gamecock posts

Last fall, the promising game publisher Gamecock Media Group sold off its assets to Southpeak Games, thanks mostly to one of Gamecock's rich investors pulling out after the financial crisis hit. Now our sister site Joystiq is reporting that many of the people and vendors who were owed money by working on Gamecock's games are still waiting for Southpeak to pay up. Some have even filed lawsuits against Southpeak.

The report, which cites a number of sources that wanted to remain anonymous, claims that Southpeak has told several of the people who are owed money that "Gamecock's upper management simply took the money and ran". Not true, according to Gamecock co-founder Mike Wilson, who was interviewed for the story. He states, "We got absolutely nothing for the small amount of equity that we owned," and added that they "got a reduced severance in order to be able to start working on our new company (Devolver Digital)". Southpeak Games' only official comment on the story? "SouthPeak continues to diligently work through the outstanding details related to the acquisition of Gamecock Media Group. We cannot comment on any pending litigation other than those cited in our public filings."

The announcement of the Serious Sam: The First Encounter HD title today mentioned the inolvement of a previously unknown company called Devolver Digital, described as a "production and publishing company based in Austin, Texas, specializing in delivering top quality entertainment to gamers worldwide at affordable prices by any and all means available."

Through a little research, Big Download discovered that Devolver Digital is in fact the new company from Mike Wilson and Harry Miller, two of the co-founders of the now legendary Gathering of Developers and later the co-founders of Gamecock. When contacted Wilson admitted his and Miller's involvement with the company "along with a few other old friends."

Wilson told us, "We're basically acting as the production company for the XBLA game, since we are not an official MSFT publisher yet, and will be publishing the PC version of the games." Gathering of Developers was the first publisher for Croteam's Serious Sam games and Wilson told us, "Croteam owns the IP still since they had a g.o.d. deal, and are therefore able to work with us again on the new version(s)." We hope to get more info on Wilson's newest game venture in the near future.

Small game publisher Southpeak Games continues to expand its reach and that's evident in their latest financial results. For the quarter that ended on March 31, Southpeak had revenues of $13.5 million compared to just $2.2 million for the same period a year ago. The company had a profit of $566,000 for the the quarter compared to just $20,.000 for the same period a year ago.

Southpeak has continued to expand its game line-up, thanks in part to last fall's purchase of Gamecock which added several current and upcoming titles to their library. The company is spending $14 million on IP and game development compared to just $4 million for the same period a year ago.

Get ready for some World War II spy action really soon. Publisher Southpeak Games has announced that Velvet Assassin has now gone gold and will ship to stores as planned next week (April 30 to be exact) for both the PC and Xbox 360 consoles.

Originally the game was being developed by Replay Studios to be published by Gamecock but came under the Southpeak Games umbrella when that company bought Gamecock's assets last fall. Players will be able to control British spy Violette Summer (based on the real WWII secret agent Violette Szabo) as she sneaks around those nasty Nazis and tries to bring their plans down. Southpeak sent over new screenshots from the game (six in all) that we have added to our gallery.

Gamecock's purchase by Southpeak Games last fall resulted in several of Gamecock's upcoming games being brought into the Southpeak publishing line up. One former Gamecock game that hasn't been heard from lately is Dungeon Hero, the fantasy action-RPG from UK based Firefly Studios.

This week the developer's official web site finally posted up an update on the title admitting that the shutdown of Gamecock "created a number of challenges for us over the past weeks and months". Originally set for release sometime this spring, Dungeon Hero's release has now been delayed. The update didn't provide a new release date and failed to state if the game has found a publisher. It did state that Firefly has "a couple of exciting projects built around the Dungeon Hero universe that we will be talking about soon".

And for those of you waiting for an revival of Firefly's multi-million selling RTS game series Stronghold, there's good news as well. The update states, " . . . we are moving up a gear on the production of the next game in the Stronghold series."

[Via Joystiq]

While other game publishers (*cough* Midway *cough* THQ *cough* EA) are in various states of financial decline at the moment, smaller game publisher Southpeak Games actually had a solid quarter of revenues and profits, at least according to their latest financial results.

The company revealed that its last financial quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2008, had revenues of $17.3 million for the time period, over four times the amount it got for the same time period a year ago ($4.2 million). Southpeak pulled in a profit of $1.2 million for the last quarter. Last fall the company bought out Gamecock's game line-up, including Legendary. and this year the company has plans to publish a number of PC game titles including Section 8, Velvet Assassin and the upcoming fantasy RPG sequel Two Worlds: The Temptation.

This is the demo for Legendary, a first-person shooter where players combat mythological creatures set free from Pandora's Box.
Download Legendary Demo (1.92 GB)
Check out all Legendary downloads

Southpeak Games is the latest publicly traded game publisher to issue financial results for the past quarter. The company's latest numbers for the three months that ended Sept. 30 show revenues of $8.4 million compared to revenues of $18.3 million for the same period a year ago. The company had a loss of $1.3 million for the quarter compared to a profit of $3.4 million for the same period a year ago.

Despite the bad news financially, Southpeak's press release on the results was very optimistic, saying that they have high hopes for the current fiscal quarter and their line-up of games, including two, Legendary and Mushroom Men, that they acquired with the purchase last month of Gamecock.

There's more news today of game developers losing their jobs. Today the word got out that the Spokane-based developed Cyan Worlds, best known for their Myst series of adventure games, laid off nearly 50 workers in its QA division. Cyan Worlds had been testing games for Gamecock Media but with their recent acquisition by Southpeak Games apparently also meant that those games would no longer be tested at Cyan.

Cyan has already had issues this year as its MMO Myst Online was shut down by its online publisher Gametap. According to the article at the Spokane-based Spokesman Review, Cyan is trying to make deals with individual game developers to test their games as a way to keep revenues going. They also have a new game concept of their own that they are shopping around to various publishers.

[Via Gamasutra]

Back in June the first of two planned downloadable episodes for the action-adventure game Insecticide was released. Developed by Crackpot Entertainment and published by Gamecock, the full game was released on the Nintendo DS console, yet PC gamers are still waiting for the second and final PC episode of the game to be released. The game's official web site claims episode 2 is out there but none of the vendors mentioned (Steam, Direct2Drive and Trymedia) actually have the episode available to download and purchase.

Since Gamecock was recently acquired by Southpeak Games we contacted their PR folks to get an update on when or even if the second Insecticide PC episode would be released. We were told that there are no updates at all on the release, with the rep saying, "It seems to be TBD at this point." Big Download also contacted Crackpot Entertainment for comment but at the time of this post we had not heard back from them. At the moment it doesn't look like folks who bought the first episode will be getting the final one anytime soon.