Subnautica 2 Smashes 2 Million Sales in 12 Hours, All But Forcing Krafton to Pay the $250 Million Bonus

What a launch.

Subnautica 2 dropped into early access on 14 May and the numbers are properly bonkers. Two million copies sold in twelve hours. Hundreds of thousands of divers flooding the alien depths at once. And somewhere in Seoul, Krafton CEO Changhan Kim is presumably staring at a spreadsheet wondering where things went so wrong.

The sequel from Unknown Worlds Entertainment hit one million sales inside the first hour, frankly ludicrous for an early access title at $29.99. Then? Two million by the time most of us in the UK had brewed our first morning cuppa. According to a studio press release reported by Game Developer, concurrent players across Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and the Epic Games Store peaked above 651,000. Steam alone clocked 467,582. For context, the all-time peak of the original Subnautica sat around 51,000. Nine times bigger. On day one.

Steam reviews are sitting at Very Positive too, thousands of players weighing in within hours. Not bad for a game whose parent company allegedly tried to bury.

The $250 million elephant in the water

Here's where things get genuinely satisfying. Back in 2021, when Krafton bought Unknown Worlds for $500 million up front, the deal included an earnout clause. If Unknown Worlds pulled in more than $69.8 million in revenue, Krafton owed $3.12 for every additional dollar of sales, capped at $250 million. Catch? All of this had to happen by the end of 2025.

Then, in July 2025, Krafton sacked the studio's CEO Ted Gill and co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. The official line: concerns about Subnautica 2 being unfinished and risking "irreversible harm" to the IP. The lawsuit told a wildly different story.

You know how these things tend to go.

The ousted trio sued, arguing Krafton fired them specifically to push Subnautica 2 out of the 2025 earnout window. Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill had planned to share the bonus pool with the entire studio team of roughly 100 staff, with individual payouts ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars into seven figures. Life-changing money for the folks making the game.

And then came the ChatGPT bit. Honestly, the absurdity writes itself.

The chatbot strategy session

A Delaware Chancery Court ruling from March laid out the whole sorry mess. Krafton CEO Changhan Kim went to ChatGPT for advice on dodging the payout. Fortune reported the chatbot first told him the earnout would be "difficult to cancel", then, when pushed further, helped him brainstorm a corporate takeover strategy nicknamed "Project X". The plan reportedly involved locking down Steam publishing rights, framing the entire conflict as being about "fan trust" rather than money, and prepping systematic legal defence materials.

Vice Chancellor Lori W. Will wrote one of the more memorable sentences in recent gaming legal history: "Fearing he had agreed to a 'pushover' contract, Krafton's CEO consulted an artificial intelligence chatbot to contrive a corporate 'takeover' strategy."

A real sentence. In a real court document. About a real CEO. In 2026.

The court ordered Krafton to reinstate Ted Gill as CEO of Unknown Worlds. The judge also extended the earnout window by 258 days to 15 September 2026, with the studio retaining the right to push the deadline out as far as 1 March 2027. Cleveland and McGuire were not reinstated, sadly, but the bonus survived.

Krafton was also quietly scrubbed from the Subnautica 2 Steam page in April, though the publisher confirmed they're still "supporting the early access launch" and Unknown Worlds remains a Krafton subsidiary. A touch awkward, all things considered.

So is the bonus locked in?

Pretty much, yeah. Do the maths.

At $29.99 a copy, two million sales is roughly $60 million in gross revenue before Steam's cut. The threshold for triggering the earnout sits at $69.8 million. Once cleared, every additional dollar of sales pays Unknown Worlds $3.12, all the way to the $250 million ceiling. With the weekend rolling in, an enthusiastic Very Positive review aggregate, and 5 million wishlists still converting, the studio looks dead set to blow through the cap.

Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who reviewed the original purchase agreement, put things bluntly: "Safe to say Krafton will be forced to pay out the $250 million bonus it tried very hard (via advice of ChatGPT) to avoid paying."

There's something poetic about how this has played out. Krafton spent the better part of a year sacking founders, ignoring the firm's own legal team, leaning on AI for boardroom strategy, and watching the company's public image take a beating, only to land in the exact spot leadership was trying so hard to avoid. The game is good. Fans are loving the sequel. Studio staff are about to get paid. And the parent company looks worse than ever.

For context on the broader pattern of corporate gaming court drama, this case slots in alongside Rockstar's tribunal saga with sacked GTA 6 developers, complete with leaks and embarrassing confessions of a similar flavour.

As for the game? Unknown Worlds says Subnautica 2 will sit in early access for roughly two to three years before reaching 1.0. Regular updates are planned, with the first wave focused on quality-of-life fixes, the second on co-op refinements like proximity chat, player emotes, and a revive system, plus bigger expansions adding biomes, creatures, and new tools down the line. Story content runs around 15 hours right now. Plenty more to come.

Worth picking up? Going by the player counts and the reviews, the answer's already pretty obvious.