It's a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success

And they want to add micro transactions

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"..

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.

Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.

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?

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.

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.

Oooh, there's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

$250M PLUS legal costs PLUS $250M in punitive fees. That should hurt them a bit.

i never bought 1. But also the story behind 2 feels like ksp2.

Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w

Publishers are cancer. Self publish whenever possible !

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.

You should get a publisher if:

You want to make one game then get fired

You want your work to be bastardized by the publisher in the future

You want countless hours of overtime/crunch and no compensation

You want to be another disposable cog in the machine

If that doesn't sound like something you want, self-publish.

I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who thought Subnautica was boring and tedious. It was definitely not for me

Well... Piracy it is, then.

I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.

Well this just wrecked my evening.

But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.

Pirate all Krafton games.

Edit. Apparently there's more to the story.

Yar har fiddle dee dee

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 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.