Egmont on face

Just a few days ago we brought you the good news that Austria's JoWood were planning to bring Germany's hit third person role-playing game Gothic to the rest of the world as part of a major publishing deal with Phenomedia, with a release planned for November. Sadly it seems that this announcement was premature, as there has been a mix-up somewhere along the line between Phenomedia, JoWood and Egmont Interactive, who originally published the game in Germany several months ago.

Soon after we reported that the game was going to be released in the rest of Europe, somebody at one of these three companies suddenly realised that, even after several months of inaction, Egmont still holds publishing rights for all other territories. Apparently they are currently in negotiations to release the game internationally through an overseas partner, but it seems unlikely now that we will see the game as soon as we had hoped, and it's not certain at this stage who will end up handling Gothic when it finally does emerge.

At the moment it appears that JoWood will still be publishing a forthcoming sequel to Gothic, but that is still some way from completion. In the meantime the Germans are the only ones who will get to see what all the fuss is about...