It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
Hopefully Kitten Space Agency ends up being a true spiritual sequel.
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
https://techdriveplay.com/2025/01/03/kerbal-space-program-2-a-tale-of-corporate-neglect-and-failure/
I never understood the fixation on IPs. For a kick ass universe with amazing lore etc, ok sure.
I mean I love Jeb and the gang as much as the next guy, but they’re not core to my enjoyment of KSP1. The mechanics were.
lol, RIP Jebs 1 - 48395.
But uh yeah, the… the lore is basically:
We made some cute little dudes and dudettes that are… possibly animated, sapient fungi? Or something?
Anyway they are sm0l and live in sm0l solar system.
And they have a space program.
And most of the characters are just obvious cutesy knock offs of famous humans in spaceflight.
Woo!
lol
Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.
Dean Hall and RocketWorkz of uh DayZ fame/infamy… are working on Kitten Space Agency… I dunno, maybe they could pull it off?
Dean’s track record is really hit and miss imo, but hey, at least they actually give a damn and try, often with pretty bold / niche concepts.
Hopefully! My comment wasn’t aimed at KSP / KSA though, just talking about why IP is valuable
It was even worse than that.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken…but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because “it would speed up development.”
It was doomed from the beginning.
Yep.
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer… yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
…
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
It’s a canon event for any
gamecompany thatachieves moderate successgets acquired by investorsVery much not exclusive to the game industry
True :3
I just said game to stay on topic tbh
Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn’t criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.
Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.
But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.
Except ConcernedApe, apparently.
Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It’s once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry
Coffee Stain’s another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there’s a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don’t agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game’s learning curve less precipitous.
Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
Or the Terraria team.
Rip ZA/UM
I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn’t see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that’s opposed to SKGs.
It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.
And they want to add micro transactions
But they said they wouldn’t!
It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.
Instead you are drowned in lootboxes and emotes
The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted “we wont put loot boxes in the game”…
I’m not going to burn your house down, rest easy knowing that. :)
Next week: Introducing new “reward containers”
No, they won’t. Because they already are there, maybe?
They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We’re in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.
Who’s the streamer that boosted the Don’t Kill Games petition? Get them on it.
PirateSoftware
Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he’s wrong and really created lots of noise about it.
Oh I misunderstood the question. I thought they were asking who ironically boosted the petition.
Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.
Yes you are going to need to, but as you asked so presumptively I have a couple of links from pretty good journalistic sources.
https://www.theverge.com/news/703373/krafton-delay-subnautica-2-250-million-bonus
The Bloomberg article they reference it’s paywalled to hell :D https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/krafton-delays-subnautica-2-game-ahead-of-250-million-payout?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MjA4MzgyNCwiZXhwIjoxNzUyNjg4NjI0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWjU4SUFUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.R0p1u8-Bar_mXzXyKWDJxsN-yaSdlIWVs2GZ5WCbpAM&leadSource=uverify+wall
Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/njpO8
Archive link for the Bloomberg article in case the gift link stops working https://archive.is/2mltm
I mean, you made the claim presumptively, seems reasonable to think it would be on you to provide a source.
Proving a negative vs a positive, exactly
The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025
The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.
If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.
Does it make sense to nitpick how much they’re getting though? The fact that they’re being denied any bonus is shady as fuck.
That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.
It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.
The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.
Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.
I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?
And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.
It is entirely possible that
Being possible doesn’t equal being likely.
The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.
According to Krafton’s statement the remaining employees are getting their bonus though.
Apologies - that was not a dig at the validity of the information provided.
That’s a very high number - so I had to either be misunderstanding the number or underestimating the number of employees the bonus was going to.
I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher
On Thursday, Krafton issued another statement addressed to “our 12 million fellow Subnauts.” The company said 90% of the $250 million payout was allocated to Unknown Worlds’ three senior leaders. Krafton accused the executives of abandoning their responsibilities in order to work on other projects, including a film, leading to delays for the game.
You said it was a fact when it’s just a suspicion
This fact check provided by EA Games.
I am also boycotting Microsoft and every product from companies owned by them.
Sure, that doesn’t leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I’m thorough with it.
Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.
Linux gaming is really hot right now. Out of my 575 games on steam I can play 568 of them.
Ditched Windows permanently 11 months ago for Pop-OS and couldn’t be happier. I’ve been a big Linux fan for years, but would always dual boot for gaming purposes.
I’m so glad that isn’t necessary any longer. Almost feels cheating, being Microsoft free with Zero downsides and plenty of benefits.
You may already know, but a lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ it just means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet and will likely still work just fine*, unless it requires kernel level anti cheat ofc
Just so happens I’m boycotting that as well. If I wanted you to do shady shit to my OS, I’d have stayed on Windows.
Edit: *Check the games not listed as playable on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.
I didn’t realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn’t want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.
Do you have a recommended flavor of Linux for gaming?
Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn’t come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.
I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don’t show as playable. I’m not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any advice?
A lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require ‘kernel level anticheat’.
Edit: Check those games out on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.
Thank you so much, I was worried I’d have to scale back my gaming significantly
Not a problem at all. If you do end up having difficulties you might try a different distro, I’ve heard a few people complaining about Mint lately. In theory though it should work just fine.
In my personal experience every game I’ve tried to play works just as well or better than it does on Windows. Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Prey, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 & 76 etc. Even older games like Baldur’s Gate and the Original Fallout work great* :)
Edit: *The GOG versions, which I use the Heroic Games Launcher to play.
Depends, the best source for running games is https://www.protondb.com/
For games that are not on Steam, you can try Lutris.
In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
Steam doesn’t have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you’ll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”
That’s what lets it use Proton for everything by default.
That used to be the case, it is enabled by default now.
SteamOS isn’t out for download if I remember correctly but you are correct about Bazzite and Novato being similar and great gaming specific distros.
Bazzite is modeled off of Steam OS
Good news, it actually is and had been for a few months! https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#reimage
Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC’s like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.
Currently, expanded support includes devices with AMD hardware and an NVME drive, targeted toward handheld devices. Please note, support for all devices that is not officially ‘Powered by SteamOS’ is not final (currently anything that is not a Steam Deck or Legion Go S)
While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC’s, Valve doesn’t recommend doing so.
They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC’s in the future, but it’s not there yet.
If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it’s designed for.
You are correct that it is possible to do, but it’s not recommended.
Almost any is fine, but if you want a distro optimized for gaming, Garuda has been treating me quite well.
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.
Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular. I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it. I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn’t used it in yonks. Good luck!
This is a good policy. They destroy everything they touch, anyway, including their acquired studios.
I find it really hard to boycott Microsoft today. Yeah, fuck windows, office, Xbox. But there’s GitHub and Azure which you just ignore walking the internet
Yeah, GitHub really hurts. Hopefully people will start to use SourceForge and similar alternatives once they realize that Microsoft isn’t just trying to monopolize Operating Systems and Gaming Studios, but the whole damn Internet as well.
SourceForge sucks ass. I’ll use pen and paper to manage my repos before SourceForge.
Forgejo is the best git forge hands down. It’s FOSS, snappy & clean web interface, much lighter than Gitlab to self-host, integrates with a bunch of CI platforms, and instance federation is in the works. It’s like GitHub, but better in pretty much every way.
The most popular instance is Codeberg
Cool, I’ll check it out. I’m not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work. It’s nice to know that there is a decent alternative for people who need it.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
Isnt every other new game “the most wish listed on steam”? Do any of them ever prove this with numbers?
Oooh, there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.
$250M PLUS legal costs PLUS $250M in punitive fees. That should hurt them a bit.
You can’t typically get punitive damages for contract disputes. Also, there is a very real possibility that the contract hasn’t been breached by the new owners’ actions. It sounds like they used their superior bargaining power to put a lot of questionable yet enforceable provisions in the contract.
Ive heard of it once where the defendant litterally wrote a book on how to use overseas buisness to pull off scams like the one he was being accused of
Punitive damages can be awarded for bad-faith bargaining, which definitely seems to be the case here.
It’s a stretch perhaps, but that’s what I think would be reasonable.
Typically, conduct would have to rise to the level of fraud to justify punitives in a contract based dispute. That’s a very high hurdle in most jurisdictions. Also, at that point the conduct complained of would likely be based in tort, not contract.
By what law?
Not a lawyer but I’m guessing it would have to be proven as a justifiable delay.
That’s easy, just say there were features they wanted
i never bought 1. But also the story behind 2 feels like ksp2.
Subnautica was lightning in a bottle.
But you played it Right ?
Right ?
</Anakin meme>
No. I still need to. :/
It’s a really good game and still holds it’s own to this day. Highly recommend it.
If you got vr is best played that way. Best horror game on vr.
it’s a horror game? prob will pass then. Also lemme borrow your vr for porn though. I’ll give it back.
It’s horror in the sense that Bioshock was horror, but much less so. There are some areas with ‘tension’ that you pretty quickly become accustomed to, just as you would in a game where there is a ‘progression’ of areas where each area you move into is quite difficult at first until you get the resources and build the new items from that area.
oh! that’s cool. will put it on my todo list. thanks!!
I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.
Outerwilds is also a must play in vr,
Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w
Best comment. Trust the publisher bro !It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the “right” choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell
Ah shit, is this ZA/UM all over again?
I’m sure there’s some truth in there, but it is hard to believe it entirely. This is what you get for unnecessarily selling your company.
Oh. Huh. That seems important. I wonder what they have to say in response.
Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can’t have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!
Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post…
Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.
When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn’t smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.
When the numbers didn’t look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn’t deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.
When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.
Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don’t play Korean games.
Kpop andcosmetics and whatever are chill. Don’t play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.Don’t buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.
Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.
Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.
Wasn’t it the Chinese that perfected Microtransactions ??
You know Genshin Impact, Azur Lane, ZZZ, Wuthering waves etc…
gachas are japanese in origin
Kpop is extremely exploitative to the artists, much worse than game development.
We’re talking physical and sexual abuse levels here.
Not chill at all.
You’re absolutely right. I was too focused. I crossed that out in my comment. Thanks
Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.
Well, you can’t deny that whatever are still chill, at least. That’s not nothing.
Very fair point. I was a bit hyper-focused. Will edit my previous comment
Dude what did Korean devs ever do to you ? You ARE generalizing a bit. What’s next ?
The devs themselves are fine. It’s the leadership that’s cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It’s just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.
You’re absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I’m confident this one is justified.
Companies only answer to profit and unfortunately we get to see the results. Can’t have those proles making 250 million dollars now. That would eat into the profits of our shareholders.
Publishers are cancer. Self publish whenever possible !
You Don’t Need a F-ing Publisher*
*unless you do.
It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.
A self-published game with a focus on quality will outperform any AAA game.
If you are going to compete with AAA games it’s going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.
A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.
Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a ‘failure’ sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.
Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn’t want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.
I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft’s gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it’s understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it’s just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don’t agree with it.
It’s not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not
I’m at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don’t think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That’s a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been.
Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it and pretend to give it extra development? I haven’t seen any details on why it wasn’t ready for release or what they are changing or adding? A quarter billion dollars in savings seems like pretty good motivation for a company to park a project for 6 to 12 months.
Agreed. Subnautica 1 steam revenue breakdown offers a bit of perspective on why they might want to play pretend.
“How much money did Subnautica make? We estimate that Subnautica made $274,113,745.92 in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $80,863,555.05. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers.”
$274,113,746
GROSS REVENUEADJ. REGIONAL PRICING
$24,670,237.13DISCOUNTS
$54,822,749.18REFUNDS
$32,893,649.51STEAM CUT
$48,518,133.03VAT / SALES TAX
$32,345,422.02NET REVENUE
$80,863,555.05Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
It’s far and away their most profitable game to date, so it would make sense to get some perspective from it. Can you offer anything concrete about their other platform sales? I’m not familiar with any tools for that
According to one of the articles above the publishers operating profit last year was “only” $300m so that bonus would make the shareholders mad I guess.
Is it still more expensive if they just shelve it
Yes. Like, it’s not even a question it’s more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don’t know what their payroll is, but we don’t need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that’s just salary. It’s possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I’m not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren’t getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren’t getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game’s revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?
Everyday up until it releases
What about after it releases? How will I know to keep not buying it?
Shat about after it releases?
Sure, but maybe not in public?
Yup, that title was pure brain fuck.
