Ed McMillen: Ubuntu Store Sold Super Meat Boy For A Year Without Permission, Has Yet To Pay Team Meat

The latest Humble Bundle includes the Linux version of The Binding Of Isaac, the Legend of Zelda-inspired roguelike. The problem is, if you try to download it using Ubuntu’s Software Centre, you’ll be told Team Meat “declined” to have the game sold via the store. Except Team Meat didn’t decline, the game was submitted and rejected, the reason being it “wasn’t a good fit”.

When you go to download the Humble Bundle 7 via the Ubuntu Software Centre, you’ll find Binding of Isaac and Dungeon Defenders are unavailable. A message at the bottom of the page states the following:

We’re sorry that Binding of Issac and Dungeon Defenders are not available. Dungeon Defenders is over our current size limit and the authors of Binding of Issac [sic] declined to make their game available and we respect their wishes.

Ed McMillen however claims this is Canonical — the company behind Ubuntu — trying to “save face” — it actually rejected the game from the Software Centre.

What we also didn’t know until now is that Canonical sold Super Meat Boy for an entire year without paying Team Meat its share of the profits. At least, this is what McMillen alleges. The developer got in touch with the company to try and sort the issue out — as well as get money owed to it — but as of writing it’s still waiting to get paid, according to Tommy Refenes, the other half of Team Meat.

To add more context to Eds statement about Isaac and the Ubuntu store…they still have not paid us for Super Meat Boy sales. — Tommy Refenes (@TommyRefenes) December 22, 2012

And here’s McMillen’s full statement, describing the entire situation:

they are just trying to save face. they rejected isaac a while ago because its content “wasnt a good fit for the Ubuntu store” then changed their tune once they found out how popular it was and that it was a part of the HIB. but since they are going out of their way to try and avoid the fact that they rejected isaac, ill also make public the 2nd reason why isaac isnt in their store. Last year Ubuntu added Super Meat Boy to their store without our written permission and sold it for a full year without paying us. we didnt find this out till a few months ago and had to contact them directly about it in order to get our payment…. i dont trust or respect their actions and wont be working with them ever again. i was trying to be cool about it but if they want to publicly state that i declined their offer to sell Isaac in their store without context to why.. then ill go public with my VERY valid reasons. feel free to re-post this message or link this to any one who might be misinformed, im not a fan of being made to look like an asshole when my reasons are quite valid.

I’ve reached out to Canonical for comment, but have yet to hear anything. I’ll update this story when (or if) it gets in contact.

EdmundM [Formspring]