Pop it in your calendars

Below Zero was ass anyways

Agree. Did not get sucked in like subnautica, which is weird because it's basically a small reskin and new (but much smaller) map.
It should have worked, but it very didn't.
- Is it actually smaller, though?
  Don't get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
  The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
  The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply 'there' to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
  Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited 'main' areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you'd just wander in to while exploring.
  The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
  The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
  The "AI" companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
  Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
  The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them ... not greater than the sum of their parts.
  I think it could've been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome "over there" largely literally on land. The ice worm would've been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it's been a while) could've been way cooler if it wasn't for one biome "over there", too.
  I don't know how much larger it'd need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would've gone a LONG way.

Now this has been rather disproved, do we think we could retract the post? It's probably done harm already but we can at least acknowledge it's no longer accurate.

What do you mean this has been disproven?
Can you provide some context. A link maybe?
- If you visit the official website of krafton https://www.krafton.com/en/ you should get this pop up:
  Basically, Krafton claims that the 3 founders they fired did not do their job in overseeing the project, leading to a game without any direction. Since the game would not meet their standards, they decided to rework a lot and push the release date back.
  This is an official statement of a company, meaning they can be (and if I read it correctly have been) sued for slander should they lie here. So a legal department looked over this and decided "Yep, we can claim that they abandoned responsibilities, we can prove that in court". Whether or not this is actually true or just an attempt to regain public opinion, it's a real shitshow.
Can you elaborate on that please?
Is Flayra not pursuing legal action against Krafton over this?

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 and cosmetics 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.

Dude what did Korean devs ever do to you ? You ARE generalizing a bit. What's next ?
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.
- Wasn't it the Chinese that perfected Microtransactions ??
  You know Genshin Impact, Azur Lane, ZZZ, Wuthering waves etc...
- 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.
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.
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.

Subnautica is one of those games that's incredible hard to recreate. Once they started trying to explain every little thing about the aliens I completely lost interest. You may be able to bottle lightning, but you certainly can't do it twice.

Avast ye matey!

Avast ye matey!

Honestly, I do not plan to buy it after Below Zero. Now that they did all the evil stuff I guess my decision is well justified.

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?

Yup, that title was pure brain fuck.
Everyday up until it releases
- What about after it releases? How will I know to keep not buying it?
Yes

Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn't happen. I'm apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn't care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.

jokes on them, i already pirate their games ☕

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.
It’s a canon event for any ~~game~~ company that ~~achieves moderate success~~ gets acquired by investors
Very much not exclusive to the game industry
- True :3
  I just said game to stay on topic tbh
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
- Or the Terraria team.
- 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.
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.

Well this just wrecked my evening.

But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.

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

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?

And they want to add micro transactions

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
But they said they wouldn't!

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 through 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.
- Do you have a recommended flavor of Linux for gaming?
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.

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?
- You can see the numbers here, for instance: https://steamdb.info/stats/mostwished/
- Steam itself shows the rankings, I believe.

I remember Flayra from Natural Selection, a half-life mod twenty years ago. I remember him making appeals for investors/donations to keep Unknown Worlds afloat (or maybe just launch it as a company. I recall a video he posted where he showed us his tiny apartment and the milk in his fridge.)

Then Subnautica came out years later and I thought 'Well I'll be damned.'

Were you on the NS forums? I went by "Scythe" back in those days.
- A bit, yeah. Same username then as today. I was with NSArmsLab and BAD Clan mostly those days.
  Weird to think that was 20+ years ago.

Natural Selection and then Natural Selection 2 - no games or communities like it. Before there time both of them and very much under appreciated. Felt like NS2 never really found it's rhythm but Unknown World kept it going longer than most games.

Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games
NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It's also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.
It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life... but that doesn't ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!
My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot... ;-;
*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat
- I feel the same way - both take the top spot as my all-time best games.
  I will say - It was a mistake building their own game engine for NS2. I realise options were limited but they bit off more than they could chew and that came out in the launch and first 3 years or so, as you say. Yeah the co-op and commander concept was both what made it awesome and contributed to its downfall. They tried to make it easier by making it so Gorges became a support role rather than critical to the alien comm but was too little, too late.
  I would 100% back a crowdunded NS3, as I did with NS2. The eSports scene is far more mature now, it could work.
The original NS was so fucking good, man. I lived in that game for several years. The competitive scene was awesome.
- Me too! Did in person LAN events and managed servers for Multiplay. No game will ever come close to the engaged community. Fusion X was my clan from start to end.
- Was that the half-life mod that mixed RTS and FPS?

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
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!
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.
Ah shit, is this ZA/UM all over again?
Oh. Huh. That seems important. I wonder what they have to say in response.

You should get a publisher if:

You want to make one game then get fired

You want your work to be bastardized by the publisher in the future

You want countless hours of overtime/crunch and no compensation

You want to be another disposable cog in the machine

If that doesn't sound like something you want, self-publish.

I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.

I'm not ignorant of it, just uninterested. I've watched gameplay footage of the first one, and it didn't look like my kind of game.
- First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn't actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.
  For people who've played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.

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.rockpapershotgun.com/krafton-plan-to-delay-subnautica-2-and-deny-the-studio-a-250-million-bonus
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- You said it was a fact when it’s just a suspicion
This fact check provided by EA Games.

Publishers are cancer. Self publish whenever possible !

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
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.

Yar har fiddle dee dee

I feel like I learn more about what I shouldn't play then what games I should play when I am on here.

You want to hear about a game to play?
Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it's a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it's all stellar.

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.
By what law?
- Not a lawyer but I'm guessing it would have to be proven as a justifiable delay.

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. :/

Pirate all Krafton games.

Edit. Apparently there's more to the story.

Why can't the OG devs just opensource the code out of spite. Would be a big middle-finger

Would you wanna get sued for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and lose?
- Of course not, but let's say one of the devs leaked it onto the internet😉

I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who thought Subnautica was boring and tedious. It was definitely not for me

Nah, that's valid. I loved it to bits, myself, but what made me love it was how adroitly I felt it curated feelings of dread and sincere awe as I explored deeper and deeper; and that's highly subjective. I hope you're finding as much joy in your own fave games as I did in Subnautica!
I also wasn't a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.
I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.
- That phase does end. The various vehicles allowed for exploration without returning to the surface, as do deep sea bases.
  At the same time, I fully understand why you feel that way. The crunch is required for the fear to be meaningful, it's not everybody's cup of tea.
- I don't know how far you made it but if you make the biggest vehicle you can add planters inside the vehicle which significantly cuts down the need to restock. That said, in the end game the survival elements become so trivialize they end meaningless busywork even if you have planters.
Couldn't get into the main game. In VR, however, just exploring was an unforgettable experience.
- It's just a shame it's such a half arsed VR conversion. Way too much UI going on for my tastes.
- I want to love it in VR. It's taking me a long time to train my stomach to accept it however. It gives me SERIOUS motion sickness in VR.
It's a popular streamer game, which means long gaps where nothing happens.
I found it to be tense and interesting while playing. But looking back, I can't really put my finger on what made it that way. I swam around and gathered resources to build boats, make food and fresh water - I can't really ser what the big drive was. But I certainly loved it enough to finish it, which is rare for me regarding most games.
That whole survival crafting genre seems very hit or miss to me, and I've noticed that people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they'll like another one. Subnautica, Don't Starve, Minecraft, and Ark are all theoretically the same genre but very different games.
However I've also seen a lot of people say that Subnautica was the one that clicked for them. I think the story and progression was big for a lot of people.
- people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they’ll like another one
  I love survival/building games, and so do most of my friends. Even the terrible ones are usually fun. So I'd posit that it's the opposite with a caveat: liking one for more than its story means you'll enjoy the others.
  I think it's more indicative of games/hobbies as a whole than the survival genre specifically. People who love the adrenaline of a motorcycle may not enjoy the thrill of going down a mile high mountain on two thin sticks, IF it was the rumble of the engine beneath them that they actually enjoyed. If it was the rush of the speed though (or in the case of survival/building games, the exploration and struggle to stay alive and not lose your stuff), then they'll likely enjoy the other adrenaline sports.
No, sane here. I also didn't find its gameplay loop fun, although the graphics were incredible.
Edit: I meant 'same', but I'm leaving it.
- Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
I just can't get into it. I can see there's a progress path of stuff to do, but it feels like there's grind to get anywhere.
- That grind is also why you actually feel like you are losing something if you die, and consequently makes you anxious about going deeper.
It was very much not an action oriented game. It was more about building resources and exploration. I can definitely see it not appealing to large swatches of the gaming population. Especially those used to the modern spate of action rpgs.
Same here.

I never cared for Subnautica I also never cared for PUBG

But what little I know about PUBG, What I've seen them do to Subnautica 2, and that lazy AI ridden "Sims killer" Inzoi, Im of the opinion Krafton are just hustlers.

The original Subnautica is worth playing, it's a fantastic game with an interesting world, intriguing story, and actually fun gameplay and vehicles. The vehicles themselves are extremely fun, too.
- Original subnautica is amazing. I've played it twice which is a really high bar for me cause I rarely replay story driven games
  Below zero isn't bad either, I enjoyed it but it doesn't come close to my first playthrough of subnautica
The Ai features in Inzoi are pretty nifty tho, generating any texture for clothing in-game with only a prompt is insanely cool.
- the creation in the game is advanced, its the gameplay inbetween the character creator and house designer that I find to be hollow

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.

Just typical KRAFTON doing KRAFTON things.

Oh fucking god dammit. I was really looking forward to it too.

Well... Piracy it is, then.

Or do the boycott right and don’t play the game at all.
- Doing the boycott "right" means not paying money. Corpos think each pirated copy is a loss. That's how they explain it to their investors too:
  "Look at all this money we're not making because of those damn dirty pirates!"
- I’ll just watch some let’s plays on YouTube
Probably not really feasible - it will require constant connection to a back-end server to play or some bullshit like that.
But even if you can, that's not the answer. The proper action is to deny them entirely. Don't play the game, don't play PUBG, don't do anything that expands their reach, money or not.
They need to suffer with NOBODY playing this game. They need to suffer by people deleting their Battlegrounds accounts. Software piracy is what makes games legendary.

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 REVENUE
  ADJ. REGIONAL PRICING
  $24,670,237.13
  DISCOUNTS
  $54,822,749.18
  REFUNDS
  $32,893,649.51
  STEAM CUT
  $48,518,133.03
  VAT / SALES TAX
  $32,345,422.02
  NET REVENUE
  $80,863,555.05
- 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.

But can I still buy the OG subnautica?

What is the next project of the og subnautica creator?
Heads up: once in a blue moon it’s on “sale” for free on Epic Games.
(Ask me how I know.)
- Fuck epic games, but I was happy I didn't have to buy it a second time on steam to play it with my kid.
  I'm just contemplating to get the mobile version of Subnautica.

I don't understand how game dev works, how does a publishing company fire the CEO of a game dev company. Like do these publishers own the game company?

Very often they do, but not always. In this particular case they do.
- Fuckin vertical integration bullshit

Nooooooooooooooo I was literally just talking about being excited for this game.

"But it's still mostly the same team, please give us the benefit of the doubt 😭😭😭😭"

Don't be stupid, don't buy from a publisher before the 1.0 release

I’ve never bought a game that isn’t indie since 5 years 🫡

Same except I made an exception for fromsoftware lol

Die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain

This looks less like heroes becoming villains and more like villains (who were always villains) tricking the hero and murdering them. Unknown World's founders and developers of the first game all got fired by the company that acquired them.
- Definitely died as heroes.
- The founders are the villains of this piece as much as Krafton. They sold out for a big payday. This was all very predictable.
  You’d have to really dense to think that Krafton is going to come along with half a billion dollars and just let things carry on as usual.

I mean, I wasn’t planning on buying it before I played it anyway.

Yo ho all together hoist the colours high...

Pirate it is

Ok, no problem.

Arrrr...

Just an Idea but could it be that the game was delayed because it is just not ready yet? Yes it could be an evil scheme sure, but maybe it is not. Has anyone here really any hard facts or insider information about the true status of the game?

It's always possible but the announcement coincides with the abrupt termination of head staff so that makes it suspicious. Still could be just for quality's sake though, I dont know if we can find out something like that unless they want us to
apparently the original devs were not interested in this lol

So is like what happened in ZA/UM with Disco Elysium?

Is this definitely what those devs are asking for? Sure this isn't just cutting them twice?

My last EA game was Battlefield 3 and I have never purchased an EA game since. Has that stopped EA? No. Why? People will buy it anyway because once their friends buy it, they have to buy it too. Companies all know gamer heard mentality. Your best bet is to slap that digital copy out of your friends' hands right onto the floor. I don't know how you do that, but that would be a nice thing to have.

One of my more depressing moments in dealing with the human race was when people were boycotting Blizzard a few years ago for.. well, everything. But the sexual harassment and discrimination scandal was the final straw for a lot of people.
I talked about it with my gaming friends on discord at the time, everyone agreed that what the company was doing was terrible, but the more we talked about it, the more they delved into nostalgia and thought about how much fun they had playing WoW when they were younger.
The next day I jump in discord and all five of them had reactivated their subscriptions and were having the time of their life running around WoW without a care in the world. I wanted to throw up.
Our species is fundamentally stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance. We will never have good things.
The biggest crime in AAA games is the tools paying top dollar for preorders and early access to games that have beta-level problems with gameplay.
Wait three or more months, they almost always go on sale and have had a patch or two. More playable, save $.
I was on an EA boycott for a while without even realising it. They just stopped making anything that interested me.
Only broke it for It Takes Two and Split Fiction, which I paid full price for. I did play a few Respawn games as well (Titanfall 2 and the Jedi games) but got them either as part of PSPlus or Humble Bundles.

they did such a bad job on Below Zero, this could be a turn for the better for the series. though if there are microtransactions that would kill it.

Below Zero wasn't a bad game.

I will wait and see how its release goes, not that I ever pre ordered a game anyways

I don't have high hopes but I'm going to save my opinions for when it's released

This isn't a question of whether or not the game is good, it's a question of whether or not you want to support a publisher that will resort to these types of tactics. Guess it depends on your brand of morality.
- The dev bonus payout is still unconfirmed and is a rumor until of course either an insider confirms it or it gets confirmed at the end of 2025, when the payout is supposed to happen. Who knows exactly how true it will be, hence why I'm not basing my opinion on it just yet. Could end up being moved to a different date, could end up being true. I just dislike immediately raising pitchforks just because a terrible thing supposedly may happen. I have enough patience to wait and see what the future holds.
  Yea the founders getting ousted is a bit of a sour taste. I just have less sympathy for them since they were also the ones who sold the company in the first place.

Not sure I can support that take. Kinda focussed on the headline there and ignores the fact that other people work there also, that are probably relying on the success of this game for their paychecks and ability to keep making games. The dev industry in general is not in great shape atm.

Let the courts sort out shady business practices imo.

Support a decent game (if it is decent).

Certainly don't preorder. Looking at you internet denisons.

other people got paid already. they most likely wont loose money or portfolio if you boycott. its rare that lower level devs and artists are getting any percent of the sales numbers. This talking point from you is coming straigt from bigger publishers all the way to stockholders that have nothing to do with the product.
- If a studio goes under cause of lack of sales of a game it's not the execs who suffer. Can't see the point your making rn?

I thought the people fired were executives, not creatives.

Edit: I also don't see how a boycott helps the actual people working on the game.

Yeah, I'm just going to wait and see. If it's good, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.

I'll pirate it

Set your stopwatches for when Tango gets shafted right before releasing their next game.

Crosspost this on other communities and social media apps

Didn't even know what it was

Yikes!

I'm not particularly excited about this upcoming dumpster fire...Already took it off my Wishlist.

Gib sauce!

Welp, guess I'm going to not buy it harder then...

what's unknown worlds? and why should I care?

I'm so sorry there aren't only posts about the latest Valorant skins here :(
- idk I thought unknown worlds was some kind of video game I'd never heard of
Lemmy is not for you

Never heard of it, probably never will once I forget about this post.

O no!!! I didn't even buy subnautica one!!!

As much as I hate Nintendo, publishing wise they’re good.

Jesus tapdancing christ is the subnautica fanbase rabid. How about we actually wait and see how the game turns out before we crucify everyone?

I do agree that you should definitely not pre-order it and remove it from your wishlist. But you should've done that already.

How about we actually wait and see how the game turns out before we crucify everyone?
Why does it matter how the game turns out if the stance is "we don't want to fund shady developers fucking over content creators"?
- Afaik krafton have been insisting for a while that the game is not ready. Founders disagreed and they were ousted. But seeing as the previous two games were in pretty dire state when they released into EA, I wouldn't really trust the founder's word on it. The whole "squirreling out of paying them 250 million" thing seems like speculation, but what do I know.
  Besides, the OP is just ragebainting, because we know exactly fuckall about the game's actual state at this point.

I feel like one of these days, some corporation will lobby the government to make piracy a felony and literally send swat team to people's houses. That's how dystopian the future will get. Mark my words.

Gotta be honest, I would do the same and worse for 250 million dollars.