Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post...

Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.

When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn't smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.

When the numbers didn't look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn't deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.

When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.

Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don't play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don't play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.

Don't buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.

jokes on them, i already pirate their games ☕

Natural Selection and then Natural Selection 2 - no games or communities like it. Before there time both of them and very much under appreciated. Felt like NS2 never really found it's rhythm but Unknown World kept it going longer than most games.

Well this just wrecked my evening.

But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.

I feel like I learn more about what I shouldn't play then what games I should play when I am on here.

But can I still buy the OG subnautica?

I remember Flayra from Natural Selection, a half-life mod twenty years ago. I remember him making appeals for investors/donations to keep Unknown Worlds afloat (or maybe just launch it as a company. I recall a video he posted where he showed us his tiny apartment and the milk in his fridge.)

Then Subnautica came out years later and I thought 'Well I'll be damned.'

Why can't the OG devs just opensource the code out of spite. Would be a big middle-finger

Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I'm using calendars wrong, but mine aren't filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I'm willing to learn. What date should I put "Don't Buy Subnautica 2" on?

I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.

Yar har fiddle dee dee

You should get a publisher if:

You want to make one game then get fired

You want your work to be bastardized by the publisher in the future

You want countless hours of overtime/crunch and no compensation

You want to be another disposable cog in the machine

If that doesn't sound like something you want, self-publish.

Nooooooooooooooo I was literally just talking about being excited for this game.

Pirate all Krafton games.

Edit. Apparently there's more to the story.

Publishers are cancer. Self publish whenever possible !

They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We're in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.

Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w

It's a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success

I am also boycotting Microsoft and every product from companies owned by them.

Sure, that doesn't leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I'm through with it.

Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.