If you can peel your eyballs away from the gaming lawsuit dominating the headlines this week, there’s another one you might want to pay attention to: the Chronicles of Elyria class action. Readers will remember that last year, Soulbound Studios ran out of cash, laid off the team, and ended development of Chronicles of Elyria, only to pivot a month later and insist the game was still in production with volunteer staff. But backers took it to court with a class action lawsuit against both Soulbound and payment processor Xsolla.
The drama over the game ramped up over the last month when Soulbound opened up testing for spinoff game Kingdoms of Elyria, which toted along an NDA that initially appeared to ask participants to sign away their rights to engage in class-action lawsuits, which gamers worried might affect the ongoing lawsuit. Soulbound later amended that NDA to assuage those concerns but then locked down the Reddit over what it called “death threats” and loosed its plans for crypto land trades.
That brings us to the current state of the lawsuit, which as ClassAction.org notes has actually been partially transferred from California to Washington. Originally, the suit named both Soulbound (in Washington) and Xsolla (in California) as defendants; Xsolla was accused of refusing to grant refunds for per its own terms of use. A few weeks ago, the judge in the suit apparently sided with Xsolla’s motion to send that part of the suit to non-class arbitration under the terms of Xsolla’s original TOS, while transferring the Soulbound slice of the suit to the Western District of Washington. In other words, the class-action against Soulbound is still marching onward.
