Subnautica 2 Has Been Such a Massive Hit That Krafton Is Paying Out Up to $250 Million to Unknown Worlds' Former Shareholders
19d 23h ago by lemmy.world/u/Jeffool in gamedev from www.ign.com
... as they were contractually obligated to, but tried to weasel out of in the past few years...
Yeah pretty nasty by them since these were the terms set when buying Unknown Worlds. Asking price would probably be higher if not for this bonus.
Using ChatGPT for advice, no less.
It'll be fun when gaming companies see this as a viable marketing strategy.
"Our CEO said they wouldn't pay us if this didn’t sell well... plz buy game"
They already do, and more. Some contracts have significant pay dependent on Metacritic scores. Whether or not the whole team is gutted between projects instead of just most of the team is generally dependent on review metrics, sales, and ROI.
It's openly been an absolutely awful industry to work for at least a decade now.
The Obsidian devs who made Fallout New Vegas famously lost their bonus because they were supposed to have a minimum Metacritic score of 85 at launch. They got an 84. That was the last good entry in the series.
Note that almost no one would have cared if the first game wasn't already a great game.
So you have to have a good indie game out of the gate first... At which point you are already doing better than 99% of the market.
The Krafton CEO reminds me a lot of the Titanic submarine CEO
I thought it was owed to the developers, not the shareholders.
I don't know, but maybe since it was a small indie studio the developers were also shareholders?