Subnautica 2 Players Are Making Krafton Pay

Añadido: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Many of you are enjoying Subnautica 2 right now. Not me, because it seems I've fallen into some sort of black void.

[00:00:04]But, a man who's not enjoying Subnautica 2 is the man who published it. Krafton CEO Changham Kim. And that's because for every dollar Subnautica 2 makes, he owes $3.12 to the leadership that he, rather recently, tried to fire. And that goes right up to a cap of $250 million.

[00:00:23]And as we've now found out, well, that $250 million is why he fired Unknown Worlds' leadership and tried to deny them their contracted bonuses. The better Subnautica 2 does, the worse it gets for Krafton, which is a pretty funny state of affairs. But, it may actually still get even worse for Krafton, because the judge ain't done yet. This whole story is honestly insane. It's a situation where Krafton didn't want Subnautica 2 to be released.

[00:00:50]Now, to understand that, basically, here's kind of how things shook out.

[00:00:54]Krafton paid half a billion dollars to acquire the developer Unknown Worlds in 2021 with up to $250 million in performance bonuses for senior leadership if results were good within 5 years. Now, last July, after Krafton's financial projections showed that they would owe $191 million in the base case for the game's release, well, they kind of realized they didn't want to pay that money. So, they fired leadership and they delayed the game, basically all to play funny business with this contract.

[00:01:25]And from there, we've had a year of legal drama. We discovered fun things like how the founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire had actually mostly stepped away from the studio. And some other fun things like Krafton's analysts actually thinking Subnautica 2 was ready to release. Obviously though, other bits of Krafton didn't want the game to release. The big bit being Changham Kim, CEO. He really didn't want to pay that money and he resorted to asking ChatGPT to help him get out of the deal that he signed. This all, of course, failed, went to court, and the court sided with the founders and restored Unknown Worlds as CEO Ted Gill to his position. They even gave him control of the Steam page and the game's launch. What a launch that has been. It is going to sting for Krafton.

[00:02:10]Though, the thing with playing all these games and running this channel is that my entire day can just vanish between scripts, recording, titles, thumbnails, team decisions, studio move chaos, admin stuff, all of that. And Trainwell is basically what's [music] helping me get things back on track. They sponsor this video. I'm about to hit 32. I need to take my health more seriously, and I am working with Nate, my personal [music] trainer. You see, Trainwell pairs you with a real personal trainer. Nate is mine. He's so warm. He's lovely. He knows his stuff. He's fellow gamer. We get on great. And you know what? The value is having an actual person who understands my actual week. Where, you know, we've had a big long call just making a plan, shooting the I guess him finding out about me, and then as a personal trainer learning, "Okay, here's how I actually train." Not just a random human, but this specific human.

[00:03:00]That is the thing that a generic workout app can't do. So, now I'm set up with stuff in my office. I've got kettlebells, dumbbells, enough space to do a lot of basic moves. And the thing is, it works because Nate has programmed around, I guess, my reality. There's times he's had to change my schedule. I mean, we've done it recently. So, I have two bigger sessions a week that I can block out in my calendar so I can actually defend that time. And then, a lot of diet and habit stuff in between all of that. Now, what's really awesome is the Trainwell app works with all of this. It tracks all the sets, the rest periods. There are video demos, pacing, all of that stuff. So, what that means is that if we program a short little session that I can sort of squeeze between things, it's so easy to start.

[00:03:45]But then, whenever I go to do a more blocked out larger training session, you literally just start it on the app, and the whole thing basically flows itself.

[00:03:54]All you do is pay attention to the app, do the movements, and well, you'll get those gains. I love their product. I love their service, and it just means that I'm getting fitness without it being another huge project that I have to manage [music] when I already feel really taxed. So, to start, take the quiz at trainwell.net/bellularnews. [music] You'll get yourself matched with your personal trainer, and you'll be able to start with 14 days for free. Normally, we talk about the likes of day one sales, but for this game, we've actually got to do the the one hour sales because the game had sold a million copies in an hour. 12 hours later, it was 2 million, and across all platforms, it hit concurrency of 651,000. [music] That's a huge number, but if we're to look just at Steam, and even before the weekend, the early access launch hit the 29th highest concurrency record in Steam's history. So, pretty good for what started off as an indie game. None of this stuff should really be surprising to any of us. Subnautica 2 had 5 million wishlists on Steam by the 11th of May. There was massive interest by, you know, long-term fans, but also the legal drama put like what, millions of views on the Subnautica. And it basically turns out that, in a way, spite can be a powerful motivator. Now, the positivity on Steam has dipped a little bit. It was hovering around 94% in the earlier days, and basically, it's really good Subnautica, right? The game is everything people liked about Subnautica, but there's basically just more of it. There is, of course, early access voidables. Those are always a thing, but the other drama in and around this has been the end user license agreement. Basically, after having looked into this, it really seems Krafton's lawyers copy-pasted in a whole bunch of boilerplate that have people worried about streaming, privacy, and ownership. Those are all fair things to be worried about. And of course, it's Krafton. Just look at their CEO going to chat GPT for legal strategy. So, some people, given all of this, are also convinced that the EULA was written by an AI. From what we can tell, it wasn't.

[00:06:02]It's just boilerplate. It's longer and it's more detailed than most online games. And a massive silver lining on it is that most of the EULA, most of the spooky things, are unenforceable for many people. Like, as an example, any arbitration clause that's outside the US. Now, Unknown Worlds themselves walked back enforcement of the EULA in Discord, but the EULA does confirm something that players seem to have misunderstood before the launch. And that's the Krafton still owns Unknown Worlds. Now, I know if you've been paying attention to the story, that won't be surprising to you. But yes, Krafton owns the company. It's still Krafton publishing this game. But based on the payout that they're about to have to make, they probably wish they weren't. So, let's get to that. So, a month before the launch, something changed in Steam. And that was that Unknown Worlds replaced Krafton as the publisher for Subnautica 2. So, if you were just looking at the Steam page, you might think, "Oh, okay, cool. They're self-publishing the game." And loads of people did just interpret that as Krafton being out of the process entirely. But that's definitely not the case. Unknown Worlds themselves described it as a, quote, "co-publishing arrangement." And it's one that is seemingly enforced by the court rulings.

[00:07:10]Now, those give Gill, the CEO, full authority over the Steam publishing platforms. And that is basically why Krafton disappeared. Now, those are the same rulings that have also shown how badly this may go for Krafton in a [music] financial sense. So, the court extended the earnout period for the $250 million bonus by the time between Gill's firing and the court ruling, which pushed it to September 15th. And you got to remember, a lot of the funny business Krafton was doing was basically just trying to run out the clock and say, "Ah, guys, sorry. We we just can't publish this game. It's not ready yet."

[00:07:47]When in reality, Krafton's own people seem to have thought that it was ready, and they were just trying to bump the game out of this bonus period. Here's where it gets more fun, because there's also an option to extend the bonus payout period further, which all gives Unknown Worlds more time to hit their revenue goals. And the immediate news is they're pretty damn well on their way.

[00:08:07]And the court actually confirmed that the terms of the deal were and are this.

[00:08:12]If Unknown Worlds surpasses a revenue threshold of 69.8 million, Krafton must pay $3.12 for each additional dollar of revenue generated up to the $250 million cap.

[00:08:25]Now, let's do some maths. Subnautica 2 is currently $30 a copy, with Krafton probably keeping a good chunk until they recoup their publishing costs. But, here's the thing. This is not based on profit, right? This is all about revenue earned. And what that means is that as soon as the revenue threshold is met, Krafton are actually paying more than they are earning per copy, which is quite funny, and it works out to a $2.12 deficit on all income. Lovely stuff for them. Now, to reach 69.8 million in revenue with no other input from any other Unknown Worlds games, so say other Subnautica stuff selling, they would need about 2.3 million copies shifted.

[00:09:08]Of course, if you remember the start of the video, that they shifted 2 million copies in a day, right? So, almost certainly that threshold was hit within 48 hours of launch. I guess no wonder Krafton CEO was so damn determined to get out of this performance deal. I mean, their own analysts were telling him just how badly this thing was going to go. And it's fun because we've seen some of that analysis. And what Krafton's people worked out was an enterprise value of approximately 93.5 million compared to a projected 191.8 million earnout. And 191 million was just the base case, the like best case for the game sales. Potentially be a worst case for Krafton, well, that ran up to 242 million dollars, which is almost the 250 million dollar cap. Now, whatever the specifics of the bonus payout are, Krafton would likely end up making less than that in profits at least in the short term. You see, 12 months ago, before Krafton made themselves into a global villains and marketed this game almost as a way to support the developers and to screw them over, both scenarios that they modeled were basically a financial disaster for them. But, this is the bit where justice can be quite sweet. In trying to protect themselves and cheat Unknown Worlds' leadership out of their bonuses, well, they may have just went and done even more financial damage. Because, yes, there could actually be more. Now, for the additional penalty Krafton may end up facing to kind of make sense, we've got to talk about the actual creation of this game. Because, while all the was going on, of course, the game was delayed. But, the rest of Unknown Worlds were still working in the damn thing. They just had all of this going on above them. Of course, even if the game may have been ready as of last year, as one staff member confirmed to Polygon, they've in the meantime just been working on more content and just polishing what they've had. The thing that's funny here is that this game was not made by the founders who would be getting the performance bonus. And that's why originally the claim was that those founders had actually offered a share out to staff. So, staff basically believed that leadership would be sharing the 250 million dollar bonuses pretty much with everyone, and this was according to reporting from Bloomberg last summer. Now, that was also on top of documents that Jason Schreier had sought, which stated that 40 staff would get a 10% split amongst themselves. Now, when that stuff became public, Krafton basically went on a charm offensive.

[00:11:38]They put out statements suggesting that they had, quote, committed to fair and equitable compensation for all remaining Unknown Worlds employees. Now, that promise, remember, was being made at a time when Krafton did not expect to pay the $250 million. They sort of thought their plan could have worked. Obviously, no, it hasn't worked. And now, that additional stuff that Krafton was going to pay off to staff, that may also now be coming on top of the $250 million.

[00:12:06]Quite something. So, we're going to get to see if Krafton and the old leadership keep to their word. We're going to see how that money is distributed because, ultimately, the people who have done the work that like earns this money is, of course, the staff at Unknown Worlds. And that's where there is still one last twist waiting for our good friends at Krafton. What we can say for sure is that Krafton is very likely paying the $250 million earnout plus whatever they've promised to staff on top of that. Now, their own analysts said that the game's profit wouldn't actually cover it. But, what if I told you it gets worse? Yes, it gets worse. You see, the court case that they lost was only the first phase. The second phase is about to begin. Leadership are being made whole, they're getting the bonus they were contractually owed, but part of the case is also whether Krafton owes damages for trying to get out of the deal and all of the chaos that then followed. Now, if the court awards the leaders, then, well, then there'll be another hit to come for Krafton. And what that ultimately means is that they tried to escape their own contract. But, that contract is a contract that the courts have held up. Dollar by dollar, Krafton are going to lose a shitload of upfront money. And what really strikes me is that here, the bad guys lost. I know it's a little simplistic to just say the good guys and the bad guys.

[00:13:27]There's lots of gray, there's lots of nuance, but fundamentally, they signed a contract, they did a whole bunch of funny business, and they have been punished for it. Like, it's actually happened. It's kind of rare, right?

[00:13:37]Like, we're almost so used to big, loud stories that ultimately just kind of peter out and have an ending that just leaves nobody satisfied.

[00:13:47]Here, it's not that whatsoever. Now, there's one other thing. This video was sponsored by friends over at Trainwell.

[00:13:55]They pair you with a real personal trainer who builds around your actual week, not a generic app plan that just dies the moment things get busy. Nate has helped me steer my way through some really busy times lately. And all you need to do to get started is take the quiz at go.trainwell.net/bellularnews, and that's where you'll start a 14-day free trial. And for our next story, the entire console market is being priced in a way for investors. There are pressures that are happening on companies like Nintendo, PlayStation, etc. that aren't really good for your pocket. So, to learn about what's going on there and how we're heading towards thousand-dollar and thousand-dollar-plus consoles that only the top 10% can afford, watch this next.

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