Like a toothy, grinning leviathan prowling the depths, waiting for unsuspecting explorers to come toodling along in hopelessly delicate, defenseless mini-subs Subnautica 2 continues its reign of terror: Unknown Worlds announced today that the game has now surpassed 4 million sales in less that one week.
The latest sales milestone comes after Subnautica 2 pushed out one million copies in its first hour of release, and then doubled that to two million in its first 12 hours. And despite some professed trepidation from Unknown Worlds parent Krafton, the game’s early access state has not diminished enthusiasm for it: Subnautica 2 currently holds a “very positive” rating across more than 74,000 user reviews on Steam.
“We’re incredibly grateful for the response from players around the world,” executive producer Fernando Melo said. “Seeing millions of players dive into this new world during Early Access has been an incredible moment for the team. Community feedback continues to help shape the future of Subnautica 2, and we’re excited to keep building the experience together with our players.”
Something else I found interesting in the press blast is the description of Subnautica 2 as “developed by Unknown Worlds, founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire.” I get a lot of press releases, as you might imagine, and I don’t recall any of them ever pointedly naming the studio’s founders like that—except in cases where the PR is about a new studio announcement, of course. It’s honestly a bit weird.
Except it’s not weird, in this specific case, because of the well-publicized dispute between Unknown Worlds and Krafton. Here’s a summary of the whole mess if you’re late to the party, but the crash course version is that Krafton promised the studio founders, along with CEO Ted Gill, a veritable boatload of money if Subnautica 2 was a hit, and then tried to weasel out of it—an effort that blew up in the company’s face in a very public and humiliating way.
Since then, Krafton has taken a much lower-profile role on the whole, including being removed as publisher on the Subnautica 2 Steam page; Krafton told us in April that it’s “focused on successfully supporting the early access launch of Subnautica 2,” but what that actually means in a practical sense, I do not know. It reminds me more than a little of Valve’s effort to ensure that its name, and not that of publisher Sierra, led the way on Half-Life—and we all know how that turned out. (If you don’t know, Steam basically rules the kingdom of PC gaming now, and Sierra went out of business about 20 years ago.)
How close the Unknown Worlds honchos are to their big payout is entirely a matter of speculation at this point, as the requisite numbers have not been revealed publicly. I would imagine, though, that Krafton CEO Changham Kim is probably doing his best to think about something else right now. Anything else.