Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked...
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities... with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out... and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state... but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn't, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or... maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn't want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken...but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because "it would speed up development."
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer... yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
...
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn't criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.
Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.
But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.
Coffee Stain's another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there's a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don't agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game's learning curve less precipitous.
Didn't sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not "indie" as slang for low budget) development teams don't follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn't see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that's opposed to SKGs.
It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.
It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.
The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted "we wont put loot boxes in the game"..
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.
Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he's wrong and really created lots of noise about it.
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?
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.
Ditched Windows permanently 11 months ago for Pop-OS and couldn't be happier. I've been a big Linux fan for years, but would always dual boot for gaming purposes.
I'm so glad that isn't necessary any longer. Almost feels cheating, being Microsoft free with Zero downsides and plenty of benefits.
You may already know, but a lot of times when a game isn't listed as 'playable' it just means that particular game hasn't been tested yet and will likely still work just fine*, unless it requires kernel level anti cheat ofc
Just so happens I'm boycotting that as well. If I wanted you to do shady shit to my OS, I'd have stayed on Windows.
Edit: *Check the games not listed as playable on protondb and see what that says. Since it's a 'crowdsourced' platform, it's often more up to date than Valve is.
I didn't realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn't want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.
Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn't come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.
I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don't show as playable. I'm not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any advice?
A lot of times when a game isn't listed as 'playable' on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn't been tested yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require 'kernel level anticheat'.
Edit: Check those games out on protondb and see what that says. Since it's a 'crowdsourced' platform, it's often more up to date than Valve is.
Not a problem at all. If you do end up having difficulties you might try a different distro, I've heard a few people complaining about Mint lately. In theory though it should work just fine.
In my personal experience every game I've tried to play works just as well or better than it does on Windows. Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Prey, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 & 76 etc. Even older games like Baldur's Gate and the Original Fallout work great* :)
In addition to what Wolf told you, here's a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don't, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don't need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you'd get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don't have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn't enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game's compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
Steam doesn't have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you'll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting "Enable Steam Play for all other titles"
That's what lets it use Proton for everything by default.
Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC's like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.
Currently, expanded support includes devices with AMD hardware and an NVME drive, targeted toward handheld devices. Please note, support for all devices that is not officially 'Powered by SteamOS' is not final (currently anything that is not a Steam Deck or Legion Go S)
While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC's, Valve doesn't recommend doing so.
They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC's in the future, but it's not there yet.
If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it's designed for.
You are correct that it is possible to do, but it's not recommended.
For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular.
I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it.
I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn't used it in yonks.
Good luck!
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it's still Arch.
Pros: It's easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion.
Cons: It's still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you're not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it's easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They're harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You're less involved with the OS's technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager.
Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I'd say that Garuda is great if you're interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There's a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you'Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
I find it really hard to boycott Microsoft today. Yeah, fuck windows, office, Xbox. But there's GitHub and Azure which you just ignore walking the internet
Yeah, GitHub really hurts. Hopefully people will start to use SourceForge and similar alternatives once they realize that Microsoft isn't just trying to monopolize Operating Systems and Gaming Studios, but the whole damn Internet as well.
SourceForge sucks ass. I'll use pen and paper to manage my repos before SourceForge.
Forgejo is the best git forge hands down. It's FOSS, snappy & clean web interface, much lighter than Gitlab to self-host, integrates with a bunch of CI platforms, and instance federation is in the works. It's like GitHub, but better in pretty much every way.
Cool, I'll check it out. I'm not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work. It's nice to know that there is a decent alternative for people who need it.
Not only is it FOSS, but the experience is legitimately better than GitHub.
Also has a super fast & good repo migration & sync system. You can still keep the GitHub repo around for the network effect while porting over issues & PRs.
Forgejo Actions is maybe the only thing worse, but that's because it isnt one-to-one with the whole GHA ecosystem, even if most GitHub Actions work out the box with no changes.
I'm not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work.
You're gonna start seeing more of these pointing to codeberg.org in the near future. I have been seeing a ton of important projects move there or their own Forgejo instance. Once federation hits, I imagine a massive proportion of projects are gonna jump ship.
The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025
The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like "10% of net profit, capped at $250 million".
If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn't pass the smell test.
That's how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn't be a bonus.
It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.
The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.
Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I'm not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it's not my preference.
I'm also not defending Krafton's decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that's impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?
And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme ("a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"). So I'm really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don't add up to explain how it's actually bad.
The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.
I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher
On Thursday, Krafton issued another statement addressed to “our 12 million fellow Subnauts.” The company said 90% of the $250 million payout was allocated to Unknown Worlds’ three senior leaders. Krafton accused the executives of abandoning their responsibilities in order to work on other projects, including a film, leading to delays for the game.
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.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
You can't typically get punitive damages for contract disputes. Also, there is a very real possibility that the contract hasn't been breached by the new owners' actions. It sounds like they used their superior bargaining power to put a lot of questionable yet enforceable provisions in the contract.
Ive heard of it once where the defendant litterally wrote a book on how to use overseas buisness to pull off scams like the one he was being accused of
Typically, conduct would have to rise to the level of fraud to justify punitives in a contract based dispute. That's a very high hurdle in most jurisdictions. Also, at that point the conduct complained of would likely be based in tort, not contract.
It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the "right" choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell
Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!
It's horror in the sense that Bioshock was horror, but much less so. There are some areas with 'tension' that you pretty quickly become accustomed to, just as you would in a game where there is a 'progression' of areas where each area you move into is quite difficult at first until you get the resources and build the new items from that area.
I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.
It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.
If you are going to compete with AAA games it's going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.
A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.
Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a 'failure' sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.
Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn't want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.
I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft's gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it's understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it's just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don't agree with it.
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don't sign away too much while still getting value from them.
It's not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not
Companies only answer to profit and unfortunately we get to see the results. Can't have those proles making 250 million dollars now. That would eat into the profits of our shareholders.
First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn't actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.
For people who've played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.
It was weirdly a little light on crafting in some ways. But extremely heavy in others. I tried playing it like Minecraft and stockpiling stuff but that's not really the way. I found it slightly more enjoyable to gather things only when I needed them.
Also the game has no map and I'm REALLY bad with directions. Like REALLY bad.
Yep, it loops between exploration and basebuilding / crafting.
The exploration part is what usually gets people hooked because the alien underwater setting is amazing. The other stuff is more to give you a reason to stick around for longer, and pace your exploration since need to unlock things at certain points.
This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don't need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.
A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn't stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they're playing it like Minecraft, and it's not Minecraft. You don't need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don't have an immediate idea of how to use, you're probably doing it wrong.
Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you're a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you're not moving in. To quote the game itself, "Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not."
Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there's a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka "Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?" The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line "Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down." You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.
Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you'll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.
The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.
Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.
You'll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.
Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you'll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn't complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.
Lifepod 6 and 7 are both "coordinates corrupted" quests; it won't give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.
All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.
It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.
I'll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, "Well now what?" And the game doesn't seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.
I don't need hints because I'm not playing the game and I'm not planning on continuing. I'd gotten further than you think. But for context I'd already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn't take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn't have the moon pool unlocked. You're talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.
Yeah, it sounds like you didn't explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I've finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.
That's the point of the game - it doesn't tell you where to go and what to do because you're meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.
Look, I genuinely get your point, and I was tracking with you until you said this. Fuck off. Fuck for with this stupid bullshit. I was not playing wrong. I was playing it the same way everyone else does. I was exploring. I was collecting. I was finding new things. It was getting very clear that the distances the game expected me to travel were meant to be done much faster than what I was capable of. I was getting multiple upgrades for things that I couldn't use because I didn't have the thing that lets me install them. It's been ages since I've played and I'm not psychic so I'll never know what the actual devs' intent was, but something was off. I'd definitely missed something. What's more annoying is that I was finding multiple blueprints I already had or something? I don't remember the context. Like you needed 3 fragments or something. And I'd find more like "ah surely this is the third for the thing I need" only to get the 5th of something I already had. It was give years ago when I played, at least, so I'm probably explaining wrong.
But don't fucking say I was playing wrong. That's such a condescending, brain dead thing to say to someone who is critiquing a game.
"Hey, based on what's going on and getting tons of upgrades and not unlocking the thing to install the upgrades, I think I've missed something and I have no idea where to find it. It would be nice if there was a way to unlock this without scouring every inch of the ocean I've been through multiple times and without looking it up online." No, you're just playing wrong! It's a game about exploration and discovery!
You’re not alone. As much as I love that game, the absolute lack of direction is one of my biggest gripes with it, right along with the atrocious inventory system.
You’d think someone who manages to build a fricking atomic submarine and a mech suit would be able to pinpoint relevant tech on the go somehow but no. Also you get a scanning room that can pinpoint little pebbles a kilometre away but is it helpful? Nope. Just another half-baked gameplay element that was never developed beyond the initial concept.
So yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid. Anyone who played this game would agree. But maybe that’s why I personally love the game. Clunky and beautiful, frustrating but once you find that thing you’ve been looking for, a bit rewarding too.
Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:
Some way to tell if there aren't any more in an area so you don't waste time looking when there isn't anything.
Some sort of device that tells you how close some are, but not where they are. Like the classic "beep ... beep ... beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEPBPBPBBPBP" thing that gets more frequent as you approach. But make the max range relatively small.
I think they were called life pods? Like the other crashed emergency escape pods. For things you're expected to get like the sea bike (I don't remember the name), sea moth, and moon well maybe always put some blue print fragments on life pods you find later. This way you can't miss them (unless you're really really not paying attention). You can still make it so you get them earlier on, but this way in case you missed some somehow you can always "catch up" to where the devs expect you to be. Like if they expect you to get them ~10% in, then make it so the life pods you find ~25% in give you what you are missing for the sea moth.
A bit of a map system. This one is controversial, so I'm putting it last. A huge appeal of the game is not having a map. But even just a blank screen showing you all your way points, but not showing you where you are or what biomes are around would be useful. Then do something like show where blueprints are in an area. Maybe something like once you get two of three it shows you the general area where the remaining ones are, but doesn't put a marker on the HUD.
Because with games like this where progression isn't gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn't get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there's no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren't sure, and you don't want spoilers so you don't look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn't have it yet, that's common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.
But it's just so infuriating when people say things like "you're not playing right" like, I'm getting frustrated because I'm playing right! If I wasn't checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don't. But then you can still miss things because there's no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.
Tbh I’m against the full on map idea since it would ruin and demystify/trivialise the aspect of exploration, but maybe they could have made it so that the scanner room HUD chip UI was actually useful and displayed any kind of distance indicator. Often times I’d be scanning for limestone chunks for example. Now my HUD is full of circles that all have the exact same radius and no indication of distance, just a vague direction, and it’s so frustrating to work with that.
They could have added some sort of compass as well. They chose not to.
I wish they implemented something like No Man’s Sky’s non-intrusive HUD, which conveys both heading and distance at the same time in a super nice way.
I'm at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don't think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That's a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Agreed. Subnautica 1 steam revenue breakdown offers a bit of perspective on why they might want to play pretend.
“How much money did Subnautica make?
We estimate that Subnautica made $274,113,745.92 in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $80,863,555.05. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers.”
Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
It’s far and away their most profitable game to date, so it would make sense to get some perspective from it. Can you offer anything concrete about their other platform sales? I’m not familiar with any tools for that
According to one of the articles above the publishers operating profit last year was "only" $300m so that bonus would make the shareholders mad I guess.
Yes. Like, it's not even a question it's more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don't know what their payroll is, but we don't need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that's just salary. It's possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I'm not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren't getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren't getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game's revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
Nah, that's valid. I loved it to bits, myself, but what made me love it was how adroitly I felt it curated feelings of dread and sincere awe as I explored deeper and deeper; and that's highly subjective. I hope you're finding as much joy in your own fave games as I did in Subnautica!
I also wasn't a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.
I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.
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.
I'll check it out, next time I get a chance to fire it up. Unfortunately, I hate the teleport mechanism of vr games. I love hurtling through the water. Unfortunately, that also makes me motion sickness. I'm slowly training myself out of it, but it takes time.
I found it to be tense and interesting while playing. But looking back, I can't really put my finger on what made it that way. I swam around and gathered resources to build boats, make food and fresh water - I can't really ser what the big drive was. But I certainly loved it enough to finish it, which is rare for me regarding most games.
That whole survival crafting genre seems very hit or miss to me, and I've noticed that people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they'll like another one. Subnautica, Don't Starve, Minecraft, and Ark are all theoretically the same genre but very different games.
However I've also seen a lot of people say that Subnautica was the one that clicked for them. I think the story and progression was big for a lot of people.
people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they’ll like another one
I love survival/building games, and so do most of my friends. Even the terrible ones are usually fun. So I'd posit that it's the opposite with a caveat: liking one for more than its story means you'll enjoy the others.
I think it's more indicative of games/hobbies as a whole than the survival genre specifically. People who love the adrenaline of a motorcycle may not enjoy the thrill of going down a mile high mountain on two thin sticks, IF it was the rumble of the engine beneath them that they actually enjoyed. If it was the rush of the speed though (or in the case of survival/building games, the exploration and struggle to stay alive and not lose your stuff), then they'll likely enjoy the other adrenaline sports.
Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
It was very much not an action oriented game. It was more about building resources and exploration. I can definitely see it not appealing to large swatches of the gaming population. Especially those used to the modern spate of action rpgs.
Probably not really feasible - it will require constant connection to a back-end server to play or some bullshit like that.
But even if you can, that's not the answer. The proper action is to deny them entirely. Don't play the game, don't play PUBG, don't do anything that expands their reach, money or not.
They need to suffer with NOBODY playing this game. They need to suffer by people deleting their Battlegrounds accounts. Software piracy is what makes games legendary.
Subnautica is one of those games that's incredible hard to recreate. Once they started trying to explain every little thing about the aliens I completely lost interest. You may be able to bottle lightning, but you certainly can't do it twice.
Now this has been rather disproved, do we think we could retract the post? It's probably done harm already but we can at least acknowledge it's no longer accurate.
I never cared for Subnautica
I also never cared for PUBG
But what little I know about PUBG, What I've seen them do to Subnautica 2, and that lazy AI ridden "Sims killer" Inzoi, Im of the opinion Krafton are just hustlers.
The original Subnautica is worth playing, it's a fantastic game with an interesting world, intriguing story, and actually fun gameplay and vehicles. The vehicles themselves are extremely fun, too.
I wasn't dunking on the game, I only said I didnt play it, and otherwise, anything in the present that Krafton is associated with seems like something to avoid
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.'
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.
Me too! Did in person LAN events and managed servers for Multiplay. No game will ever come close to the engaged community. Fusion X was my clan from start to end.
Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games
NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It's also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.
It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life... but that doesn't ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!
My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot... ;-;
*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat
I feel the same way - both take the top spot as my all-time best games.
I will say - It was a mistake building their own game engine for NS2. I realise options were limited but they bit off more than they could chew and that came out in the launch and first 3 years or so, as you say. Yeah the co-op and commander concept was both what made it awesome and contributed to its downfall. They tried to make it easier by making it so Gorges became a support role rather than critical to the alien comm but was too little, too late.
I would 100% back a crowdunded NS3, as I did with NS2. The eSports scene is far more mature now, it could work.
The whole ordeal with the game engine is so.. ironic. They opt'd for it because they wanted the infestation to spread dynamically and it wouldnt work with existing engines... so one whole custom game engine later... the infestation feature they desperately wanted was scrapped anyways.
At least it benefited from being easy to mod... the modders are the real MVPs. Kept the game alive with everything from performance, to matchmaking, to balancing.
I'd absolutely support a crowdfunded ""NS3"".. but I don't know if that's feasible without the official company's sign off? Like it couldn't just copy the core gameloop/aliens because of copyright? I can't imagine it feeling the same without Skulks, Gorges, Lerks, Fades, Onos. The way they traverse the map and fill a niche would be hard to beat.
Yeah, the modding community rallied around both versions. The NS community is really dedicated. I admit to stopping playing NS2 when they made the announcement, have they allowed the community to keep it going in any form?
Surely they would approve of some community crowdfunding? Perhaps the original creators but not the parent company is it is now, if the recent issues around Subnautica are to be believed. NS belongs to the community.
I haven't played in ~a year, but afaik yes! The benefits of selfhosted servers. I think there were 3-4 servers going strong on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of those players were the... worst kind. Hyper competitive, 10k hours, surrender the second something goes wrong types. (Edit- this might have been because my own ELO was super high, so different levels might vary)
Still amazing to see any activity this long!
My understanding of the situation was one of the creators/founders/idk said they don't want to do anything more with guns. Hence why subnautica has no "real" weapons and no NS3. This was a long time ago with some old tweet(?). I don't know if a community-funded thing would get support from the original creators.
I don't understand how game dev works, how does a publishing company fire the CEO of a game dev company. Like do these publishers own the game company?
This looks less like heroes becoming villains and more like villains (who were always villains) tricking the hero and murdering them. Unknown World's founders and developers of the first game all got fired by the company that acquired them.
They didn't sell out. That's a childish view.
They made one and a half games (Subnautica and the dlc turned full release), never made the direct sequel, cut thier losses and cashed thier checks.
If they sold out they'd still be on the dev team, making micro transactions for the corpo.
Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it's a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it's all stellar.
I don't really understand this sentiment. Cheap games are cheap games. Not even steam lets you 'own' your gaming library.
More game market competition is good not bad.
Just an Idea but could it be that the game was delayed because it is just not ready yet?
Yes it could be an evil scheme sure, but maybe it is not.
Has anyone here really any hard facts or insider information about the true status of the game?
It's always possible but the announcement coincides with the abrupt termination of head staff so that makes it suspicious. Still could be just for quality's sake though, I dont know if we can find out something like that unless they want us to
I was on an EA boycott for a while without even realising it. They just stopped making anything that interested me.
Only broke it for It Takes Two and Split Fiction, which I paid full price for. I did play a few Respawn games as well (Titanfall 2 and the Jedi games) but got them either as part of PSPlus or Humble Bundles.
Not sure I can support that take. Kinda focussed on the headline there and ignores the fact that other people work there also, that are probably relying on the success of this game for their paychecks and ability to keep making games. The dev industry in general is not in great shape atm.
Let the courts sort out shady business practices imo.
Support a decent game (if it is decent).
Certainly don't preorder. Looking at you internet denisons.
other people got paid already. they most likely wont loose money or portfolio if you boycott. its rare that lower level devs and artists are getting any percent of the sales numbers.
This talking point from you is coming straigt from bigger publishers all the way to stockholders that have nothing to do with the product.
but the people are already kicked...
Look if bob works at "bob studios" and i love his work and want to support him, i can buy his game. but if bob got fired long ago, he wont get the money i give to "bob studios".
You are supporting a buisness construct and not the artist in this case here. almost all workers in the game dev field loose their job post project anyway, so you are not even helping them.
So i stand by point that this is capitalist propaganda. Its sad but videogame artists get abused by the scene a whole lot. i think it makes sense to show support witht the individuals who make the games you love, rather than the legal steuctures trying to milk them.
Are you saying that only the 3 people that got let go (and potentially shafted), are the only people that worked on the game? I don't believe that's the case but I could be wrong of course.
Don't use best coding practices, do not make readable code following good naming/formatting standards, have it only make sense for you in the moment and require weeks to debug even by you
Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn't happen. I'm apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn't care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.
This isn't a question of whether or not the game is good, it's a question of whether or not you want to support a publisher that will resort to these types of tactics. Guess it depends on your brand of morality.
The dev bonus payout is still unconfirmed and is a rumor until of course either an insider confirms it or it gets confirmed at the end of 2025, when the payout is supposed to happen. Who knows exactly how true it will be, hence why I'm not basing my opinion on it just yet. Could end up being moved to a different date, could end up being true. I just dislike immediately raising pitchforks just because a terrible thing supposedly may happen. I have enough patience to wait and see what the future holds.
Yea the founders getting ousted is a bit of a sour taste. I just have less sympathy for them since they were also the ones who sold the company in the first place.
Afaik krafton have been insisting for a while that the game is not ready. Founders disagreed and they were ousted. But seeing as the previous two games were in pretty dire state when they released into EA, I wouldn't really trust the founder's word on it. The whole "squirreling out of paying them 250 million" thing seems like speculation, but what do I know.
Besides, the OP is just ragebainting, because we know exactly fuckall about the game's actual state at this point.
It's a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success
Kerbal Space Program 2 still hurts me.
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked...
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities... with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out... and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state... but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn't, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or... maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
https://techdriveplay.com/2025/01/03/kerbal-space-program-2-a-tale-of-corporate-neglect-and-failure/
I never understood the fixation on IPs. For a kick ass universe with amazing lore etc, ok sure.
I mean I love Jeb and the gang as much as the next guy, but they're not core to my enjoyment of KSP1. The mechanics were.
lol, RIP Jebs 1 - 48395.
But uh yeah, the... the lore is basically:
We made some cute little dudes and dudettes that are... possibly animated, sapient fungi? Or something?
Anyway they are sm0l and live in sm0l solar system.
And they have a space program.
And most of the characters are just obvious cutesy knock offs of famous humans in spaceflight.
Woo!
lol
Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.
Dean Hall and RocketWorkz of uh DayZ fame/infamy... are working on Kitten Space Agency... I dunno, maybe they could pull it off?
Dean's track record is really hit and miss imo, but hey, at least they actually give a damn and try, often with pretty bold / niche concepts.
Hopefully! My comment wasn't aimed at KSP / KSA though, just talking about why IP is valuable
It was even worse than that.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn't want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken...but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because "it would speed up development."
It was doomed from the beginning.
Yep.
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer... yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
...
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
It’s a canon event for any
gamecompany thatachieves moderate successgets acquired by investorsVery much not exclusive to the game industry
True :3
I just said game to stay on topic tbh
Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn't criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.
Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.
But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.
Except ConcernedApe, apparently.
Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It's once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry
Coffee Stain's another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there's a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don't agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game's learning curve less precipitous.
Or the Terraria team.
Didn't sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not "indie" as slang for low budget) development teams don't follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
Rip ZA/UM
I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn't see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that's opposed to SKGs.
It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.
And they want to add micro transactions
But they said they wouldn't!
It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.
Instead you are drowned in lootboxes and emotes
The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted "we wont put loot boxes in the game"..
I'm not going to burn your house down, rest easy knowing that. :)
Next week: Introducing new "reward containers"
No, they won't. Because they already are there, maybe?
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.
Who's the streamer that boosted the Don't Kill Games petition? Get them on it.
PirateSoftware
Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he's wrong and really created lots of noise about it.
Oh I misunderstood the question. I thought they were asking who ironically boosted the petition.
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?
Everyday up until it releases
What about after it releases? How will I know to keep not buying it?
Sure, but maybe not in public?
It's not coming out until 2026. It's probably unhealthy to hold it in that long.
Gooooood point
Yes
Yup, that title was pure brain fuck.
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.
Linux gaming is really hot right now. Out of my 575 games on steam I can play 568 of them.
Ditched Windows permanently 11 months ago for Pop-OS and couldn't be happier. I've been a big Linux fan for years, but would always dual boot for gaming purposes.
I'm so glad that isn't necessary any longer. Almost feels cheating, being Microsoft free with Zero downsides and plenty of benefits.
You may already know, but a lot of times when a game isn't listed as 'playable' it just means that particular game hasn't been tested yet and will likely still work just fine*, unless it requires kernel level anti cheat ofc
Just so happens I'm boycotting that as well. If I wanted you to do shady shit to my OS, I'd have stayed on Windows.
Edit: *Check the games not listed as playable on protondb and see what that says. Since it's a 'crowdsourced' platform, it's often more up to date than Valve is.
I didn't realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn't want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.
Do you have a recommended flavor of Linux for gaming?
Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn't come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.
I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don't show as playable. I'm not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Any advice?
A lot of times when a game isn't listed as 'playable' on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn't been tested yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require 'kernel level anticheat'.
Edit: Check those games out on protondb and see what that says. Since it's a 'crowdsourced' platform, it's often more up to date than Valve is.
Thank you so much, I was worried I'd have to scale back my gaming significantly
Not a problem at all. If you do end up having difficulties you might try a different distro, I've heard a few people complaining about Mint lately. In theory though it should work just fine.
In my personal experience every game I've tried to play works just as well or better than it does on Windows. Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Prey, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 & 76 etc. Even older games like Baldur's Gate and the Original Fallout work great* :)
Edit: *The GOG versions, which I use the Heroic Games Launcher to play.
Depends, the best source for running games is https://www.protondb.com/
For games that are not on Steam, you can try Lutris.
In addition to what Wolf told you, here's a few little extra tidbits:
Some games have native Linux versions. If they don't, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don't need to worry about it much.
Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you'd get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.
Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don't have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn't enabled yet.
You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game's compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.
Steam doesn't have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you'll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting "Enable Steam Play for all other titles"
That's what lets it use Proton for everything by default.
That used to be the case, it is enabled by default now.
SteamOS isn’t out for download if I remember correctly but you are correct about Bazzite and Novato being similar and great gaming specific distros.
Bazzite is modeled off of Steam OS
Good news, it actually is and had been for a few months! https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3#reimage
Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC's like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.
While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC's, Valve doesn't recommend doing so.
They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC's in the future, but it's not there yet.
If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it's designed for.
You are correct that it is possible to do, but it's not recommended.
For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular. I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it. I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn't used it in yonks. Good luck!
Almost any is fine, but if you want a distro optimized for gaming, Garuda has been treating me quite well.
Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it's still Arch.
Pros: It's easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It's still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you're not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it's easy to change.
I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They're harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.
Pros: You're less involved with the OS's technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.
In the end I'd say that Garuda is great if you're interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There's a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you'Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.
This is a good policy. They destroy everything they touch, anyway, including their acquired studios.
I find it really hard to boycott Microsoft today. Yeah, fuck windows, office, Xbox. But there's GitHub and Azure which you just ignore walking the internet
Yeah, GitHub really hurts. Hopefully people will start to use SourceForge and similar alternatives once they realize that Microsoft isn't just trying to monopolize Operating Systems and Gaming Studios, but the whole damn Internet as well.
SourceForge sucks ass. I'll use pen and paper to manage my repos before SourceForge.
Forgejo is the best git forge hands down. It's FOSS, snappy & clean web interface, much lighter than Gitlab to self-host, integrates with a bunch of CI platforms, and instance federation is in the works. It's like GitHub, but better in pretty much every way.
The most popular instance is Codeberg
Cool, I'll check it out. I'm not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work. It's nice to know that there is a decent alternative for people who need it.
Not only is it FOSS, but the experience is legitimately better than GitHub.
Also has a super fast & good repo migration & sync system. You can still keep the GitHub repo around for the network effect while porting over issues & PRs.
Forgejo Actions is maybe the only thing worse, but that's because it isnt one-to-one with the whole GHA ecosystem, even if most GitHub Actions work out the box with no changes.
You're gonna start seeing more of these pointing to codeberg.org in the near future. I have been seeing a ton of important projects move there or their own Forgejo instance. Once federation hits, I imagine a massive proportion of projects are gonna jump ship.
Im gonna need a fact check on that bonus number.
Yes you are going to need to, but as you asked so presumptively I have a couple of links from pretty good journalistic sources.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/krafton-plan-to-delay-subnautica-2-and-deny-the-studio-a-250-million-bonus
https://www.theverge.com/news/703373/krafton-delay-subnautica-2-250-million-bonus
The Bloomberg article they reference it's paywalled to hell :D https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/krafton-delays-subnautica-2-game-ahead-of-250-million-payout?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc1MjA4MzgyNCwiZXhwIjoxNzUyNjg4NjI0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTWjU4SUFUMVVNMFcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.R0p1u8-Bar_mXzXyKWDJxsN-yaSdlIWVs2GZ5WCbpAM&leadSource=uverify+wall
Archive link for the Bloomberg article in case the gift link stops working https://archive.is/2mltm
I mean, you made the claim presumptively, seems reasonable to think it would be on you to provide a source.
Proving a negative vs a positive, exactly
The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like "10% of net profit, capped at $250 million".
If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn't pass the smell test.
Does it make sense to nitpick how much they’re getting though? The fact that they’re being denied any bonus is shady as fuck.
That's how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn't be a bonus.
It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.
The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.
Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I'm not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it's not my preference.
I'm also not defending Krafton's decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that's impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?
And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme ("a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad"). So I'm really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don't add up to explain how it's actually bad.
Being possible doesn't equal being likely.
The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.
According to Krafton's statement the remaining employees are getting their bonus though.
Apologies - that was not a dig at the validity of the information provided.
That’s a very high number - so I had to either be misunderstanding the number or underestimating the number of employees the bonus was going to.
I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher
You said it was a fact when it’s just a suspicion
This fact check provided by EA Games.
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 andcosmetics 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.
Kpop is extremely exploitative to the artists, much worse than game development.
We're talking physical and sexual abuse levels here.
Not chill at all.
Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
Isnt every other new game "the most wish listed on steam"? Do any of them ever prove this with numbers?
You can see the numbers here, for instance: https://steamdb.info/stats/mostwished/
Steam itself shows the rankings, I believe.
Oooh, there's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
$250M PLUS legal costs PLUS $250M in punitive fees. That should hurt them a bit.
You can't typically get punitive damages for contract disputes. Also, there is a very real possibility that the contract hasn't been breached by the new owners' actions. It sounds like they used their superior bargaining power to put a lot of questionable yet enforceable provisions in the contract.
Ive heard of it once where the defendant litterally wrote a book on how to use overseas buisness to pull off scams like the one he was being accused of
Punitive damages can be awarded for bad-faith bargaining, which definitely seems to be the case here.
It's a stretch perhaps, but that's what I think would be reasonable.
Typically, conduct would have to rise to the level of fraud to justify punitives in a contract based dispute. That's a very high hurdle in most jurisdictions. Also, at that point the conduct complained of would likely be based in tort, not contract.
By what law?
Not a lawyer but I'm guessing it would have to be proven as a justifiable delay.
That’s easy, just say there were features they wanted
Seems like there is a plot twist to this story no one is mentioning https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3ltmyjaecpc2w
Best comment. Trust the publisher bro !
It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the "right" choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell
Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.
Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!
I’m sure there’s some truth in there, but it is hard to believe it entirely. This is what you get for unnecessarily selling your company.
Ah shit, is this ZA/UM all over again?
Oh. Huh. That seems important. I wonder what they have to say in response.
i never bought 1. But also the story behind 2 feels like ksp2.
But you played it Right ?
Right ?
</Anakin meme>
No. I still need to. :/
It's a really good game and still holds it's own to this day. Highly recommend it.
If you got vr is best played that way. Best horror game on vr.
it’s a horror game? prob will pass then. Also lemme borrow your vr for porn though. I’ll give it back.
It's horror in the sense that Bioshock was horror, but much less so. There are some areas with 'tension' that you pretty quickly become accustomed to, just as you would in a game where there is a 'progression' of areas where each area you move into is quite difficult at first until you get the resources and build the new items from that area.
oh! that’s cool. will put it on my todo list. thanks!!
I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.
Outerwilds is also a must play in vr,
Publishers are cancer. Self publish whenever possible !
You Don't Need a F-ing Publisher*
*unless you do.
It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.
A self-published game with a focus on quality will outperform any AAA game.
If you are going to compete with AAA games it's going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.
A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.
Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a 'failure' sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.
Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn't want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.
I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft's gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it's understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it's just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don't agree with it.
I'm still waiting for Obsidian to finish writing the second half of Tyranny and I won't be buying another of their games until they do.
Source?
Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don't sign away too much while still getting value from them.
It's not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not
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.
Well this just wrecked my evening.
But this is an ongoing, recurring story. Thief 2014 was a mockery of the original titles.
Companies only answer to profit and unfortunately we get to see the results. Can't have those proles making 250 million dollars now. That would eat into the profits of our shareholders.
I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.
I'm not ignorant of it, just uninterested. I've watched gameplay footage of the first one, and it didn't look like my kind of game.
First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn't actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.
For people who've played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.
Heh. Moon Well. Warcraft 3 player.
Yeah, I just had to search for this because I thought, I missed that too!
I just really don't like crafting mechanics in games, and the game seemed very collecting and crafting heavy.
It was weirdly a little light on crafting in some ways. But extremely heavy in others. I tried playing it like Minecraft and stockpiling stuff but that's not really the way. I found it slightly more enjoyable to gather things only when I needed them.
Also the game has no map and I'm REALLY bad with directions. Like REALLY bad.
Yep, it loops between exploration and basebuilding / crafting.
The exploration part is what usually gets people hooked because the alien underwater setting is amazing. The other stuff is more to give you a reason to stick around for longer, and pace your exploration since need to unlock things at certain points.
Then maybe I'll try it sometime. I don't like base building (feels like crafting), but exploration can be fun. But it's pretty far down my list.
Very, very light spoilers:
This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don't need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.
A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn't stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they're playing it like Minecraft, and it's not Minecraft. You don't need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don't have an immediate idea of how to use, you're probably doing it wrong.
Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you're a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you're not moving in. To quote the game itself, "Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not."
Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there's a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka "Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?" The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line "Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down." You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.
Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you'll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.
The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.
I don't think I had scanner room blue print.
Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.
You'll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.
Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you'll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn't complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.
Lifepod 6 and 7 are both "coordinates corrupted" quests; it won't give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.
All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.
It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.
I'll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, "Well now what?" And the game doesn't seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.
I don't need hints because I'm not playing the game and I'm not planning on continuing. I'd gotten further than you think. But for context I'd already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn't take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn't have the moon pool unlocked. You're talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.
Yeah, it sounds like you didn't explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I've finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.
That's the point of the game - it doesn't tell you where to go and what to do because you're meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.
Look, I genuinely get your point, and I was tracking with you until you said this. Fuck off. Fuck for with this stupid bullshit. I was not playing wrong. I was playing it the same way everyone else does. I was exploring. I was collecting. I was finding new things. It was getting very clear that the distances the game expected me to travel were meant to be done much faster than what I was capable of. I was getting multiple upgrades for things that I couldn't use because I didn't have the thing that lets me install them. It's been ages since I've played and I'm not psychic so I'll never know what the actual devs' intent was, but something was off. I'd definitely missed something. What's more annoying is that I was finding multiple blueprints I already had or something? I don't remember the context. Like you needed 3 fragments or something. And I'd find more like "ah surely this is the third for the thing I need" only to get the 5th of something I already had. It was give years ago when I played, at least, so I'm probably explaining wrong.
But don't fucking say I was playing wrong. That's such a condescending, brain dead thing to say to someone who is critiquing a game.
"Hey, based on what's going on and getting tons of upgrades and not unlocking the thing to install the upgrades, I think I've missed something and I have no idea where to find it. It would be nice if there was a way to unlock this without scouring every inch of the ocean I've been through multiple times and without looking it up online." No, you're just playing wrong! It's a game about exploration and discovery!
🙄
You’re not alone. As much as I love that game, the absolute lack of direction is one of my biggest gripes with it, right along with the atrocious inventory system.
You’d think someone who manages to build a fricking atomic submarine and a mech suit would be able to pinpoint relevant tech on the go somehow but no. Also you get a scanning room that can pinpoint little pebbles a kilometre away but is it helpful? Nope. Just another half-baked gameplay element that was never developed beyond the initial concept.
So yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid. Anyone who played this game would agree. But maybe that’s why I personally love the game. Clunky and beautiful, frustrating but once you find that thing you’ve been looking for, a bit rewarding too.
Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:
Because with games like this where progression isn't gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn't get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there's no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren't sure, and you don't want spoilers so you don't look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn't have it yet, that's common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.
But it's just so infuriating when people say things like "you're not playing right" like, I'm getting frustrated because I'm playing right! If I wasn't checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don't. But then you can still miss things because there's no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.
Tbh I’m against the full on map idea since it would ruin and demystify/trivialise the aspect of exploration, but maybe they could have made it so that the scanner room HUD chip UI was actually useful and displayed any kind of distance indicator. Often times I’d be scanning for limestone chunks for example. Now my HUD is full of circles that all have the exact same radius and no indication of distance, just a vague direction, and it’s so frustrating to work with that.
They could have added some sort of compass as well. They chose not to.
I wish they implemented something like No Man’s Sky’s non-intrusive HUD, which conveys both heading and distance at the same time in a super nice way.
I'm at least willing to wait until it gets reviews to make a sound judgement.
I don't think the bonus would have been a big enough reason to delay the game. Delaying a game like this relatively last-minute and giving it an extra year of development is waaaay more expensive than the bonuses would have been. That's a gigantic revenue spike they were expecting to get this year and now have to push out to next year, and they may well end up paying out similar bonuses next year too.
My suspicion, from the history of Steve Papoutsis, is that Kraftom wanted to add in anti-player elements and the original founders refused. Probably micro transactions, or maybe even having a bigger multiplayer focus to make it closer to a live-service game. Some mechanism to get money from customers beyond the original purchase. I suspect crap like that will be reason enough not to buy the game when it comes out.
Agreed. Subnautica 1 steam revenue breakdown offers a bit of perspective on why they might want to play pretend.
“How much money did Subnautica make? We estimate that Subnautica made $274,113,745.92 in gross revenue since its release. Out of this, the developer had an estimated net revenue of $80,863,555.05. Refer to the revenue table for a full breakdown of these numbers.”
$274,113,746
GROSS REVENUE
ADJ. REGIONAL PRICING
$24,670,237.13
DISCOUNTS
$54,822,749.18
REFUNDS
$32,893,649.51
STEAM CUT
$48,518,133.03
VAT / SALES TAX
$32,345,422.02
NET REVENUE
$80,863,555.05
Bloomberg reported that the bonus was tied to revenue targets. So the $250,000 estimate must be estimating significantly higher revenues for them in 2025.
What you posted is just the sales on 1 platform for 1 game, whixh came out in 2018 when games were cheaper.
It’s far and away their most profitable game to date, so it would make sense to get some perspective from it. Can you offer anything concrete about their other platform sales? I’m not familiar with any tools for that
According to one of the articles above the publishers operating profit last year was "only" $300m so that bonus would make the shareholders mad I guess.
Yes. Like, it's not even a question it's more expensive to delay it. First of all, they are choosing to pay for 6-12 months of extra development, which alone is probably several times more money than the bonus that they would have paid out. I don't know what their payroll is, but we don't need to know because math.
If the bonus was for 1/2 annual salary per person (which would be insanely high), then the cost of the bonus would be the same as 6 months of additional payroll. Meaning that with any longer delay than 6 months or smaller bonus structure than 1/2 of annual salary, it becomes more expensive to delay the game. Both of which are incredibly likely in my opinion.
And that's just salary. It's possible the studio was planning on laying people off after release, but more likely that they would have moved to a other project that is currently wrapping up pre-production. So this is causing a cascading effect unless they hire additional staff to catch up.
Then you have marketing costs. The rule of thumb in the industry is that half the overall budget is marketing. There are all sorts of contracts they probably had- digital stuff like banner ads on websites, on the console digital storefronts, partnerships with twitch streamers and YouTubers and review websites, physical stuff like cardboard cutouts and fliers. They may have started printing for boxes for physical releases (though I'm not sure whether this game would have had one or not). They may have started acquiring merch inventory: shirts and stickers and backpacks and flashlights and more perhaps. Some of these contracts they may be able to postpone or cancel, but they certainly aren't getting back 100% of what they paid.
And in all of this time they aren't getting the huge revenue spike they were expecting. The vast, vast majority of a game's revenue comes at launch (excluding live services, which this hopefully will not have). They need to survive another year on the trickle of revenue coming in from the sales of their other games, or Krafton may need to pump more of their own money into Unknown Worlds. Or debt.
Yar har fiddle dee dee
I feel like I’m the only person on the planet who thought Subnautica was boring and tedious. It was definitely not for me
Nah, that's valid. I loved it to bits, myself, but what made me love it was how adroitly I felt it curated feelings of dread and sincere awe as I explored deeper and deeper; and that's highly subjective. I hope you're finding as much joy in your own fave games as I did in Subnautica!
I also wasn't a fan, mainly due to how often you need to resupply to stay alive. You get a very small window of opportunity to do actual exploration before you need to go find more food and water, on top of gathering a bunch of other materials.
I liked parts of it, but ultimately just got frustrated with the tedious parts and bailed.
That phase does end. The various vehicles allowed for exploration without returning to the surface, as do deep sea bases.
At the same time, I fully understand why you feel that way. The crunch is required for the fear to be meaningful, it's not everybody's cup of tea.
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.
I did build the big ship, but I don't think I used the planters effectively. I just remember needing to frequently recharge it and repair it.
Couldn't get into the main game. In VR, however, just exploring was an unforgettable experience.
I want to love it in VR. It's taking me a long time to train my stomach to accept it however. It gives me SERIOUS motion sickness in VR.
There's an improved motion control VR mod now for it now btw
https://github.com/Okabintaro/SubmersedVR?tab=readme-ov-file
I'll check it out, next time I get a chance to fire it up. Unfortunately, I hate the teleport mechanism of vr games. I love hurtling through the water. Unfortunately, that also makes me motion sickness. I'm slowly training myself out of it, but it takes time.
It's just a shame it's such a half arsed VR conversion. Way too much UI going on for my tastes.
It's a popular streamer game, which means long gaps where nothing happens.
I found it to be tense and interesting while playing. But looking back, I can't really put my finger on what made it that way. I swam around and gathered resources to build boats, make food and fresh water - I can't really ser what the big drive was. But I certainly loved it enough to finish it, which is rare for me regarding most games.
That whole survival crafting genre seems very hit or miss to me, and I've noticed that people liking one game in the genre is a very poor predictor of whether they'll like another one. Subnautica, Don't Starve, Minecraft, and Ark are all theoretically the same genre but very different games.
However I've also seen a lot of people say that Subnautica was the one that clicked for them. I think the story and progression was big for a lot of people.
I love survival/building games, and so do most of my friends. Even the terrible ones are usually fun. So I'd posit that it's the opposite with a caveat: liking one for more than its story means you'll enjoy the others.
I think it's more indicative of games/hobbies as a whole than the survival genre specifically. People who love the adrenaline of a motorcycle may not enjoy the thrill of going down a mile high mountain on two thin sticks, IF it was the rumble of the engine beneath them that they actually enjoyed. If it was the rush of the speed though (or in the case of survival/building games, the exploration and struggle to stay alive and not lose your stuff), then they'll likely enjoy the other adrenaline sports.
No, sane here. I also didn't find its gameplay loop fun, although the graphics were incredible.
Edit: I meant 'same', but I'm leaving it.
Seeing the underwater world was so much fun. I got it to play in VR and only did that a couple of times, but I completed the original and Below Zero because the exploration and underwater scenes were just so good.
I just can't get into it. I can see there's a progress path of stuff to do, but it feels like there's grind to get anywhere.
That grind is also why you actually feel like you are losing something if you die, and consequently makes you anxious about going deeper.
It was very much not an action oriented game. It was more about building resources and exploration. I can definitely see it not appealing to large swatches of the gaming population. Especially those used to the modern spate of action rpgs.
Same here.
Well... Piracy it is, then.
Doing the boycott "right" means not paying money. Corpos think each pirated copy is a loss. That's how they explain it to their investors too:
"Look at all this money we're not making because of those damn dirty pirates!"
I’ll just watch some let’s plays on YouTube
I only got into subnautica because Markiplier was so funny screaming in the videos
Probably not really feasible - it will require constant connection to a back-end server to play or some bullshit like that.
But even if you can, that's not the answer. The proper action is to deny them entirely. Don't play the game, don't play PUBG, don't do anything that expands their reach, money or not.
They need to suffer with NOBODY playing this game. They need to suffer by people deleting their Battlegrounds accounts. Software piracy is what makes games legendary.
Avast ye matey!
jokes on them, i already pirate their games ☕
Subnautica is one of those games that's incredible hard to recreate. Once they started trying to explain every little thing about the aliens I completely lost interest. You may be able to bottle lightning, but you certainly can't do it twice.
Now this has been rather disproved, do we think we could retract the post? It's probably done harm already but we can at least acknowledge it's no longer accurate.
I never cared for Subnautica I also never cared for PUBG
But what little I know about PUBG, What I've seen them do to Subnautica 2, and that lazy AI ridden "Sims killer" Inzoi, Im of the opinion Krafton are just hustlers.
The original Subnautica is worth playing, it's a fantastic game with an interesting world, intriguing story, and actually fun gameplay and vehicles. The vehicles themselves are extremely fun, too.
Original subnautica is amazing. I've played it twice which is a really high bar for me cause I rarely replay story driven games
Below zero isn't bad either, I enjoyed it but it doesn't come close to my first playthrough of subnautica
The Ai features in Inzoi are pretty nifty tho, generating any texture for clothing in-game with only a prompt is insanely cool.
the creation in the game is advanced, its the gameplay inbetween the character creator and house designer that I find to be hollow
I wasn't dunking on the game, I only said I didnt play it, and otherwise, anything in the present that Krafton is associated with seems like something to avoid
It's cool! No worries, just want to point out when an actually good use for Gen Ai is put in place :P
Pirate all Krafton games.
Edit. Apparently there's more to the story.
Below Zero was ass anyways
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.'
Were you on the NS forums? I went by "Scythe" back in those days.
A bit, yeah. Same username then as today. I was with NSArmsLab and BAD Clan mostly those days.
Weird to think that was 20+ years ago.
I had so much fun playing NS. Banana phone anyone?
Honestly, I do not plan to buy it after Below Zero. Now that they did all the evil stuff I guess my decision is well justified.
Just typical KRAFTON doing KRAFTON things.
"But it's still mostly the same team, please give us the benefit of the doubt 😭😭😭😭"
Don't be stupid, don't buy from a publisher before the 1.0 release
Oh fucking god dammit. I was really looking forward to it too.
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.
The original NS was so fucking good, man. I lived in that game for several years. The competitive scene was awesome.
Was that the half-life mod that mixed RTS and FPS?
The very same!
Me too! Did in person LAN events and managed servers for Multiplay. No game will ever come close to the engaged community. Fusion X was my clan from start to end.
Some of the fan made content still pops up in my head, lol. Like Boondock Marines. Legendary!
Brilliant! Another thing they never got around to in NS2 that they had in NS1. Doors, lifts, weldable components that do things.
Let me preface by saying NS/NS2 are my all-time favorite games
NS2 had a terrible launch.* It was unstable, terrible performance, limited to no tutorials, and no match matching system. The game has an intense learning curve, and players who had thousands of hours from NS1 / Early Access. It's also a game where cooperative play was imperative, so the matches really stink for everyone when teams are unbalanced / one guy curbstomps the other team.
It did eventually address those things, but much of it came too late. I so desperately want NS3 to bring it new life... but that doesn't ever seem to be coming. I want more games where I get to be the alien/creature/monster!
My desperation hit an all-time high when I started making a game in Godot... ;-;
*To be fair, they also needed to launch ASAP because they needed the money to stay afoat
I feel the same way - both take the top spot as my all-time best games.
I will say - It was a mistake building their own game engine for NS2. I realise options were limited but they bit off more than they could chew and that came out in the launch and first 3 years or so, as you say. Yeah the co-op and commander concept was both what made it awesome and contributed to its downfall. They tried to make it easier by making it so Gorges became a support role rather than critical to the alien comm but was too little, too late.
I would 100% back a crowdunded NS3, as I did with NS2. The eSports scene is far more mature now, it could work.
The whole ordeal with the game engine is so.. ironic. They opt'd for it because they wanted the infestation to spread dynamically and it wouldnt work with existing engines... so one whole custom game engine later... the infestation feature they desperately wanted was scrapped anyways.
At least it benefited from being easy to mod... the modders are the real MVPs. Kept the game alive with everything from performance, to matchmaking, to balancing.
I'd absolutely support a crowdfunded ""NS3"".. but I don't know if that's feasible without the official company's sign off? Like it couldn't just copy the core gameloop/aliens because of copyright? I can't imagine it feeling the same without Skulks, Gorges, Lerks, Fades, Onos. The way they traverse the map and fill a niche would be hard to beat.
Yeah, the modding community rallied around both versions. The NS community is really dedicated. I admit to stopping playing NS2 when they made the announcement, have they allowed the community to keep it going in any form?
Surely they would approve of some community crowdfunding? Perhaps the original creators but not the parent company is it is now, if the recent issues around Subnautica are to be believed. NS belongs to the community.
I haven't played in ~a year, but afaik yes! The benefits of selfhosted servers. I think there were 3-4 servers going strong on the weekends. Unfortunately, a lot of those players were the... worst kind. Hyper competitive, 10k hours, surrender the second something goes wrong types. (Edit- this might have been because my own ELO was super high, so different levels might vary)
Still amazing to see any activity this long!
My understanding of the situation was one of the creators/founders/idk said they don't want to do anything more with guns. Hence why subnautica has no "real" weapons and no NS3. This was a long time ago with some old tweet(?). I don't know if a community-funded thing would get support from the original creators.
Yo ho all together hoist the colours high...
I don't understand how game dev works, how does a publishing company fire the CEO of a game dev company. Like do these publishers own the game company?
Very often they do, but not always. In this particular case they do.
Fuckin vertical integration bullshit
The founders sold it, it’s not like they were put a gun to their heads to sell.
Die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain
This looks less like heroes becoming villains and more like villains (who were always villains) tricking the hero and murdering them. Unknown World's founders and developers of the first game all got fired by the company that acquired them.
Definitely died as heroes.
The founders are the villains of this piece as much as Krafton. They sold out for a big payday. This was all very predictable.
You’d have to really dense to think that Krafton is going to come along with half a billion dollars and just let things carry on as usual.
They tempted the heroes with wealth beyond measure so that by the time they stab them in the back, nobody mourns.
They didn't sell out. That's a childish view.
They made one and a half games (Subnautica and the dlc turned full release), never made the direct sequel, cut thier losses and cashed thier checks.
If they sold out they'd still be on the dev team, making micro transactions for the corpo.
They literally sold out. They sold the company. And, they sold it to a corporation whose portfolio is littered with microtransactions.
What losses? Were they not profitable?
Yeah, that’s the selling out part.
No. That's taking the money and run.
If they sold out they'd still be on the dev team, making micro transactions for the corpo.
I feel like I learn more about what I shouldn't play then what games I should play when I am on here.
You want to hear about a game to play?
Clair Obscur. Made from former Ubisoft team members in what sounds like a healthy development culture and it's a godamnned masterpiece at every level. Visuals, art direction, story, characters, mechanics, music - it's all stellar.
I’ve never bought a game that isn’t indie since 5 years 🫡
Same except I made an exception for fromsoftware lol
Arrrr...
Pirate it is
So is like what happened in ZA/UM with Disco Elysium?
Why can't the OG devs just opensource the code out of spite. Would be a big middle-finger
Nooooooooooooooo I was literally just talking about being excited for this game.
But can I still buy the OG subnautica?
What is the next project of the og subnautica creator?
Heads up: once in a blue moon it’s on “sale” for free on Epic Games.
(Ask me how I know.)
Fuck epic games, but I was happy I didn't have to buy it a second time on steam to play it with my kid.
I'm just contemplating to get the mobile version of Subnautica.
I don't really understand this sentiment. Cheap games are cheap games. Not even steam lets you 'own' your gaming library. More game market competition is good not bad.
Epic is 1/3rd owned by Tencent. No thank you
Just an Idea but could it be that the game was delayed because it is just not ready yet? Yes it could be an evil scheme sure, but maybe it is not. Has anyone here really any hard facts or insider information about the true status of the game?
It's always possible but the announcement coincides with the abrupt termination of head staff so that makes it suspicious. Still could be just for quality's sake though, I dont know if we can find out something like that unless they want us to
apparently the original devs were not interested in this lol
Ok, no problem.
they did such a bad job on Below Zero, this could be a turn for the better for the series. though if there are microtransactions that would kill it.
Below Zero wasn't a bad game.
The biggest crime in AAA games is the tools paying top dollar for preorders and early access to games that have beta-level problems with gameplay.
Wait three or more months, they almost always go on sale and have had a patch or two. More playable, save $.
I was on an EA boycott for a while without even realising it. They just stopped making anything that interested me.
Only broke it for It Takes Two and Split Fiction, which I paid full price for. I did play a few Respawn games as well (Titanfall 2 and the Jedi games) but got them either as part of PSPlus or Humble Bundles.
Is this definitely what those devs are asking for? Sure this isn't just cutting them twice?
Not sure I can support that take. Kinda focussed on the headline there and ignores the fact that other people work there also, that are probably relying on the success of this game for their paychecks and ability to keep making games. The dev industry in general is not in great shape atm.
Let the courts sort out shady business practices imo.
Support a decent game (if it is decent).
Certainly don't preorder. Looking at you internet denisons.
other people got paid already. they most likely wont loose money or portfolio if you boycott. its rare that lower level devs and artists are getting any percent of the sales numbers. This talking point from you is coming straigt from bigger publishers all the way to stockholders that have nothing to do with the product.
If a studio goes under cause of lack of sales of a game it's not the execs who suffer. Can't see the point your making rn?
but the people are already kicked... Look if bob works at "bob studios" and i love his work and want to support him, i can buy his game. but if bob got fired long ago, he wont get the money i give to "bob studios". You are supporting a buisness construct and not the artist in this case here. almost all workers in the game dev field loose their job post project anyway, so you are not even helping them. So i stand by point that this is capitalist propaganda. Its sad but videogame artists get abused by the scene a whole lot. i think it makes sense to show support witht the individuals who make the games you love, rather than the legal steuctures trying to milk them.
Are you saying that only the 3 people that got let go (and potentially shafted), are the only people that worked on the game? I don't believe that's the case but I could be wrong of course.
I thought the people fired were executives, not creatives.
Edit: I also don't see how a boycott helps the actual people working on the game.
Yeah, I'm just going to wait and see. If it's good, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
Don't use best coding practices, do not make readable code following good naming/formatting standards, have it only make sense for you in the moment and require weeks to debug even by you
Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn't happen. I'm apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn't care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.
I will wait and see how its release goes, not that I ever pre ordered a game anyways
I don't have high hopes but I'm going to save my opinions for when it's released
This isn't a question of whether or not the game is good, it's a question of whether or not you want to support a publisher that will resort to these types of tactics. Guess it depends on your brand of morality.
The dev bonus payout is still unconfirmed and is a rumor until of course either an insider confirms it or it gets confirmed at the end of 2025, when the payout is supposed to happen. Who knows exactly how true it will be, hence why I'm not basing my opinion on it just yet. Could end up being moved to a different date, could end up being true. I just dislike immediately raising pitchforks just because a terrible thing supposedly may happen. I have enough patience to wait and see what the future holds.
Yea the founders getting ousted is a bit of a sour taste. I just have less sympathy for them since they were also the ones who sold the company in the first place.
Yikes!
Gib sauce!
I'm not particularly excited about this upcoming dumpster fire...Already took it off my Wishlist.
I'll pirate it
Set your stopwatches for when Tango gets shafted right before releasing their next game.
Welp, guess I'm going to not buy it harder then...
Didn't even know what it was
Never heard of it, probably never will once I forget about this post.
As much as I hate Nintendo, publishing wise they’re good.
O no!!! I didn't even buy subnautica one!!!
Gotta be honest, I would do the same and worse for 250 million dollars.
Jesus tapdancing christ is the subnautica fanbase rabid. How about we actually wait and see how the game turns out before we crucify everyone?
I do agree that you should definitely not pre-order it and remove it from your wishlist. But you should've done that already.
Why does it matter how the game turns out if the stance is "we don't want to fund shady developers fucking over content creators"?
Afaik krafton have been insisting for a while that the game is not ready. Founders disagreed and they were ousted. But seeing as the previous two games were in pretty dire state when they released into EA, I wouldn't really trust the founder's word on it. The whole "squirreling out of paying them 250 million" thing seems like speculation, but what do I know.
Besides, the OP is just ragebainting, because we know exactly fuckall about the game's actual state at this point.
I mean, they’ve just filed a lawsuit against Krafton, to me that says they’re pretty confident about being right.
Yep, juat read that. Man, what a fuckin' shitshow is SN2 gonna be.
Fuck krafton
what's unknown worlds? and why should I care?
I'm so sorry there aren't only posts about the latest Valorant skins here :(
idk I thought unknown worlds was some kind of video game I'd never heard of
Lemmy is not for you