To clarify...
This was going to happen at some point, because the business relationship with Konami was dissolved to allow patches to move ahead.
The parts that are shady are:
- Filing the request without conferring with Autumn or Lab Zero to see if we could even transition in time
- Lying to Sony and to Autumn, saying the other said moving it back was impossible
Their reason for doing this is because the lawsuit with Konami over DefJam Rapstar is over, and they're trying to stop dealing with Autumn forever as soon as possible. There's a lot of bad blood there.
That said, we are pretty forcefully requesting that the delisting be pushed back to 12/31 to buy us time, and I think we're going to get that.
We're going as fast as we can, but there's a lot that needs to happen:
- Get a new Communications ID for online service, which takes a few days since it must be issued from Japan
- Before we can do that we need to get an IP whitelisting issue sorted out with Autumn
- Set up the leaderboards and trophies again, since this will effectively be a "new game" as far as PSN is concerned
- Get everyone's existing purchases to carry over to the "new" version
- Get Autumn a publishing agreement for SCEE and other territories
- Get the latest build submitted and tested once we have the Communications ID and leaderboards, etc. set up
If everything goes perfectly we MIGHT be able to avoid any downtime, but there is so much to do and so much of it is reliant on learning this stuff and waiting for IDs, etc. that I don't think we're going to be able to avoid any downtime in the US. Downtime in other territories will be all-but-impossible to avoid, just because we have to set up new publishing arrangements with those territories.
Yes, this sucks, but we're used to this kind of thing at this point. We shouldn't have to be, but we are. So we'll roll with it and once this incident has passed, there should be significantly less drama moving forward.
Also, just wanted to give a shout out to Shane, Roberto, Jonathan and everyone else at Sony that has helped us on this so far. We would be completely lost without them, and they've been a huge help in helping us navigate this minor crisis. Once this is resolved, we're definitely sending them tasty gifts of some kind.