Epic Games "looking into" missing royalties for Hatoful Boyfriend creator

Epic Games has stated it is "looking into" a lack of royalty payments to Hato Moa, the creator of the original Hatoful Boyfriend game.

The pigeon dating sim was an amateur project made by Moa and it was released in 2011 in Japanese. The game gained popularity following fan translations into English, and a HD remake was developed by Mediatonic. Hatoful Boyfriend HD was published in 2014 by Devolver Digital.

Mediatonic was acquired by Epic in 2021. Last week, Mao stated they have received "no royalty payment" since the acquisition and voiced their frustration on Twitter.

"The obligations were transferred to Epic," Moa posted, "but they've never sent any replies to me." Royalties should have been paid to Moa for any sales of Hatoful Boyfriend over the past two years, which Moa said they believe shouldn't be zero.

The official Epic Games Publishing account responded to Moa, stating the company was "looking into" the issue and would reach out to Moa directly.

Following Epic's acquisition of Mediatonic in 2021, Hatoful Boyfriend was delisted from all platforms except Steam due to publishing agreements. Moa stated the unpaid royalties from the game since then are likely to be small, since sales "definitely dropped to the ground" once the game was delisted from most platforms. "The issue is not that serious for me," they concluded, stating they were not considering pursuing legal action against Epic.

Moa made the allegations of unpaid royalties shortly after the huge numbers of layoffs at Mediatonic and Epic were reported on. Reacting to the news, they wished those affected the best, saying Mediatonic had "always been nice" to them and Hatoful Boyfriend.