Splatter - Blood Red Edition - Now also Linux & OSX

Epic necro:

Splatter did "ok" on Steam: 4k units sold directly, most on sale, I estimated about 30k US$ revenue. I also did bundles, which were a mistake in retrospective, because it swamps the shady reseller sites with cheap keys. Splatter had like 30k of "keys activated" which means 30k people getting their keys from some a different place than the Steam shop. Most of them are bundles.

Then I sold the Steam rights in October 2016. Contract was limited to 2.5 years. The buyer did some stuff I don't agree with, like reducing the price to 0,99€ and giving huge discounts on *that*. He also put a Splash Screen to ask for one's email address in front of it, produced with Unity and occasionally crashing peoples computers before they even got into the game. But that's sort of ok, it's ~~now~~ not my position to judge.

What he also did was to completely ghost me once the transfer was done. I asked for some numbers and experiences after a while, never got a response, didn't think about it. Then April 2019 came and the contract ended, and still nothing. I started sending mails to the contact info I had, some addresses didn't exist anymore, others gained not response. I started bothering Valve. The Valve guy who did the transfer back in 2016 still remembered, got suspicious ("how many other games are affected?") and finally the buyer gave in and responded. He's still ignoring any mail you don't CC to Valve, and ignores any paragraph he doesn't like, but at least: I got my game back!

Did a small patch right away: some restyling, fixed a long-standing shadow bug, removes the Splash Screen. Linux will get a fix, too, because I found the cause of the "black screen with music" issue while working on the Snake project.

So a suggestion: do not sell your game to shady third parties even if they don't look shady at the beginning. Nowadays the game transfer on Steam is automated, so no Valve employee will remember you, so you're out of luck.