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”…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
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
It’s a canon event for any
gamecompany thatachieves moderate successgets acquired by investorsVery much not exclusive to the game industry
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
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/
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?
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.
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.’
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.
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
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
