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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w
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
Best comment. Trust the publisher bro !
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.
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”…
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?
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
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.
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.
