That was the one where you had to use cat hair to add a mustache to a fake ID to impersonate a character that had no mustache? Yeah, I don’t really miss moon logic.
Discover was Sears’ in-house charge/credit card. It got spun off by itself but a lot of companies never really started accepting Discover.
American Express, their whole thing is exclusivity. It’s the card you use to pay at fancy places. They charge merchants more in service fees, so a lot of places just don’t do business with them.
Stop buying things. Go to your bank and withdraw cash. Write checks.
Catch a goose and catch an octopus. Wring the ink out of the goose, pluck a feather out of the octopus, dip the feather in the ink, and write a check like they did in the good old days.
Before the Krafton acquisition, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has produced Natural Selection 2 (the first was a Half Life mod, not sure it counts), which sold 300,000 copies, Subanutica sold “over five million” at a $30 price point, and I can’t find any sales numbers for Below Zero, but for back of the napkin math let’s say it sold about as well as Subnautica at ~5 million copies, again at $30.
So both Subnautica and Below Zero grossed $150 million. Subtract the 30% that Steam takes, and you’re left with $100 million, so $200 million between those two games would have been the net take.
Meanwhile, Moonbreaker happened, and I have no sales figures for that.
Everybody talks about what a massive hit Subnautica is, and while it is a successful game, Stardew Valley sold 40 million copies. Subnautica 2 stood a good chance of being a solid commercial success with tons of 2 hour Youtube video essays about how it compares to the original. It was never going to make $750 million. Even if it outsold Subnautica and Below Zero combined at double the price. Add in merch, Peeper plushies, T-shirts, ball caps, they were talking about a movie…Subnautica 2 was going to make a good chunk of that but wasn’t going to make it all.
As far as I can tell, they never intended to pay that $250 million bonus, it was probably offered in bad faith as incentive to sell the studio, and when it looked like they were actually going to pull off the conditions Krafton broke the contract in order to break the contract.
If I get my way, Krafton will never do business in the United States again, and since I’m a vengeful asshole that likes doing brain surgery with a backhoe, I’d probably ban Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Honda, and half of those aren’t even Korean.
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.
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.
See they should have done a Charlie’s Angels type thing, have them standing kind of back to back like they’re on the same team. But I guess that won’t have been as controversial.
Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.