Subnautica - Undah Dah Sea (you die)

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OutInTheRain said:
I thought they got 500 million upfront in the initial sale. The 250 million was an incentive bonus if they hit a certain number of sales figures by the end of 2025. If the company believes that they may get a initial rush of sales if Subnautica 2 hits early access which put them over that milestone. However, if the early access is poor and buggy, it could jepordize future sales and the reputation of the company and the Subnautica brand.


250 Million is a lot, and that's one of the questions I have. If it's only 180k US dollars, then that is basically fuck all for most corps. Which, if that is true, then it's not about the money and more about the state Subnautica 2 finds itself in at the moment.
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The company was bought for $500m but that doesn't mean the founders got that, just that it was injected in the company. They were going to get up to $250 million via sales.

I haven't tracked down the original article for that, but I've seen online people speculate that the original bonus would actually have been 250 million won, which is about $180k and the currency got lost in translation somewhere. Which would make much more sense than devs getting a quarter billion.
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Possible, but I'm not convinced since the devs are claiming they would have distributed that money throughout the company, and didn't refute the number of $250 million USD.
 
Morrowind: GOTY Edition said:
The company was bought for $500m but that doesn't mean the founders got that, just that it was injected in the company. They were going to get up to $250 million via sales.
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Well probably 500 million total, including cash and whatever stock options were awarded to the previous owners of the studio, and anyone who had any kind of stock options amongst the employees.

Now depending on the agreement signed, the publisher would put up some of their money for development in the game, in return for a portion of the revenue. If they owned the studio outright, then they can expect all the profits. Unless something else was negotiated elsewhere. I assume the 250 million is a performance bonus, outside of the initial sale, but I would have to see the full details.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The developer is probably a flakey pain in the ass who can't produce. The publisher probably doesn't want to drop 250 million on a good day. I assume the relationship between publisher and studio has grown hostile. Probably due to mismanagement on both sides. I am going to lean to UW being the problem overall, because with three troubled developments in a row. With only one striking gold. That screams to me they got lucky, and can't follow up.
 
OutInTheRain said:
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. The developer is probably a flakey pain in the ass who can't produce. The publisher probably doesn't want to drop 250 million on a good day. I assume the relationship between publisher and studio has grown hostile. Probably due to mismanagement on both sides. I am going to lean to UW being the problem overall, because with three troubled developments in a row. With only one striking gold. That screams to me they got lucky, and can't follow up.
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Pretty much this. The developers have a history that isn't great, and regardless of what reddit like to think(they're currently angry at Krafton) the fact of the matter is that the studio leadership has apparently been a complete fucking failure for the past 2 years on Subnautica 2 and anyone investing money in them should be pissed off at what they've got to show for it if those slides are correct.

The fact that one of the studio heads who probably did make a huge chunk of that initial cash, has been fucking around not doing his job(leading the studio) and focusing on his own personal shit instead is another example of piss poor studio leadership. If you want to retire from game development and become a bottom barrel movie producer, then do that. Don't do it while keeping your day job you're being paid for, failing at, and expecting people to be happy with that result.
 
Morrowind: GOTY Edition said:
The company was bought for $500m but that doesn't mean the founders got that, just that it was injected in the company. They were going to get up to $250 million via sales.
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Some Chinese company owned 60% of the shares as of 2013, and held them until 2019. They only paid a few million USD for a controlling interest in the company, which makes it seem like the studio was on shaky financial footing in the early 2010s. It's unclear how much of the company the founders still owned when the sale to Krafton took place.

If I had to guess, it sounds like they did okay in the original sale, but they didn't get "fuck you" money. If they had hit the jackpot, they would have just left to work on their own projects instead of phoning it in and trying to collect the $250 mil incentive for Subnautica 2.

Perfect World acquired a 40% stake in Unknown Worlds Entertainment in August 2011 for CN¥10,803,330. It raised this to a controlling interest in February 2013 by acquiring a further 20% for CN¥5,098,956.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Worlds_Entertainment#cite_note-7"><span>[</span>7<span>]</span></a> During its 2019 fiscal year, Perfect World sold the majority of its shares in Unknown Worlds to an undisclosed entity.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Worlds_Entertainment#cite_note-8"><span>[</span>8<span>]</span></a> It sold the remainder by August 2021.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Worlds_Entertainment#cite_note-9"><span>[</span>9<span>]</span></a>
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Subnautica had always been a soft spot indie darling for me tbh, I remember thinking how amazing it was that they kept an open Trello and how well they responded to feedback during EA. Even threw in easter eggs to the big LPers at the time because, in their own words, without the publicity those series gave them they wouldn't have been able to finish the game. It was so fucking good that I refused to believe they didn't know what they were doing.

But man, it really was a typewriter monkey situation, wasn't it? You could see during BZ's early access how they just kept throwing away every single good thing about the game. They got rid of the better story. The better main character. The better map areas. The better creature designs. It was like you had asked them to take this game and make it worse on purpose. Genuinely and truly, the EA build right before the map & story was changed is better than the final product despite being half finished.

Such a shame. All they had to do was make Subnautica all over again and people would have eaten it up.

ETA: I still just can't get over how they have fucking wasted having some of the most talented people in the industry working for them. Simon is an absolutely amazing composer, and Alex Ries' paleo/theoretical biology design work is some of the best I've ever seen. Any studio worth jack shit would give their left nut to have people like that on a game. What are they doing?
 
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For any unaware, here's the plot of Below Zero which people keep referring to:

You play as a strong, independent black woman who don't need no man and never shuts the fuck up. She illegally travels to a polar research outpost on an alien planet which was abandoned following an industrial disaster, because her lesbian sister Sam was reported as having committed an act of terrorism which caused the disaster. But because all corporations are bad, your character refuses to believe that her sister (who dindunuffin) could have been no turrurrrist.

Your character does Subnautica shit and discovers that, indeed, your sister Sam got herself and others killed trying to bomb her own workplace for reasons which are never sufficiently explained. So your character goes "I did what I set out to do: Prove that all corporations are bad" - Even though they had told the truth about what had happened.

That is the A plot. The B plot is a ripoff of The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones; where there's a green alien in your mind which only you can see or hear. The alien acts bored and displeased with being in a bad game, and periodically directs your black ass toward the general vicinity of underwater artifacts which you are required to find to get the end credits to roll.

You complete the game by fabricating a new body for the alien AI parasite in your brain. Then you go to a space ship and he flies you to his home world, at which point the game ends. Also, there's a section involving fur coats, decoy penguins, and the worms from Dune which I won't get into - Just take my word for it that they're all retarded, and purely there to pad the gameplay out by forcing you to travel more slowly over land than you can in the water the rest of the game takes place in.

There's an optional MacGuffin quest where a vaccine your sister (a roboticist; and not a biologist) invented can be injected into the syphilis sores of a giant monster that's already dead; negating the need to treat its syphilis. There's also some dyke who wants to live alone on the planet (which she considers to be her property for reasons neither she nor the hack writers ever elaborate upon; resulting in her catchphrase being to yell at others to "GET OFF MAH LAND" in an arbitrary fashion), and the revelation that she's the one who both firebombed a research lab and manipulated your sister into killing herself and a security contractor is never addressed in-game, because the developers blatantly stopped working on it and then listed it for sale.
 
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It also continues that extremely irritating modern trend of giving female characters androgynous names to show that they're Strong Women In STEM and not stupid girls with stupid girl names like Susanne or Jessica. You are Robin, and your sister is Sam.

(Naturally, the AI stuck in your head who tells you what you need to do at all times is clearly male and named Johnny Silverhand Alan.)

Sorry, pet peeve of mine.
 
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Null said:
Why would they pay them $250m upfront???
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There was apparently some weird contractual agreement that the leadership, who were considered critical to keep a pretty anticipated Subnautica 2 to the same standards as the original, would share out some of the payments to the dev teams and 'other' staff costs, who would be paid the remainder through sales. I assume that was an acceptable part of the negotiation pending an expected smash hit until Krafton realised they were going to half-ass the game and expect their full bonuses anyway.

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ZipDisk said:
I just realized why Dirtnaut is impossible. You'd be building construction equipment and oil towers to fuel the contstruction equipment. And that wouldn't be allowed now.
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They made that. It's called Hydroneer. Pretty fun, but most of the game is pipes, conveyors, and rock crushers.
Marc said:
Below Zero was the result of UW abandoning their own refinement process and forsaking their own standards, simply because they desperately needed the injection of cash from releasing a DLC as a full price, standalone, download-only title to stay afloat during the pandemic. That they did so knowing the product was an undercooked turd (their protagonist even resembles one), and tried to foster good will by saying "Hey...it's been a rough road - But we'll make it up to you all with Subnautica 2" (instead of continuing to patch content into BZ)
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This was the first big, red flag that they were just cashing in. Almost all of the Below Zero assets, barring the shitty above-water ice stuff, had already been made by the original designers, most if who were already moving on by this point.

It was stuff that had been cut from the original Subnautica due to not quite fitting in and was going to be released at a later time as a free DLC so the developers work didn't go to waste.

No, wait. It's gonna be a paid DLC, because it's too expensive to put out for free.

No, wait again! Sorry, it's now going to be a stand-alone "Sequel" that's the same price as the original game despite having about half the content and it's going to have a long-ass development time where we ignore all the negative feedback you give us. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Marc said:
Your character does Subnautica shit and discovers that, indeed, your sister Sam got herself and others killed trying to bomb her own workplace for reasons which are never sufficiently explained.
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Marc said:
There's an optional MacGuffin quest where a vaccine your sister (a roboticist; and not a biologist) invented can be injected into the syphilis sores of a giant monster that's already dead; negating the need to treat its ssyphilis.
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To explain the motivations here: the virus inside the frozen leviathan is still ACTIVE, despite the creature being dead. And your stupid sister tries to bomb it so the "Evil corporation" can't use it. Despite the other scientists explaining to her how studying it can lead to medical breakthroughs, they aren't taking any samples off-planet, and THE CURE IS LITERALLY IN THE WATER after the events of the first game.

Because she's just SOOOO sure the corporation wants to weaponize it. But she's incompetent and fucks up, only blowing herself and an innocent scientist up without damaging the creature.

The "Vaccine" and "Curing" the creature is completely stupid, as they already have the cure in the water, and since the creature is dead and frozen, there's no way an injection would circulate in its body.
 
Marc said:
Your character does Subnautica shit and discovers that, indeed, your sister Sam got herself and others killed trying to bomb her own workplace for reasons which are never sufficiently explained. So your character goes "I did what I set out to do: Prove that all corporations are bad" - Even though they had told the truth about what had happened.

That is the A plot
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This is the A plot but it's also COMPLETELY OPTIONAL. Your character's entire motivation for coming to the planet is to find out what happened to your sister, but there is no reason or reward for doing it and it's actually very possible to miss entirely if you aren't keen on slogging through the dreadful surface section. The Phi lab, penguin drone, frozen leviathan, and entirety of your sister's story is down one path that you can just not go down and instead cross the broken bridge to the the Tremors worms area that actually progresses the plot towards the ending.

And as you said, following this thread has no payoff whatsoever. Just your character kind of weakly remarking to herself that she did the thing and now feels closure. Even though you start the game in disbelief that your sister is a violent retard and are definitively proven wrong with evidence that your sister absolutely fucked up big time and died pointlessly taking at least one innocent man with her. And it's never mentioned again.


Also it's worth noting that in Subnut 1 your PDA is issued by Alterra (big giant corporation) and has a generic janky British woman text to speech that is kind of bad but a little endearing. In Below Zero you have a functionally identical PDA issued by Xenoworx (a small company recently acquired by Alterra) and there is a log entry you can find early on that says something to the effect of "we all have these crappy old PDAs but pretty soon we'll get the fancy Alterra models :D"

The only difference between the models is that the Xenoworx PDA has the most grating obnoxious Indian woman voice which goes full Apu sometimes. In the first game the oxygen warning is just "oxygen." In BZ it's "WANNING, TETTY SECONDS OF OXY GEN REMAIN."

Anyway, it's very funny that it's acknowleged in-game that the Indian-voiced PDA is the crappy old models because that's about the only difference between the two.
 
That insufferable faggot seth dickinson is apparently working on subnautica 2 so I don't have high hopes

For the most of you that don't know, he contributed to the demise of the freespace modding community by injecting incredibly cringe male feminist stuff into the mods he was involved in and then having constant covid/TDS meltdowns later on.
 
Marc said:
There's an optional MacGuffin quest where a vaccine your sister (a roboticist; and not a biologist) invented can be injected into the syphilis sores of a giant monster that's already dead; negating the need to treat its syphilis.
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Don't forget it's the same space syphilis you spend all the first game trying to find a cure for and it had to come from an alien you find at the very end, you couldn't just make it.
 
Vect said:
There was apparently some weird contractual agreement that the leadership, who were considered critical to keep a pretty anticipated Subnautica 2 to the same standards as the original, would share out some of the payments to the dev teams and 'other' staff costs, who would be paid the remainder through sales. I assume that was an acceptable part of the negotiation pending an expected smash hit until Krafton realised they were going to half-ass the game and expect their full bonuses anyway.

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So they made their entire staff millionaires and then they didn't want to work any more? I am shocked. If I was a millionaire I would work just as hard at my day job as I did when I was poor. There's no way having enough money to live a comfortably off of for the rest of my life would change my work ethic.
 
I'm inclined to keep theorising, but it seems like a lot of skeletons keep coming out of the closet the more this situation evolves and the blame game gets worse.

No doubt that Krafton never wanted to give the 250 mil and now the UW leadership just gave them the perfect excuse to refuse giving it by being lazy fuckers and doing the bare minimum waiting for the check to clear and line their pockets further, Krafton likely have, as mentioned before, goot their statement proofread by an army of lawyers.

I'd say I feel bad about the developers if they weren't already well imbursed with the previous 500 mil and at the end of the day they're a bunch of whiny leftoid faggots for the most part.

As mentioned before, as well; it was lightning in a bottle the first time, Sub Zero was the nigger faggot spin-off while the second game is now becoming the sword of Damocles that THEY THEMSELVES placed above their own heads and continue sharpening to this day.
 
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p1138 said:
It's a dumpster fire of a game that relies on a fucking computer voice constantly nagging the player into doing a bunch of stupid puzzles, exploration is basically non-existent, you spend half the game out of the water so that bit of dread is gone and replaced with just cold which is much easier to avoid because of the thermal plants(as in actual plants everywhere that generate heat for you conveniently), the vehicle progression is simplified to the point of making base building damn near pointless compared to the first game(just get the aquarium car for your underwater train and you pretty much never need to do anything else). Basically everything the first game got right, BZ threw out... including the audio engineer apparently.

Sure, the first game basically has no replay value due to the world being static. But it's fine, and as long as you didn't buy it during early access you didn't have to put up with the slow trickle of content over the course of 4 years, but that's just a problem with early access bullshit in general when they aren't simply abandoned.
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You can try and replay Subnautica 1 with permadeath.

It completeley changes the game, how you play it, when you have only one life.

You invest in Armor and defensesystem for the seamoth. Something you would not do when you can reload for instance.
 
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Kharash said:
Don't forget it's the same space syphilis you spend all the first game trying to find a cure for and it had to come from an alien you find at the very end, you couldn't just make it.
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Otis Mallebrok said:
I noticed that too. In below zero you just mix three common things, and done, cure 😀😀
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Not only does Robin's "one misgiving away from being a firebombing terrorist with a cat named Potato" sister come up with a subcutaneously administered Kharaa antibiotic (erroneously labeled "antidote" in-game, despite Kharaa being a bacteria; and not a poison) through the Black People Magic of mashing ice-resistant plant matter and a chile pepper together (Again: Sam's education and speciality is robotics, and she was lousy enough at that to be demoted and reassigned to a different lab after building a spy penguin), she did something the "our advanced, hivemind science is indistinguishable from magic" Architects were unable to achieve over the course of thousands of years, due to their hinging the ??? step of formulating a cure on the cooperation of a giant, telepathic retard they had imprisoned refusing to hatch her eggs unless they played with her (which she couldn't convey to them, despite both parties' respective forms of telepathy apparently transcending language; given their instantaneous grasp of whichever language the humans they encounter happen to speak).

And the cure ends up being cum. You know what? Fuck these games.
 
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