Krafton Delays Subnautica 2 for (Maybe) Naughty Reasons?

There's $250 million on the line here.

Author

Robert Scarpinito
July 11, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

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There’s something in the water over at Krafton and Unknown Worlds. The publisher promised the developers at Unknown Worlds a $250 million bonus if Subnautica 2 hits a certain revenue target in 2025. Obviously, that’s going to be much harder now that Krafton has pushed the release into 2026.

According to leads who used to work at the studio, the game is pretty much ready for release into early access. However, Krafton disputes this claim and asserts that Subnautica creator Charlie Cleveland abandoned his duties on the sequel to pursue a personal film project.

Obviously, Cleveland disputes this claim and has filed a corporate lawsuit. It’s a big, ugly matter of “he said, they said” that’s overshadowing arguably one of the more anticipated survival-crafting sequels on the horizon.

Romero Games had canceled an upcoming project due to an unknown publisher pulling out of the deal, leading to some inaccurate reports about the studio closing. However, John Romero has come out to clarify that his studio will remain open and is actively working to right the ship.

In definitely unrelated news, opinion writer Anson Chan analyzes the massive layoffs at Xbox last week, putting a lot of them in context with how the brand has been doing since it acquired Rare in 2002.

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