Baldur's Gate Enhanced pulled over 'contractual issues'
A contractual dispute with "a publishing partner" has forced Beamdog to pull Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition from its store and Steam, also leaving in doubt the future of the upcoming sequel of Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced.
Update: With more comments from Oster.
A contractual dispute with "a publishing partner" has forced Beamdog to pull Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition from its site and the Apple App Store, leaving in doubt the future of DLC and patches for the game, as well as the upcoming planned sequel.
"I'd say it could be resolved in a few weeks at best," Beamdog president Trent Oster told Shacknews. "Worst-case, it could be a while. We've been trying for a while to work through the issues, so the legal request to take the games down wasn't unforeseen."
Oster took to the official site to break the news. "Unfortunately, until this matter is resolved, we are unable to release the latest Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition patch or Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for Android. This also prevents the launch of Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition. I sincerely apologize to the series' fans and promise we are working diligently to remedy the situation."
The planned patch was fairly far along and was already in QA. Oster also recently told us that BG2EE production was well under way, with more than 350,000 words of new content already written for the game.
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Shacknews
replyJohn Keefer posted a new article, Baldur's Gate Enhanced pulled over 'contractual issues'.
A contractual dispute with "a publishing partner" has forced Beamdog to pull Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition from its store and Steam, also leaving in doubt the future of the upcoming sequel of Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced.-
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Why on earth would this prevent a patch release?
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Beamdog Pulls Out Before Release
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shacknews please amend your article title. I release this under CC license.
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Do it Keefinator.
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Should I buy it before it gets removed from there or will the contract issues get sorted out pretty quickly?
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Yeah, I amended it. It was pulled from the Apple app store.
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Not so strange if the publishing partner they're speaking of is Atari.
Would really like to see some more details get released... it seems right now Atari has made themselves the sole source of the game, so I'm really curious about what exactly is going on here.
It is a shame at any rate... I was looking forward to that multiplayer improvement patch.-
These Infinity Engine games have always been tricky. Look at BG for example
- Bioware developed the game
- Interplay published the game
- TSR owned D&D when the game development started
- WOTC bought TSR before the game was finished, so WOTC owns D&D
- Hasbro bought WOTC in 1999 after the game was released so Hasbro now owns D&D
- Atari got the publishing rights to D&D in 2001, so now Atari owns the D&D license for games
- Bioware was acquired by EA so anything owed to Bioware is now owed to EA (I think)
- Beamdog does the Enhanced Edition
And everything prior to the EE was all done and contracts signed before the advent of feasible digital distribution, so when GOG wanted to put it up for sale they had to go get all of the companies involved to line up and agree to terms for digital distribution. And so every time one of these companies throws a wobbly, things like the incident we see here happen where it gets pulled from sale from certain places. I would imagine that it goes up for sale again eventually since when it's not available for sale people don't get any money out of it.
This is why I have all of the D&D games I have on GOG backed up to DVD-R's and people think I'm silly but I just don't trust the ten or so parties involved to all continue to get along.-
Jesus, I forgot how convoluted this ended up being.
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Awwww, this makes me sad.
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I literally just bought this on iOS earlier this week.
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