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.
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.
Yea but what are executive responsibilities to a company? They generally are not creative and dynamic positions and instead focus on producing results for the corporate body. I could readily see Krafton firing them for trying to make a fun and compelling game as opposed to a profitable game ripe for DLC, for example. Of course they’d couch such money grubbing expectations in to language of the managerial class…
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.
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.
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Bloomberg 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
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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.
I wouldn’t call this proof. Krafton is known for pulling stuff like this.
Yea but what are executive responsibilities to a company? They generally are not creative and dynamic positions and instead focus on producing results for the corporate body. I could readily see Krafton firing them for trying to make a fun and compelling game as opposed to a profitable game ripe for DLC, for example. Of course they’d couch such money grubbing expectations in to language of the managerial class…
Can you elaborate on that please?
Is Flayra not pursuing legal action against Krafton over this?
I mean, I wasn’t planning on buying it before I played it anyway.
Nooooooooooooooo I was literally just talking about being excited for this game.
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.
I’m still waiting for Obsidian to finish writing the second half of Tyranny and I won’t be buying another of their games until they do.
Source?
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.
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
It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
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.
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.
Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It’s once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry
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.
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.
Or the Terraria team.
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
deleted by creator
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
Rip ZA/UM
Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.
This fact check provided by EA Games.
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
I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher
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 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.
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.
Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/njpO8
Archive link for the Bloomberg article in case the gift link stops working https://archive.is/2mltm
You said it was a fact when it’s just a suspicion
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.
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
Gotta be honest, I would do the same and worse for 250 million dollars.
Arrrr…
Yikes!
Oh fucking god dammit. I was really looking forward to it too.
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’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.
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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.
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.
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
Bloomberg 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
Just typical KRAFTON doing KRAFTON things.
Gib sauce!