Honestly maybe the last Xbox will be the last one I buy.
Yes. I also stopped buying XBoxes with the Series…G. (I’m lying. I have no idea what my Xboxes are called. Is the 360 still new? Was there a G? It felt like we were doing letters for awhile.)
Even if they put out another one what’s even the point anymore?
I agree. But I gave up when I had to do research to figure out which one was the new one.
Tbh I never really had trouble with which was which, despite their ridiculous naming conventions. And like the console is decent and they do a lot of things right. But also unless I’m just paying them a monthly fee for gamepass to get access to games that are also on other consoles then there’s no real particular benefit to the console aside from what backwards compatibility it offers. Which is okay but not nearly full BC coverage. And at this point with all the studios they’ve gutted, what more would a new console even bring to the table? An $800 price tag maybe.
Any business executive who graduated after 1993 can’t run a business sustainably…all they know is line go up, microtransactions, layoffs, give themself bonus, buzzwords & lie.
According to the article the old leadership wanted to share the bonus with the whole development team of around 100 people. I don’t think the motivation of the team will be great now that the publisher pushed the bonus in unreachable distance. Fucking assholes can’t even stand by their own promises.
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.
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.
One developer at a separate company who played Subnautica 2 and requested anonymity because they signed a non-disclosure agreement told Bloomberg they enjoyed the game and that it “seemed way more robust” than other titles in early access.
Yeah, this is clearly the publisher trying to get out of paying the full bonus.
When I first heard about the firings and the delay to the game I thought "This doesn't sound plausible. Are they really going to ruin their investment and effectively kill the company to supposedly save a quarter of a billion. That would be unbelievably stupid". But with every subsequent nugget of information it's getting increasingly clearer that they, Krafton, actually are unbelievably stupid. They're pretty much guaranteed that if Subnautica 2 gets released (and that's assuming Subnautica 2 is in a good enough position to be released) the studio will shutter as all the talent will move on and all the money Krafton spent acquiring the studio is thrown in the wind. They're not even going to save the quarter billion because the delay means they're going to be paying at least 6 months wages for minimum effort work because I doubt anyone at that studio is willing to put in the effort after being cheated out of their bonus.
Even if it's all so obvious I still find it hard to believe the publisher is THAT stupid. But that's the world we live in, where people get to make idiotic decisions because they're greedy as fuck.
They paid for their expertise, even offering a bonus that was clearly less than whatever their projected profit would be, and then tried to squander it because they didn’t listen to their expertise.
Publishers in all kinds of industries are risk adverse to the point of not trusting whoever they made deals with to follow through. This is totally on brand for publishers!
Yeah in the world where EA exist and Xbox close down a studio that just launched a successful game and also fire bunch of people and shutting down lot of project, this doesn’t sound far fetch at all.
I guess the lesson the first game trying to teach is to never believe any giant corporation.
I doubt anyone at that studio is willing to put in the effort after being cheated out of their bonus
Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of those 250 million were going to the three people that were fired, not the actual workers. I stopped caring about this issue when I learned that, seems like just rich people bickering to me.
That's according to Krafton and we know they will bend the truth to create a narrative. But even if it's true I still think Krafton are the assholes here. I'm less concerned when people in positions of power don't get their position enabled bonuses, but Krafton is also taking away whatever bonus the actual workers were originally promised.
I mean, the publisher seems to be pretty stupid, because…how did they figure that $250 million?
There are two entries in the Subnautica series, Subnautica and Below Zero. Subnautica has sold “over 5 million copies” at a retail price point of $30. So that’s $150 million in gross revenue. For this back of the napkin math I’ll assume that the “over five million” and the number of copies sold at a discount come out in the wash. 30% of that gross revenue is going to immediatley go to Steam or whatever other platform, so the company got $100 million in net revenue before their own expenses like rent and power bills gets at it.
I cannot find sales figures for Below Zero, but it sells for the same price point and I don’t think it could have possibly sold more than Subnautica did, so let’s figure another $150 million gross, $100 million net.
Subnautica as a franchise netted its studio ~$200 million across the launch of two games selling ~10 million copies.
And Krafton had agreed to pay out a $250 million bonus for reaching a certain revenue target in 2025, which they were on track to do given the announced early access launch.
Just to put them in the black for that bonus, Subnautica 2 would have to sell better than both previous games put together at a higher price, and that doesn’t touch the purchase of the studio, operating expenses, or the dump truck of cocaine that must have been involved in these financial decisions.
I didn't want to think they're completely incompetent so I decided to do some digging. That $250 million is actually part of their acquisition deal. Krafton technically bought Unknown Worlds for $750 million. $500 million was paid up front and the extra $250 million was due for 2026 if Unknown Worlds met the performance clause. That $250 million has nothing to do with the sales of Subnautica, it's part of the buyout.
This could mean they were always going to try and stiff Unknown Worlds. It also means it's probably less about the people working at Unknown Worlds getting stiffed and more about the leadership expecting a payout that was agreed upon.
So what? Things are mostly valued by what the projected performance is, not the prior performance.
Also it seems that Krafton assumed they would miss the performance criteria, so they thought they’d bought it for $500 million. That doesn’t sound unreasonable for a studio that made $250 million with a single release and already had more in its pipeline.
What do you base projected performance on if not prior performance?
I don’t think Unknown Worlds did have a $250 million single release; that’s probably what they netted across three games, Natural Selection 2, Subnautica, Below Zero.
Stupidity is an ingredient in betting against your own teams. Because this is what happens, you put yourself in a position where you don’t want your own victories.
Any way, I see it as our goal as the game playing public to figure out how to make this cost Krafton more than $250 million.
““This doesn’t sound plausible. Are they really going to ruin their investment and effectively kill the company to supposedly save a quarter of a billion”
A wildly succesful game, so what did the publisher do after having released a wildly succesful game and having the team that made it under their wings? Fire them all and try to weasel out of the promised bonuses.
It was standard practice 30 years ago, and it still is…
Standard practice has been to fuck over the developers after release. They haven't released Subnautica 2 yet. They're screwing the developers over before they've cashed out the game. That's the part that made it implausible in my mind.
We don't know the exact state of the game but what we know is that it's early access ready. If previous Unknown world games are of any indication it's still 2 years away from final release. They might make some money back with early access but it will be negatively reviewed under the pretense that it will not be properly finished. The release is already guaranteed to take a financial hit.
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.
bloomberg.com
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