You know that personal film project they claimed one of the founders was distracted by? It was a Subnautica film they asked him to make.
In other news, Krafton extends the payout today too.
Nobody knows what’s going on, at this point just wait until this goes over to court and we’ll see who did what.
Smart move, because they absolutely would have gotten sued and likely wound up with no game.
I’m not a numbers guy but $25 million seems a tad smaller than $250 million
I saw one article that said 250 total. 25 million goes to the 40 employees who developed it and the other 225 goes to the 3 guys who got fired.
And the fired guys had promised to disburse most of that to their employees.
One developer at a separate company who played Subnautica 2 and requested anonymity because they signed a non-disclosure agreement told Bloomberg they enjoyed the game and that it “seemed way more robust” than other titles in early access.
Yeah, this is clearly the publisher trying to get out of paying the full bonus.
When I first heard about the firings and the delay to the game I thought “This doesn’t sound plausible. Are they really going to ruin their investment and effectively kill the company to supposedly save a quarter of a billion. That would be unbelievably stupid”. But with every subsequent nugget of information it’s getting increasingly clearer that they, Krafton, actually are unbelievably stupid. They’re pretty much guaranteed that if Subnautica 2 gets released (and that’s assuming Subnautica 2 is in a good enough position to be released) the studio will shutter as all the talent will move on and all the money Krafton spent acquiring the studio is thrown in the wind. They’re not even going to save the quarter billion because the delay means they’re going to be paying at least 6 months wages for minimum effort work because I doubt anyone at that studio is willing to put in the effort after being cheated out of their bonus.
Even if it’s all so obvious I still find it hard to believe the publisher is THAT stupid. But that’s the world we live in, where people get to make idiotic decisions because they’re greedy as fuck.
Yeah in the world where EA exist and Xbox close down a studio that just launched a successful game and also fire bunch of people and shutting down lot of project, this doesn’t sound far fetch at all.
I guess the lesson the first game trying to teach is to never believe any giant corporation.
They paid for their expertise, even offering a bonus that was clearly less than whatever their projected profit would be, and then tried to squander it because they didn’t listen to their expertise.
Publishers in all kinds of industries are risk adverse to the point of not trusting whoever they made deals with to follow through. This is totally on brand for publishers!
What the fucking fuck is this? Websites are comically bad now.
In their suit, the founders said that Krafton was aware of their new roles and that Cleveland had spent a large amount of time working on a Subnautica film, which Krafton had asked the studio to develop.
The moment they put someone who oversee the development of Calisto Protocol as CEO, it already smell like a seamoth full of dead peeper. Now this one? This one takes the cake.
The moment I saw Subnautica 2 is being published by Krafton, I knew it will be dead on the crib. Average Korean game company behavior.
The second I heard the heard the firings happens and the rumors behind why I removed the game from my wishlist. And as more slowly comes out it makes Krafton look worse and worse
That could hurt the devs more than the publisher.
If they can prove breach of contract they can maybe get their IP back. Wishlists are a huge deal for if they want to shop the game around to other publishers.
Let’s be honest. Soon, Subnautica 2 will be on the front page of Steam, likely for a month or more. People who have no idea any of this is happening, nor care will buy it up in droves and in six months, none of this will matter, and you’ll all have likely pirated it by then anyway.
