Dragon’s Prophet’s new Steam entry is not a legitimate revival, Runewaker says

By
Bree Royce
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15

We’ve updated the end of this piece with the latest info as of July 31st.

MMO gamers were bummed back in May when Gamigo sunsetted Dragon’s Prophet over in the Europe, especially since it was the last remaining western version after Daybreak’s 2015 sunset of US version of the game. So it was cause for cheer when the game recently popped back up on Steam, especially since we’d long wondered whether Runewaker was clawing back games like Dragon’s Prophet and Guardians of Ember and ending EU publishing contracts in order to self-publish them.

But a closer inspection of the title on Steam leads us to wonder whether this version of the game is fully legitimate, as a search for the studio BOBYGAME seems to bring up only brand-new social media pages, Roblox and Minecraft profiles, and small gaming YouTubes. The official website for this game also appears to be dragonsprophets.com, and it’s already got a beta and “recharge diamonds” button.

One Redditor who claimed to work for the original publisher cast serious doubts on the provenance of the game.

We’ve asked the Discord developers to clarify their relationship with Runewaker (we haven’t been banned yet), and we’ve reached out to Runewaker for a statement about its involvement or lack thereof too. We’ll update if we get it. But in the meantime, it might be wise to follow Hinji’s advice. While our readers will know that we generally aren’t morally opposed to rogue servers for dead MMOs, we’re concerned that the game is being presented to players as fully legitimate when it may not be.

Source: Steam via Reddit
Update 7/30
So we still don’t have a reply from Runewaker, but the owner of the Discord did surface this morning to reply to us and insist that he had “trademarks and patents,” whatever that means. We asked again what kind of licensing agreement the team had with Runewaker, and then not long after, the channel was wiped. Again, we’re advising caution until we can figure out whether this is legitimate or not.
Update 7/30
The BOBYGAME rep on Discord has provided us with multiple scans of documents, all in Mandarin, that he says he submitted as part of Steam’s approval process. At least one of them appears to be an ancient trademark application. We have still not gotten a straight answer on whether the team has a licensing agreement with Runewaker.
Update 7/31
Instincts right: This is not a legitimate revival of Dragon’s Prophet. Using our docs, the inimitable Connor at MMO Fallout finally got an answer from an international sales rep at Runewaker who told him categorically that “BOBYGAME is not [Runewaker’s] partner.” The rep further confirmed that the documents we were sent were for a different partnership with a different Chinese company from many years ago and have nothing to do with BOBYGAME.

We’d like to reiterate that our site favors game preservation and emulators especially for dead MMORPGs, but we cannot stress enough that this particular developer is being extremely shady: banning journalists asking basic questions in Discord, lying about his relationship with the IP owner, and issuing fraudulent “proof” of his legitimacy. We’re assuming that Valve will do at least as much research as we did, and you’ll never see this version of the emulator on Steam – or anywhere else.

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