I mean, the easy analysis is just to ask “what would be in Krafton’s best interest?”
Anyone who has paid attention to the videogames industry will tell you that games releasing in an unfinished state has been a problem throughout history, and one that has gotten much worse in recent decades as the budgets have increased and the ability to patch games post-launch over the Internet has granted an opportunity for redemption. Recent Mario Party entries, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk, Redfall, Concord. Some games get salvaged and some games get dropped. In all of these cases, the community consensus seems to be “wow these games should have been delayed, the publishers were greedy to sell an unfinished product without labeling it as pre-release or beta properly”. So my gut reaction when I hear that any publisher is delaying a game is not to think “wow that’s a greedy publisher”, but rather “wow it’s good to see a publisher actually caring about the quality of their product who is willing to incur more costs and delay their revenue in order to get it right”.
Delaying a game is expensive. This is going to incur another year’s worth of development time. Another year’s worth of salaries and associates payroll costs, licenses, office space, all sorts of ongoing costs. Krafton would have been expecting to see revenue from the game hit 2025, and the studio to begin work on their next game, which is now getting pushed back. If Krafton has any debt that means they have increased interest costs. Their equity will suffer from this.
Let’s say that Subnautica 2 WAS in a great, finished, release-ready state whenever they fired the founders. The costs of delaying the game by a year are going to far exceed the costs of bonuses. Afaik the actual structure of the bonus has not been released, but typically these sorts of things would be structured in a way where the bonus would not have been paid if the game didn’t meet it’s sales targets
There are two pieces of information the public does not have which I think are necessary to make a judgement here. What was the structure of this promised bonus, and what was the state of the game at the time that Krafton decided to delay it? While I don’t have those answers, both Krafton and the founders do. Looking at their motivations, I just have a hard time seeing why Krafton would look at a fantastic, complete game ready for release and say “nah, we would rather sit on this thing for a year”.
The only alternative explanation I can come up with is that Krafton wants to stuff the game full of micro transactions or other live service elements. But that’s just pure speculation on my part: even the listed founders have not mentioned anything about that.
I am generally inclined to side with individual artists over these giant corporations, but what the founders are claiming just doesn’t add up. And what Krafton is claiming - that the founders basically abandoned the game to work on other things and did a pretty terrible job- seems like something that would be easily either proven or disproven in court. So either Krafton is lying just to try to get good PR for a few months until the discovery happens, or Krafton expects to be vindicated in court.
paultimate14@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean, the easy analysis is just to ask “what would be in Krafton’s best interest?”
Anyone who has paid attention to the videogames industry will tell you that games releasing in an unfinished state has been a problem throughout history, and one that has gotten much worse in recent decades as the budgets have increased and the ability to patch games post-launch over the Internet has granted an opportunity for redemption. Recent Mario Party entries, No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk, Redfall, Concord. Some games get salvaged and some games get dropped. In all of these cases, the community consensus seems to be “wow these games should have been delayed, the publishers were greedy to sell an unfinished product without labeling it as pre-release or beta properly”. So my gut reaction when I hear that any publisher is delaying a game is not to think “wow that’s a greedy publisher”, but rather “wow it’s good to see a publisher actually caring about the quality of their product who is willing to incur more costs and delay their revenue in order to get it right”.
Delaying a game is expensive. This is going to incur another year’s worth of development time. Another year’s worth of salaries and associates payroll costs, licenses, office space, all sorts of ongoing costs. Krafton would have been expecting to see revenue from the game hit 2025, and the studio to begin work on their next game, which is now getting pushed back. If Krafton has any debt that means they have increased interest costs. Their equity will suffer from this.
Let’s say that Subnautica 2 WAS in a great, finished, release-ready state whenever they fired the founders. The costs of delaying the game by a year are going to far exceed the costs of bonuses. Afaik the actual structure of the bonus has not been released, but typically these sorts of things would be structured in a way where the bonus would not have been paid if the game didn’t meet it’s sales targets
There are two pieces of information the public does not have which I think are necessary to make a judgement here. What was the structure of this promised bonus, and what was the state of the game at the time that Krafton decided to delay it? While I don’t have those answers, both Krafton and the founders do. Looking at their motivations, I just have a hard time seeing why Krafton would look at a fantastic, complete game ready for release and say “nah, we would rather sit on this thing for a year”.
The only alternative explanation I can come up with is that Krafton wants to stuff the game full of micro transactions or other live service elements. But that’s just pure speculation on my part: even the listed founders have not mentioned anything about that.
I am generally inclined to side with individual artists over these giant corporations, but what the founders are claiming just doesn’t add up. And what Krafton is claiming - that the founders basically abandoned the game to work on other things and did a pretty terrible job- seems like something that would be easily either proven or disproven in court. So either Krafton is lying just to try to get good PR for a few months until the discovery happens, or Krafton expects to be vindicated in court.