They exploited Gamecock’s unpaid bills to ”try to squeeze a better deal” out of SouthPeak, and ”paint a negative picture” they’re still fighting to disprove.
”…some people, attorneys or whoever, used the press to try to put pressure on us, to try to squeeze a better deal out of us, to try to paint a negative picture of us,” said SouthPeak Games boss Terry Phillips.
”That’s definitely a challenge for us, because we spend a lot of time with our partners reassuring them that everything is fine. That’s not how we want to spend our time we want to sell games.” Legal issues have involved CDV, Paradox, Nobilis, Timegate and even SouthPeak’s former CFO. These have now been largely put to rest.
”We’re disappointed that some people have used the press for some… we’ll call it misinformation, if not perhaps outright something else,” continued Phillips.
”You read a lot of it and you just think we’ve had a terrible year on the legal side, but we’ve not had one single substantive judgement against us whatsoever this year.”
”It hasn’t been our style to respond to all of these, or to use the press in that sort of vein. So we’ve tried to steer clear of all that, but I think what happens is some people tend to use it and it works well for them, so the next person tries the same thing.”
Gamecock had unpaid bills to former partners which caused the majority of lawsuits against SouthPeak. ”In most cases we were able to get things back on track… Probably in, I guess, 20 per cent of the cases, we either weren’t able to reach an agreement or it was already too far gone, if you will. In those sorts of situations, we were sort of forced to protect our investment,” he stated.
The publisher knew of Gamecock’s financial troubles before completing the acquisition in 2009. This year they’re far more optmistic thanks to more My Baby titles, Two Worlds II and another as of yet unannounced game that’s in partnership with Nvidia.
