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Due South

Southpeak's chairman Terry Phillips and CEO Melanie Mroz on a difficult 2010

GamesIndustry.biz You've also dealt with legal action from the likes of CDV, Paradox and Timegate. Why would you say there've been quite so many cases against you this year?
Terry Phillips

Yeah, from our standpoint we think most of it stems back from our purchase of Gamecock back in October 2008. We took over Gamecock and when we did they already had a fair amount of issues on the table - contract disputes and whatnot with a variety of people. We took over the company in October, we quickly worked with the various developers or distributors, whoever the third parties were, and in most cases we were able to get things back on track and get things solved, get the games back on track and moving forwards.

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. We tried in every case to work out something else, and in most cases we did - but in a few cases we didn't. Most of the litigation challenges, things you read about, all stem from Gamecock contracts versus things that we had prior to that. I think Nobilis is the only substantial issue that we've had that didn't have something to do with Gamecock.

GamesIndustry.biz Do the guys you've worked with generally seem pretty clear about that - that outstanding payments are to do with Gamecock rather than blaming Southpeak directly?
Terry Phillips

Yeah, I think that goes back to the misinformation. Gamecock had its challenges when we took it over, we kept it as a separate company, we never took any assets out of that company, we tried to resolve the liability. We thought it had some good games, some good opportunities, we thought we could get most of the things back on track. I would say that, as a public company, some of that's more challenging than we had anticipated because so much of it gets aired in your public filings. When you're a public company, you have to report any potential bad news, you don't get to report any potential good news. It can make your numbers look pretty bad...

Because we have to consolidate their numbers with ours we have to put in these potential liabilities and contingencies, even if we're not sure that they'll ever amount to anything. Like with CDV, we had millions reserved, but once that was resolved we were able to unravel that. It would have been ideal if we could have resolved 100 per cent of these cases, but we think that after we bought Gamecock some people might have taken a little bit of advantage and there may have been some hard feelings about some of the people that were there. It was disappointing.

GamesIndustry.biz How confident are you that's all behind you now? Or is there potentially more trouble to emerge from Gamecock's legacy?
Terry Phillips

I hope not! [Laughs] More came out of it than we ever expected. There were people we'd never heard of when we bought the company that came up later on which made plain that we'd never been informed about some things. So we've worked really hard to work directly with people, to resolve those issues, to help people who were disappointed. We think that it's behind us now, and the reality is we only have a couple of things left that are hanging out there, and Nobilis is one, now we just need to make sure we protect the rights on the other versions. There's nothing else really substantive that's still outstanding.

Rob Burman (European PR and marketing manager)

From the UK side, the CDV issue was a major press point and it got a lot of attention. We purposely chose not to add fuel to the fire; we just went about our business and dealt with those legal issues through the courts rather than through the press. That's all been solved now, we're back to business as usual here and a lot of people supported us in terms of distribution partners and whatnot is testament to how we tried to continue our business going forward.

GamesIndustry.biz Are the former Gamecock bosses still involved in any way?
Terry Phillips

Yeah, the prior management pretty much left a couple of months later.

Melanie Mroz

Soon after we acquired the company, they moved on to pursue other interests, if you will.

Alec Meer avatar
Alec Meer: A 10-year veteran of scribbling about video games, Alec primarily writes for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, but given any opportunity he will escape his keyboard and mouse ghetto to write about any and all formats.
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