Krafton has fired another shot in its legal battle with former executives of Subnautica 2 studio Unknown Worlds, who filed a lawsuit last month, claiming the South Korean publisher undermined the game’s release to avoid paying them a bonus. In its response, Krafton claims that the three plaintiffs, Ted Gill, Charlie Cleveland, and Max McGuire, had “lost interest in developing Subnautica 2.”
The story told by Krafton’s lawyers in the filing is that after selling Unknown Worlds to Krafton for $500 million and promising $250 million more in earnout bonuses, Cleveland and McGuire essentially checked out of working on Subnautica 2 to focus on personal projects.
“In 2024 and 2025, Cleveland stated that he was ‘no longer working on games but […] working on a couple of films,’” while “McGuire started ‘working on initiatives that fall outside of [the Company’s] main development activities.’” As for Gill, “And Gill, who remained, focused on leveraging his operational control to maximize the earnout payment, rather than developing a successful game.”
They allege that without the leadership of Cleveland and McGuire, development on Subnautica 2 suffered to the point that a delay of the game’s early access launch was necessary.
…as the end of the carnout period drew nearer, the game was still nowhere near its planned scope. Indeed, as late as March of 2025, only two months before the Key Employees claimed the game was ready for the first Early Access (“EA”) release, the development lead for Subnautica 2 at Unknown Worlds noted that the first EA and second EA (planned for December 2025) would only be “about 12% of our intended 1.0 scope” and joked that “at that rate we would be in development for 30 years.”
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