Indie developer and publisher tinyBuild is currently being threatened of legal action by Russian publisher Buka Entertainment over the claims made by tinyBuild about the troubled development behind No Time to Explain.
According to tinyBuild head Alex Nichiporchik, the whole mess began in 2011, when half the funding to No Time to Explain was suddenly pulled by Buka Entertainment, which heavily hampered the development of the game.
The entire timeline of events was chronicled by Nichiporchik over at tinyBuild’s blog. He also published an article over at Gamasutra explaining why the game turned out the way it did, aptly titling it “Why the original No Time to Explain sucked”.
Now, six years later, Buka’s threatening to sue tinyBuild, claiming that false information has been spread by Nichiporchik and tinyBuild about the entire ordeal. Since the original threat was made, tinyBuild has sent over the gold master of No Time to Explain so that Buka Entertainment would pull the case and attempt resolve the matter as amicably as possible.
tinyBuild is no stranger to going public about problems involving their games. Around this time last year, Nichiporchik dropped the gauntlet on key seller G2A over the reselling of over $450,000 worth of their game keys from Humble and other bundle services without giving tinyBuild a cut of the profits. G2A went on to say that fault fell to tinyBuild’s own distributors, who went on to sell the codes over their website. The story broke open a Pandora’s Box worth of discourse about the ins and outs of the indie game distribution economy, and how messed up things still are for anyone trying to put out a game commercially in an independent manner.
Here’s hope that everything will turn out better this time.
