Over the past couple months, Pearl Abyss has been in negotiations with GameNet’s parent company Vebanaul. GameNet, Black Desert’s Russian publisher, has worked together with Pearl Abyss, Black Desert’s developer, to transfer account data. Last week though, many players were fearing the worst when issues with negotiations were hinted at by Pearl Abyss.

Staruday morning, Pearl Abyss stated that they had failed in acquiring Russian player data and everything on the Russian servers was gone. Pearl Abyss also said that the game would have be entirely re-localized as they also failed to obtain GameNet’s localized version of the game.

As upset as players are, Pearl Abyss seems to be sharing some of the sentiment as they have accused Vebanaul of negligence for not setting up a system to allow Russian players to grant consent to transfer their data in accordance with Russian Law.

“Regardless of the conditions specified in our contract, Vebanaul use our users as their weapon. Vebanaul claims that we have declared the uselessness of the translations developed by them. However, due to the negotiations, we had no choice but to start preparing our own game localization, because we had a premonition that there was a possibility that we would not be able to transfer the Black Desert Online Russia service from Vebanaul. […] Blocking access to the server since August, after the opening of our website, Vebanaul began to protest and demanded that we stop all actions aimed at supporting the game Black Desert Online Russia. Although we have all the rights to transfer the service, we listened to all the requirements of Vebanaul and tried to minimize all our actions.”

According to Pearl Abyss, Vebanaul placed a price tag on the data, but the price tag was “excessively high.” As of now, all Pearl Abyss can do is hope that Vebanaul won’t delete the database without consent.