Subnautica on iOS is great, but playing it knowing what's going on bums me out

  I've been spending the last few weeks playing the iOS version of Subnautica. I've also spent about as much time during its release following the current legal spat between Krafton, the company that acquired Subnautica, and the team that originally made the game. A good timeline summarizing these events can be found here, but the short version is: Krafton fired the leadership team on Subnautica 2 and delayed the game until 2026, which put potential earnings-based bonuses at risk of being impossible for the development team to get. Since then, the fired leadership team has filed a breach-of-contract complaint against Krafton, there's been a lot of public argument between both sides about whether Subnautica 2 is ready for an early access release, and Krafton has extended the bonus window for the development team (in a move I am cynically convinced was not made out of any goodwill or desire to respect the original deal).  

Regardless of who is right here or whether the development team gets its bonus or not (for the record: they should!), the whole thing has been putting a damper on my enjoyment of Subnautica. The situation reveals yet another side to the ugly business of making games and goes to show that even the developers of super successful games aren't somehow insulated from corporate decision-making.

On one hand, it makes me marvel at the fact that games like Subnautica exist at all. That said, it also implies a grim reality that there are probably many, many other games that never see the light of day. You don't have to look very hard to see how rough it is in the game's business. From burnout to mass layoffs, the industry is unusually cruel to all but c-suite executives. This terrible state of affairs is partially responsible for my move to cover mobile and smaller games in general, but the mobile release of Subnautica coinciding with this Krafton drama is forcing me to confront this head on.

And that's a shame because Subnautica is awesome. It is one of the few survival/crafting games that has really grabbed me, and the mobile port of it is shockingly well-done. It has an incredible sense of discovery, open-endedness, progression, and danger that in hours and hours of playing has managed not to fall off in the slightest. There's seemingly always something new lurking just ahead of you--both literally and metaphorically--and the reaching you have to do to get these things makes your survival situation both a bit better and also more terrifying.

I wish I could have these feelings for this game without also knowing that the people that made it are currently embroiled in some corporate back-and-forth horseshit. They deserve better than that, and it's not cool to see something so beautiful be tainted by such ugly circumstances. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't quite see things this way, or don't really care, but that's exactly what enables this kind of thing to happen. Treating games simply as products to consume might feel more comfortable, but all it really does it make you an easier customer to sell things to. And, as long as there are enough consumers willing to just ignore or shrug-off things like mismanagement and stealing profits, the closer companies can get to paying people less and chase the ideal goal of selling a product that barely clears the bar of minimum viability for maximum sales.

These are the things I keep thinking about every time I'm on a long dive in my playthrough of Subnautica, and it both makes me happy that such a wonderful game exists, but also sad that--even with a direct sequel in the works right now--we might not really see something capture the same magic again.