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It will be fascinating to see how the drama continues to play out, but Krafton is a publicly traded company and the founders are very rich. My story centered on the normal people who thought they could get six-figure checks. And there’s still hope the public pressure will make things right for them

Reading internet reactions to the Krafton vs. Unknown Worlds drama, I think something getting lost is that dozens of employees thought they were on track to get life-changing bonuses and then suddenly saw them blow up. There’s still hope that Krafton will remedy that, but no straight answers yet

Just in: Unknown Worlds founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire along with former CEO Ted Gill are filing a lawsuit against Krafton.

Much more to come in the next few days

“The dev team totally fucked up because the founders were gone. But now that the founders are gone, they’re gonna kill it”

It’s a bit hard to reconcile Krafton saying that the founders not being involved with Subnautica 2 led to “repeated confusion in direction and significant delays” with Krafton also saying, a paragraph later, that it respects and supports that same Subnautica 2 dev team

A wild new statement just published by Krafton blames the founders of Unknown Worlds for issues with Subnautica 2 and says the company will “provide the rewards [employees] were promised.” Unknown Worlds staff have not yet been given any specifics on what that means krafton.com/en/

All of that money was tied to revenue targets. It remains to be seen if Krafton will amend the contract to give Unknown Worlds more time to hit those revenue targets even after delaying Subnautica 2 to 2026. And of course, litigation may be looming. This story certainly isn’t over yet.

Update on the Subnautica story: today I received more documentation on the $250m earnout. Ten percent of that, or up to $25m, was due to be paid to about 40 Unknown Worlds staff (each receiving different amounts, mostly six figures). Leadership had also said they’d give parts to other employees.