At this point anyone selling a company to a bigger studio is just either ignorant or greedy. It’s almost a given that they’ll just crash it into the grounds. Acquisitions and mergers might be like the eighth deadly sin. Everyone loses.
Who cares? It’s the audiences fault for assuming that prior performance is an indicator of future performance. Let the founders cash out. Buyers get rich because audiences think quality will be maintained post acquisition. How often does that really happen though?
Yeah I mean, I have a hard time being too sympathetic to people who unnecessarily sold their company. There is no reason to do it. If you need money, you can always get investors to get a minor stake or something.
The second I heard the heard the firings happens and the rumors behind why I removed the game from my wishlist. And as more slowly comes out it makes Krafton look worse and worse
If they can prove breach of contract they can maybe get their IP back. Wishlists are a huge deal for if they want to shop the game around to other publishers.
Let’s be honest. Soon, Subnautica 2 will be on the front page of Steam, likely for a month or more. People who have no idea any of this is happening, nor care will buy it up in droves and in six months, none of this will matter, and you’ll all have likely pirated it by then anyway.
This honestly feels like an “everyone sucks here” situation. It’s obviously bad that the publisher just sacked the 3 founders of a developer and replaced them with a CEO from a developer they just scuttled… But then there is this terrible sell-out deal the devs went for where 1/3 of the sale price of the company was tied up in sales performance with the deadline rapidly approaching so of course they want to put out a shiny new title for people to buy even though they keep having to cut the planned content down to almost nothing. (supposedly, obvi I haven’t played it…)
AND THEN there is what I am calling Schrodinger’s Beta. It is supposedly right now ready for early access release (which means Krafton delaying the game is proof of being shady and avoiding the bonus), but also likely going to flop because they got rid of the founders and now they won’t have the devs to make it any good (making Krafton correct in delaying the EA because it isn’t ready yet…).
This whole thing is a mess of pointing fingers and no one knows what’s real. Truth of the matter is probably that both sides are right. Dev’s want to push the game out to get the rest of what they feel they are owed, whether the game is ready for EA be damned. Publisher wants to not pay for any of that, downsize the dev team to finish production as cheap as possible just to drop a steaming turd with just enough name recognition to keep their line going up, but not to make enough money they can’t plausible deniability sink another developer. I hope I’m wrong, because I was looking forward to Subnautica 2 (mostly just to have a multiplayer subnautica experience), but the industry has mostly convinced me to assume the worst in everyone.
This story comes alongside numerous reports from the dev team that said the team felt it was ready. Plus it was only supposed to launch into early access.
They still both “could” be true. Though more likely something else was a foot. Maybe the earnings target was set poorly such that the payout was more than the increased earnings. You would think in general that such a clause would be mutually beneficial, but clearly one side didn’t think so.
In their suit, the founders said that Krafton was aware of their new roles and that Cleveland had spent a large amount of time working on a Subnautica film, which Krafton had asked the studio to develop.
The moment they put someone who oversee the development of Calisto Protocol as CEO, it already smell like a seamoth full of dead peeper. Now this one? This one takes the cake.
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.
Seeing how publisher buying company and fucked their employees, now i’m super glad Hoopo sell only the IP to Gearbox, and not the whole company. Unknown Worlds might as well become a f2p company now, and my interest had plunged below zero.
bloomberg.com
Aktywne