At this juncture Bethesda might literally be cursed. It is hard to struggle to determine what else could cause a company to become befallen with near weekly issues other than gross mismanagement on such an epic scale only the government could rival it while still staying in business.
Not even a month after Bethesda acquired Human Head Studios and rebranded it Roundhouse Studios, litigation is being filed by Ragnarok LLC against the studio for not releasing assets or the source code they were commissioned to develop.
Other outlets have questioned how you can sue a corporation that no longer exists, but in America liability laws are not as absolute as they are in other countries. Nor are contracts dissolved upon the dissolution of a corporate entity. Before accounts are closed all obligations must be settled.
The full blog post was made available over on the official Rune 2 website.
The gist of the message is in the middle of the body, where the Rune 2 team writes…
“[…] As mentioned previously, we had no warning that our long term partner and friends in this project would abandon it during its most crucial moment, leaving our team at Ragnarok Game LLC to shoulder both the development and publishing burden of launch all on its own.
“Since Human Head’s sudden closure, announcement, and discovering the active concealment of their acquisition, we have repeatedly requested access to the final launch build source code and RUNE II game assets. This is so we can continue to support, update, and execute future DLC for our community. As part of the publishing agreement on RUNE II, Ragnarok Game LLC has paid for the development of these assets and is the rightful owner of them. After repeated refusals by Human Head to produce these assets, we’ve had no choice but to file a legal complaint in order to obtain the RUNE II game assets. We have exhausted all possible options before getting to this point. This is not the step we wanted to take, but it is necessary in order to fulfill our promises to our community.” […]
There is a complicated mess of legal issues at play here, but the short of it is Human Head isn’t off the hook purely because they dissolved and reformed. In fact the principle holders can be pursued for damages and breach of contract if fraud can be proven. Given Human Head Studios did not disclose to their partners they were seeking and in talks of acquisition by and with Bethesda, fraud could potentially be a very easy case to make.
Likely this issue will soon make its rounds amongst YouTube Legal Channels where a more precise breakdown of the matter will be laid out.
As tated in the blog post, they have plans on releasing Rune 2 on other PC platforms at some undisclosed point in 2020.
