BulkyPix

» see bulkypix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

BulkyPix was a French mobile publisher with more than two hundred titles to its name, founded in December 2008 by former Vivendi staff, and it is remembered now mostly by the developers it did not pay. The Tribunal de commerce de Versailles opened a redressement judiciaire, the French restructuring procedure, on 29 March 2016. No buyer appeared. On 4 August 2016 the same court converted the file into a liquidation judiciaire and appointed Maître Cosme Rogeau of SELARL MJ Conseils, 26 Rue Hoche, Versailles, as liquidator.

The catalog was the kind that made the early App Store readable: Pix'n Love Rush, Bardbarian, Penumbear, plus the iPhone version of Motion Twin's My Brute. BulkyPix published rather than built. That business runs on volume and on float, and the float is what fails first.

~ the case file ~

~ 509 796 314 ~

The company's register number carries the whole decline, and none of it was reported while it was happening. The créations notice went into the BODACC on 23 January 2009. Four capital modifications and two changes of registered address follow across the next five years. Then, in early 2014, a judgment homologating a conciliation agreement. Conciliation is the quiet French procedure a company enters under a court-appointed negotiator before it is in open trouble, and no games outlet covered it. The register contradicts itself slightly on the date, printing a publication of 3 February 2014 ten days ahead of the judgment date it carries, but either way BulkyPix was in front of a judge about its finances two years before the trade press noticed anything.

Then the detail that dates the collapse properly. On 5 February 2016 the company filed its annual accounts for the year ending 31 December 2013 and for the year ending 31 December 2014, both on the same day, years late. PocketGamer later reported that the publisher had been running at a loss in both of those years. When the court opened the restructuring seven weeks later it fixed the cessation des paiements, the legal date a company became unable to meet its debts, at 7 February 2016. That is two days after the two late filings went in.

I installed plenty of games in those years without once reading who published them. A mobile publisher's logo gets three seconds on a splash screen before the game starts, and that is the distance here. It is a company I may well have paid without knowing the name.

~ what the developers got ~

Developers had been saying on Reddit since October 2015 that no money was arriving, and TouchArcade picked it up from there. Once the liquidation was published, emails to the company started bouncing and studios learned about the closure secondhand. One developer posted BulkyPix's own answer to a request to end the contract: the bankruptcy, it said, did not legally allow them to break it. On that reading a studio could neither take its game to another publisher nor ask for the payments it had missed.

The claims process ran off the BODACC notice itself. The conversion was published on 18 August 2016, and the deadline the trade press reported, two months for French studios and four for everybody else, is counted from that publication date rather than from the judgment. French developers had until 18 October 2016 and foreign ones until 18 December. Tiny Lab Productions got the rights to Orborun back. Nothing in the coverage from those months records a studio getting paid.

~ insuffisance d'actif ~

The liquidation stayed open from that August until the start of 2020. An état des créances was filed on 30 June 2017 and a list of post-judgment claims on 11 March 2019. On 9 January 2020 the court closed the procedure pour insuffisance d'actif, for insufficiency of assets, the French court's formal finding that there is not enough left to pay the creditors. That finding ends the creditors' pursuit of the company. The strike-off from the register was published on 12 January.

One piece of the structure outlasted everything. BulkyPix Management, a separate entity at RCS 533 826 806, was never wound up alongside the publisher. Nothing further was published about it for a decade, until the Versailles court struck it off on its own motion, radiation d'office, published on 6 February 2026. The publisher had been dead since August 2016 and the holding company above it stayed listed for another nine and a half years, doing nothing.

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