July was an ugly month for Subnautica 2 and developer Unknown Worlds. In the course of fewer than 30 days, the studio’s leadership was gutted, the anticipated early access release was delayed, harsh words were exchanged, and a lawsuit was filed. The dispute turns largely on whether or not Subnautica 2 is ready for early access release: The ousted leaders of Unknown Worlds insist it is, but Krafton says it needs more content and polish before it’s ready to see the light of day.
It’s obviously not an ideal situation, but during the company’s Q2 FY2025 earnings call, Krafton said its willingness to delay the game amidst all the furor is actually a good sign because it proves the company’s commitment to getting it right.
“I do fully understand that from the outside, you may think that because there’s talk of legal proceedings of Subnautica 2 and it being delayed, that could make you think that maybe within Krafton, our milestone process is being mismanaged,” Krafton chief financial officer Dongkeun Bae said in response to a question about whether the game had become “too burdensome” to be properly managed.
But while he claimed to understand that reasoning, he also said that viewing the game’s development as mismanaged reflects something of a “reasoning gap,” because the steps Krafton has taken over the past month “actually represent that things are effectively being managed.”
“[The] Subnautica IP basically has this big follower base, big fandom base,” Bae said. “So as long as we market it and we release it into the market, people would say that a certain level of sales from this title would be guaranteed. But what we are seeking to do is, we want to make sure that we satisfy the highest level of satisfaction that the gamers have, their aspirations.
“And so because we’ve managed the whole milestone process very rigorously within the company, we were able to make the decision that we made regarding Subnautica 2. And because we felt that the game was not up to par, not up to the level that we had wished it to be—I think that case really goes to show that our milestone process is being rigorously managed.”
There’s some logic to that I suppose, although managing a milestone system isn’t the same as leading the development of a game. Whether or not a project is ready for an early access release is also a big, very opinion-driven question: If there’s one thing we learned from Baldur’s Gate 3, after all, it’s that being short on content and long on jank isn’t necessarily the kiss of death.
And really, we saw the same thing with Subnautica, a game that presented as “underwater Minecraft” when we first saw it in early 2015 and came out the other end as a memorable journey to “beautiful and terrifying depths” three years later. I have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes at Krafton but I do know that Unknown Worlds put out an absolute banger with Subnautica, through early access warts and all, and my inclination would be to trust them to do it again with the sequel.
Of course, Krafton has good cause to claim that it knows what it’s doing, too: The company said the first half of its 2025 fiscal year was its best H1 ever, with revenues up nearly 12% to 1.536 trillion Korean won ($1.1 billion), and operating profit increasing 9.5% to 703.3 billion won ($505 million). The company attributed the growth to a strong mobile business driven by Battlegrounds Mobile India and the continued success of PUBG: Battlegrounds.
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