. Something like Atari informally telling Beamdog that they could delay payment is hardly out of the realm of possibilities, but right now we have no elements to assume that, and this amounts to pure speculation.

We contacted both Atari and Beamdog to comment on this. While, as of this posting, Atari hasn't gotten back to us, Beamdog president Trent Oster reiterated that they're working with Atari to resolve this dispute, though he wouldn't confirm or deny whether what we heard from our source is true.

We'll let you know if we hear more news, and I'm certain I echo the sentiments of the GameBanshee staff at large when I say my hope is that this gets resolved sooner rather than later.

Tsk tsk, Beamdog. I certainly hope this was all a big misunderstanding and not an attempt to make an easy buck off of a dying publisher.

There are 68 comments on Mystery solved? "Anonymous industry source" reveals unpaid royalties as reason for BG:EE takedown

Tweets by RPGCodex

Gallery

Devil Whiskey

package2