Standard practice has been to fuck over the developers after release. They haven’t released Subnautica 2 yet. They’re screwing the developers over before they’ve cashed out the game. That’s the part that made it implausible in my mind.
I didn’t want to think they’re completely incompetent so I decided to do some digging. That $250 million is actually part of their acquisition deal. Krafton technically bought Unknown Worlds for $750 million. $500 million was paid up front and the extra $250 million was due for 2026 if Unknown Worlds met the performance clause. That $250 million has nothing to do with the sales of Subnautica, it’s part of the buyout.
This could mean they were always going to try and stiff Unknown Worlds. It also means it’s probably less about the people working at Unknown Worlds getting stiffed and more about the leadership expecting a payout that was agreed upon.
That’s according to Krafton and we know they will bend the truth to create a narrative. But even if it’s true I still think Krafton are the assholes here. I’m less concerned when people in positions of power don’t get their position enabled bonuses, but Krafton is also taking away whatever bonus the actual workers were originally promised.
When I first heard about the firings and the delay to the game I thought “This doesn’t sound plausible. Are they really going to ruin their investment and effectively kill the company to supposedly save a quarter of a billion. That would be unbelievably stupid”. But with every subsequent nugget of information it’s getting increasingly clearer that they, Krafton, actually are unbelievably stupid. They’re pretty much guaranteed that if Subnautica 2 gets released (and that’s assuming Subnautica 2 is in a good enough position to be released) the studio will shutter as all the talent will move on and all the money Krafton spent acquiring the studio is thrown in the wind. They’re not even going to save the quarter billion because the delay means they’re going to be paying at least 6 months wages for minimum effort work because I doubt anyone at that studio is willing to put in the effort after being cheated out of their bonus.
Even if it’s all so obvious I still find it hard to believe the publisher is THAT stupid. But that’s the world we live in, where people get to make idiotic decisions because they’re greedy as fuck.
I think you’re seriously underestimating how big VISA and Mastercard are. Valve is estimated to be worth around 8 billion, Visa made 4.5 billion in profits Q2 of 2025. VISA makes more money annually than Valve is even worth. Furthermore if we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online payments. Steam’s entire business depends on online purchases. Steam would be thoroughly fucked if Visa and MC dropped Valve.
What Visa and MC are doing is despicable and something should be done about them, but Valve is not in a position to do anything but bend over and spread the cheeks.
If you’re a hobbyist you’re very unlikely to release something that would be affected by SKG. If you make games without any online components (or some other kind of fuckery that renders the game inoperable) then your games already align with the spirit of the initiative.
Even if you make online games as long as you allow consumers set up their own servers you’re good as far as SKG is concerned. The initiative impacts primarily bigger studios with the resources to set up and run their own services that they can (and will) shut down which then renders the game unplayable. The only thing SKG cares about is keeping games in a playable state.
Politicians would have to completely fuck up the legislation for it to impact you.
Found the guy who would use a flathead screwdriver to regulate a demon core.
As evident from Australia, Canada and the US, every government does not care. There’s no guarantee that the EU commission will care either, but because we’ve (hopefully) met their pretty significant requirement they have to care enough to address it. And in an ideal society they would have to care because the government is for the people and enough people have voiced their concern.
Also considering there’s at least one prominent EU parliament politician showing public support it’s bound to get a bit more political attention than just a simple “No” that we’ve seen so far.
Yeah. There are a lot of story beats that everyone knows GRRM would write (if he only cared to continue the series) and those story beats were in the show. They had enough material to work with, they simply chose to rush through all of it.
Well, if you had been here since the start you’d know that Ross started SKG by having multiple petitions around the globe. The EU initiative is one the last (if not the last) petition he pushed for. For Australia and Canada the ship already sailed, Australia said no and Canada gave a roundabout no. Ross didn’t even try in the US because the US is such a lost cause there’s nothing to even petition for. I don’t remember what happened with Brazil but it was on Ross’s radar. Most other countries would simply be too small to have an impact on the global scale. Which is why the last two bastions left are the UK and the EU, because the haven’t said outright “No” yet and they’re big enough to influence the market. The rest of the world has to wait because the other influential parts of the world have already failed.
As for a boycott, you’re free to start organizing one. I see that as a lost cause. If we can barely get 1 million Europeans to do the bare minimum of signing one petition I don’t see how you’re going to get 10+ million people across the globe to do more than the bare minimum for who knows how long. Boycotts don’t work because 99% of gamers do not give a fuck. I’ve seen different groups of people boycott Ubisoft for 20 years now and I personally had boycotted them for about a decade, it had no impact as Ubisoft made even more profits despite the different boycotts. Modern Warfare 2 boycott had no impact on the removal of dedicated servers. People even boycotted Valve when Steam launched and that did nothing. Boycotts have only had very limited consumer rights successes in individual games, like EA removing pay to win mechanics from Battlefront 2. Meanwhile Australia ended up made Steam to offer refunds to everyone and Belgium and Netherlands restrictions on lootboxes has noticeably reduced their usage in games.
You’re free to prove to me wrong but government actions end up being far more successful than boycotts.
Okay, so what more should we do? Boycott somehow?
What even is your point? Besides “I don’t like this thing so I’m going to shit on it”? You’ve made no actual arguments against the initiative. All you’ve said is that it doesn’t work (technically you haven’t even said this, at best you’ve implied) and I could just as easily say that about your boycott “solution” as well.
You have no point. You’re just shit stirring. That’s why you’re a bad faith troll.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I was under the impression that Ross had people prepared to meet with the representatives and present the initiative in case it does go through in the EU. Because it’s not like he could do it himself considering he’s not an EU citizen.
Countries probably have something in place that would easily verify a person but it would still take extra effort to make that something work with the system is managing the initiative counting.
It’s simply cheaper to collect all the votes and then do the verification rather than develop integration to verify in real time.
There probably isn’t a central database to verify against so the solution would be to come up with a distributed system where each country implements its own verification process and then implement a standardized messaging structure that all countries would have to use. It would be a significant development effort to make something like that and it probably wouldn’t pay off to if it was made just for citizens initiative. Considering in the last 5 years there has been only 4 (5 if we also count SKG) initiatives that have passed 1 mil it’s probably cheaper to collect all the signatures and then have each country verify the dataset that relates to their country.
I’m of the opinion that Rimworld DLCs don’t actually improve the base game, they simply build an extra layer of isolated complexity ontop of the base game. I like the base game but I didn’t really enjoy the DLCs (at least not the first 2) because they didn’t actually expand the base game. They felt like mods I paid for.
I don’t know how far you made it but if you make the biggest vehicle you can add planters inside the vehicle which significantly cuts down the need to restock. That said, in the end game the survival elements become so trivialize they end meaningless busywork even if you have planters.
Reminds me of the good old days of playing Colin McRae Racing 2.0. Even the red Mini Cooper makes an appearance. I just got all the right heart strings pulled, this is going on my wishlist to check it out when it releases.
The argument isn’t that only Steam gamers are hoarders. The argument is that game hoarders congregate on Steam. You can have hoarding gamers in the wild, and those wild hoarders may never touch Steam, but you’re guaranteed to find hoarding gamers on Steam. If you’re looking to sell games to hoarders you’re going to sell more when you do it where hoarders regularly visit.
It’s the same reason Epic is giving away free games. They’re trying to attract hoarders by giving them a free hoard and regularly inviting them into their shop. They won’t really attract hoarders who are entrenched on Steam but they will attract future hoarders who might not yet have a huge Steam library.
We don’t know the exact state of the game but what we know is that it’s early access ready. If previous Unknown world games are of any indication it’s still 2 years away from final release. They might make some money back with early access but it will be negatively reviewed under the pretense that it will not be properly finished. The release is already guaranteed to take a financial hit.