Subnautica 2 Lawsuit Ends With Team Bonus Payout

After months of legal drama, the team behind Subnautica 2 gets a bonus payout that dwarfs what was originally promised.

If you've been following the drama between Krafton and the team behind Subnautica 2, you'll want to hear how it all wrapped up, because this ending is honestly one of the better outcomes you'll see come out of a lawsuit like this.

If you need a quick recap, this whole situation kicked off when it came out that Krafton's leadership had reportedly leaned on ChatGPT to help find ways around paying out a massive bonus tied to Subnautica 2's performance. That earnout bonus, worth up to $250 million, was tied to the studio hitting aggressive monthly revenue targets.

Once a Delaware judge caught wind of how far Krafton had allegedly gone to dodge that payout, including a covert takeover plan, the court stepped in and ordered the ousted Unknown Worlds CEO reinstated, letting him get back to actually finishing and shipping the game.

From there, everyone had a deadline hanging over their heads: they legally had until September of this year to get Subnautica 2 into early access and trigger those aggressive revenue tiers, or the bonus money would never materialize.

Subnautica 2 didn't just hit its targets; it blew right past them, landing near 6 million copies sold not long after launch. For a game still in early access, that's a massive result, and it set the stage for everything that came next.

You're looking at the final chapter of this whole saga.

It genuinely looks like the last one. According to Bloomberg, Krafton reached a legal settlement with reinstated CEO Ted Gill, as well as co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. The same people were pushed out earlier in this fight. 

The result: the entire development team behind Subnautica 2 is being compensated significantly more than originally laid out when the company acquired Unknown Worlds in 2021. Now comes the interesting part.

As per the original plan, only Gill, along with the two other executives, was going to receive the earnout bonus, and there was nothing concrete in the contract guaranteeing that the bonus would eventually be passed on to the entire team. This was always a somewhat flimsy deal since it was not even written in the contract. Now things have changed thanks to the settlement reached.

Gill has assured that the bonus will go to everyone at Unknown Worlds, including the developers who had been with the company before the acquisition. So while the founders are walking away with a settlement, the actual bonus money is going to the wider Unknown Worlds team, which is a far fairer outcome than what looked likely a few months ago.

You're talking about roughly 100 people splitting a huge payout.

This could reportedly reach up to $250 million total once the earnout and settlement figures are combined, which is a life-changing amount of money for a studio of that size. Just one fact that should be mentioned: Ted Gill won’t remain with the company after all.

Even though he had been reinstated to complete the work and meet the sales targets to earn the bonus, there were reports that he would leave once everything was settled. No wonder. After going through legal troubles because the management tried to avoid paying what he and his staff were owed, staying with the company in the long term wasn’t really his intention anyway.

He came back, released Subnautica 2, and met the required sales targets to get the bonus. That does leave an open question about what happens to Subnautica 2 going forward. This is still an early-access title, meaning it needs ongoing updates, new content, and long-term support to keep growing.

With the CEO who led the studio through this whole fight now on his way out, and with the rest of Unknown Worlds fully aware that Krafton allegedly tried to use AI-generated strategies to avoid paying them what they were promised, there's a real question of how much goodwill is left between the developers and the publisher.

Putting the numbers into perspective shows just how big this outcome really is.

The original contract was incredibly leveraged, forcing Krafton to pay the developers over three dollars for every dollar of revenue generated beyond their target baseline. Because Subnautica 2 performed like an absolute juggernaut right out of the gate, Krafton found itself legally on the hook for a massive payout that directly eats into its own corporate operating profits.

That extreme financial bottleneck is exactly why the publisher tried to sabotage the timeline in the first place, and it's also why they are now stuck paying out significantly more than they ever wanted to. Even with a rocky drop-off in daily player numbers after the initial launch spike, which is fairly normal for early access games with limited content so far, the sales figures have already locked in the bonus regardless of how the player count looks day to day.

Krafton effectively lost money on the sales side once you factor in what it now owes, but the studio and its developers are the ones coming out ahead. After more than six months of this story dragging on through lawsuits, leaked details, and accusations on both sides, it's ending about as well as it possibly could for the people who actually built the game.

The founders get their settlement, the wider Subnautica 2 development team gets a bonus payout that dwarfs what was originally promised, and Krafton is stuck footing the bill for a promise it apparently tried to avoid keeping. It's rare to see a corporate legal fight wrap up in favor of the people who did the actual work, but that's exactly what happened here.