UPDATE: This post has been updated to clarify that the lawsuit was filed by Robert Kirkman LLC. and Skybound Entertainment and that Robert Kirkman is the sole creator of The Walking Dead IP.
The Walking Deadcreator Robert Kirkman and his company Skybound Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against a video game developer for allegedly failing to pay him as part of a deal. Disruptor Beam released a mobile game inThe Walking Deadseries after striking a deal with Kirkman in 2014.
Documents from the lawsuit of Robert Kirkman LLC. and Skybound Entertainment, which is owned and co-founded by Kirkman, against Disruptor Beam reveals that the two parties struck a deal in 2014. Per this deal, the game developer would give Kirkman’s companies $500,000 a year for four years after the game was released. Disruptor Beam’s game,The Walking Dead: March to War, was released in August 2017.
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The Kirkman companies claim that Disruptor Beam owes him $690,000, of which $190,000 is the rest of this year’s payment and $500,000 for next year. Disruptor Beam has made some of its payments late, says the lawsuit, but this time it told Kirkman that it would be stopping payments “until further notice.”
While the deal meant that Kirkman would be paid for four years, the game has not been available since last year.The Walking Dead: March to Warbecame one of several high profilemobile games to be shut downwhen Disruptor Beam stopped offering it in January 2019. This means that the game is likely no longer making any money for the developer, which may be why it has allegedly chosen to stop paying Kirkman.
Disruptor Beam has also changed what it does since releasingThe Walking Dead: March to War. The company, which also released aGame of Thronesmobile game, has become Beamable. All three of its mobile games have been shut down or sold to other developers.
The company Beamable doesn’t make mobile games, but it provides an SDK that gives game developers new ways to make games in Unity. Beamable helps developers “easily add social, commerce, and content management features to their games with drag-and-drop prefabs inside Unity,” says its site. The announcement that Beamable would go from making mobile games to helping developersmake games in Unitywas only made two days ago. The details from the lawsuit were revealed on April 22, but it’s unclear how much time there was between the filing of the suit and the Beamable announcement.
The Disruptor Beam team may have just found that mobile games don’t make as much money as it had expected. There are also several games inThe Walking Deadseries, such asThe Walking Dead: The Telltale Series,and fans may not have felt like playing another. However, this information is unlikely to stop Kirkman’s companies from trying to get the money they feel is owed.
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