{"id":548729,"date":"2026-03-20T09:45:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T09:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548729\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T09:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T09:45:12","slug":"new-dispute-emerges-around-subnautica-2s-early-access-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548729\/","title":{"rendered":"New dispute emerges around Subnautica 2\u2019s early access release"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Lawyers for the ousted\u2014and now partially reinstated\u2014leadership team of Unknown Worlds, the studio behind Subnautica 2, are crying foul over news that the game will be released into early access in May.<\/p>\n

The release announcement earlier this week was made improperly, potentially \u201cdamaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community,\u201d the lawyers said in a letter sent on Tuesday to Vice Chancellor Lori Will of Delaware\u2019s Court of Chancery.<\/p>\n

In their letter, the lawyers also floated the idea of asking Will to find Krafton in contempt of the court\u2019s ruling.<\/p>\n

The letter was sent just one day after Will\u2019s bombshell ruling<\/a> that publisher Krafton had breached its contract with Unknown Worlds\u2019 executive team, when it fired them last June.<\/p>\n

The new issue isn\u2019t necessarily the May early access timeframe, but how the news was announced.<\/p>\n

The letter and Krafton\u2019s response have not been previously reported.<\/p>\n

A quick recap of prior events: Subnautica 2 is an unreleased, underwater survival adventure and the most-wishlisted game on Steam. Last year, longtime Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill, along with studio co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, were fired by Krafton. They swiftly sued<\/a>, saying the publisher had terminated them to avoid paying out up to $250 million in potential performance-based bonuses. The studio leaders had hoped to earn that with an early access release of the game, which Krafton had blocked. The publisher argued in court that Subnautica 2 wasn\u2019t ready, which the ousted execs disputed. On Monday, Will ruled that Krafton had violated its contract, firing the execs to avoid the performance payouts, and that it had to reinstate Gill<\/a> and give him full authority over any early access release for Subnautica 2. <\/p>\n

On Tuesday, IGN reported<\/a> on a new memo issued that day to Unknown Worlds staff by Steve Papoutsis, the executive Krafton had put in charge of Unknown Worlds after the 2025 firings. In the note, Papoutsis said that Subnautica 2 had passed a key development milestone \u201clast week\u201d and that he and Krafton had determined the game \u201cis ready for Early Access release in May.\u201d<\/p>\n

This news appeared to catch the lawyers for Gill, Cleveland and McGuire by surprise. <\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, they sent a letter to Will expressing \u201cserious concerns\u201d about whether it would be possible to forge an agreement with Krafton consistent with the judge\u2019s order.<\/p>\n

Papoutsis\u2019 memo was a problem, they wrote. He didn\u2019t have the authority to declare anything about Subnautica 2\u2019s release. As of 9am ET on Monday, March 16, the effective date of Will\u2019s order, Papoutsis wasn\u2019t CEO of Unknown Worlds. Gill was. And, per Will\u2019s order, only Gill could make Subnautica 2 release decisions.<\/p>\n

They continued:<\/p>\n

Krafton self-servingly announced the launch without any regard to its impact on the game, the team, or the community\u2014let alone this Court\u2019s Opinion. Announcing the release of a game is momentous, and it is typically accompanied by significant marketing activity, fanfare, and community coordination. And most importantly, the announcement is carefully designed to maximize excitement for the game. That entire process was supposed to be driven by Mr. Gill. However, in defiance of the Court\u2019s Opinion, Krafton has now taken that away, further damaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community.<\/p>\n

The lawyers speculated that Krafton had \u201cintentionally leaked\u201d Papoutsis\u2019 memo and then issued an official statement to confirm the leak.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, lawyers for Krafton defended their client in their own letter to vice chancellor Will, saying nothing they did violated her order nor showed contempt:<\/p>\n

Papoutsis\u2019s message was simply celebrating the UW employees\u2019 efforts toward a past event: Krafton\u2019s pre-Opinion determination that Subnautica 2 was ready for Early Access release. There was nothing improper about conveying the results of the milestone review or thanking the development team for their dedication and talent.<\/p>\n

They added that Gill could still make his own call about Subnautica 2\u2019s release:<\/p>\n

In his role as CEO, Gill will be able to assess independently his views on the state of Subnautica 2 and the appropriate release schedule; nothing in Papoutsis\u2019s message alters Gill\u2019s authority or discretion.<\/p>\n

Vice chancellor Will has not responded to the letters and doesn\u2019t necessarily have to. Both parties were previously ordered by Will to confer this week and submit a proposed judgment consistent with her ruling.<\/p>\n

The letter from Gill\u2019s attorney\u2019s this week doesn\u2019t indicate whether he would or would not support a May release for Subnautica 2. But it could limit his options.<\/p>\n

And, if Gill\u2019s lawyers are right, the lack of marketing fanfare around the leak of the May date could dull the launch of the game. Any harm to Subnautica 2\u2019s launch is an extra sensitive issue given the context of the legal dispute: millions of dollars of payouts are on the line, tethered to the scale of the game\u2019s initial performance.<\/p>\n

In her ruling on Monday, Will noted that there was obvious \u201cbad blood\u201d between Gill\u2019s side and Krafton but that the two would need to work together: \u201cThey can\u2014and must\u2014act in good faith to navigate their remaining contractual relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Pivot development team at Alt.Crtl.GDC. Photo: Game File<\/p>\n

A highlight of GDC each year is the Alt.Ctrl showcase that features games played with extremely experimental controllers. Perusing this year\u2019s offerings last Friday, I found a game controlled with giant scissors, another with big toothbrushes and one that amounted to dumpster diving.<\/p>\n

My favorite was Pivot<\/a>, a co-op game about collectively maneuvering a couch. It was developed by students at the University of Utah\u2019s masters of arts and engineering games program<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Players lift and tilt the physical couch in order to control the position of a virtual one. That virtual one is moving through an obstacle course on-screen, while being pursued by a giant skull. <\/p>\n

Developer Nishant Verma told me at GDC that the couch is made of styrofoam (this became more evident as I watched!) and that the name was a riff on an episode of the sitcom Friends<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\ud83d\udeab Ubisoft is laying off more than 100 workers at its Red Storm studio, as the North Carolina location known for decades for its Tom Clancy games, ceases in-house game development, VGC reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udc40 On Monday, Nvidia\u2019s revealed<\/a> its DLSS 5 AI-driven graphics technology that purports to improve game graphics\u2026 and it has been roasted about it by the media<\/a> and the online gaming<\/a> public<\/a> for the remainder of the week.<\/p>\n

The tech changed the faces of characters in footage from Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and EA Sports FC, drawing accusations of giving carefully art-directed games the generic look of AI \u201cslop.\u201d <\/p>\n

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said on Monday that \u201cDLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics\u2014blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.\u201d <\/p>\n

By mid-week, Huang was telling Tom\u2019s Hardware<\/a> that the new tech\u2019s critics were \u201ccompletely wrong\u201d because game-makers could still \u201cfine-tune the generative AI\u201d to suit their game\u2019s aesthetics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lawyers for the ousted\u2014and now partially reinstated\u2014leadership team of Unknown Worlds, the studio behind Subnautica 2, are crying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-548729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}