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.
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”…
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
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.
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.
That’s not what they think, that’s just how their law lackeys justify horrendous fines. Their market analysts will still see the „talk“ about the game, by people who played, legally or not.
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.
They didn't sell out. That's a childish view.
They made one and a half games (Subnautica and the dlc turned full release), never made the direct sequel, cut thier losses and cashed thier checks.
If they sold out they'd still be on the dev team, making micro transactions for the corpo.
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.”
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
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.
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.
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.
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