Frontier Developments is currently best known for their hit title Planet Coaster, of course when people aren’t thinking of them as the developer of that Star Citizen-esque game that actually saw release. Odds are you’ll also remember them as being the developer behind Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, because I just told you they were. The news today is that Frontier Developments is suing Atari over what it claims are $2.2 million in unpaid royalties.
“We can confirm Frontier is currently pursuing a complaint against Atari. We have attempted to resolve this issue without legal action since April 2016. We have so far been denied our contractual right to audit by Atari, and we are unfortunately left with no other way to resolve our concerns. We are unable to offer any further comment while the matter is subject to due legal process.”
Here’s where it gets weird. First, of all people, TMZ broke the story. According to the news article, Frontier Developments is citing a Steam tracking website (likely Steam Spy) in their claim that Atari owes them $2.2 million, following with a lawsuit because Atari has been delaying an audit which Frontier is entitled to in their contract. Secondly, it is odd to see a developer using something like Steam Spy as a source. For the record, it is impossible for third party services to count how many people own a certain game, that information isn’t publicly available. They guess, using data from accounts that are public, and do not claim to be accurate.
Imagine users as voters, but instead of voting for one of three candidates, they’re voting for several games from tens of thousands available in Steam catalog. Even the most popular paid games are reaching maybe 5% of this audience and most are in realms of 0.1% or even less.
So 0.1% margin of error for a game with 0.1% of Steam audience would produce results that are mostly useless. That’s why Steam Spy has to gather millions points of data daily to predict games sales and audience. And that’s why Steam Spy is often wrong. Not by much, but still wrong.
At a $2.2 million difference comparing sales to Steam Spy, it’s rather believable that Atari shorted Frontier Develoments on some level, and you could be forgiven for taking the delays as a sign that the company is hiding something.
Or maybe nobody at the shell corporation that calls itself Atari answers their email. I couldn’t get a single person to answer my requests for comment over Asteroids: Outpost.