Subnautica 2 publisher says the studio's previous game was a "failure" – a strategy game that's nothing like Subnautica and peaked at under 1,000 Steam players

The ongoing back-and-forth over Subnautica 2's leadership gutting, subsequent delay to 2026, and an adjacent $250 million payout apparently tied to developer Unknown Worlds' 2025 revenue targets has only intensified following a scathing statement from publisher Krafton, which acquired the studio in 2021 and has now, in so many words, claimed that the old studio leaders had to go because they weren't doing their job.

In the margins of all this, a smaller but interesting narrative has emerged: the studio's previous game, which was nothing like Subnautica and was the first thing it released after Krafton acquired it, was an utter failure.

Krafton's newest statement argues that the ousted leaders "abandoned the responsibilities entrusted to them," and at one point calls out co-founder Charlie Cleveland specifically.

"In particular, following the failure of Moonbreaker, KRAFTON asked Charlie to devote himself to the development of Subnautica 2," the publisher said. "However, instead of participating in the game development, he chose to focus on a personal film project."

Moonbreaker, you may remember – or not remember, because apparently nobody actually played it – was fully released in 2024 after a stay in early access that began in September 2022. It's a turn-based strategy game with PvP that doubles as a digital miniatures collector, letting you granularly paint and customize your units before sending them into battle in a world sculpted, in part, by fantasy author Brandon Sanderson.

This was inherently risky since strategy games have a relatively small audience with no real crossover with Subnautica's survival game demographic, but on Steam, Moonbreaker reviewed pretty well with a score of 84% positive after 1,262 reviews. A lot of game devs would kill for that kind of reception. But Unknown Worlds was coming off of Subnautica, which has 285,739 reviews with a 97% positive score on Steam. It's one of the best-reviewed games on the entire platform, which sets quite the bar.

I never got the impression that Unknown Worlds was banking on Moonbreaker being a Subnautica-sized hit, but whatever its expectations were, clearly the game drastically underperformed. And yeah, looking at its SteamDB history, which shows a peak player count of just 882 people nearly three years ago, it never got off the ground.

So, let's explore these abandoned ruins a bit. A look through Moonbreaker's patch history shows a classic sign of trouble: "Business Model Changes" shortly after launch. From the outside looking in, it certainly seems like the devs were making drastic adjustments to monetization in hopes of wooing players who clearly didn't bite at the time and ultimately never did.

Compared to the talk around the reveal for Moonbreaker, this monetization patch sounds like pretty scorched earth stuff, removing one key currency from purchase and deleting booster boxes entirely. Moonbreaker was $30, but old reviews show some confusion and pushback around its original free-to-play-like monetization. Clearly it was enough of a problem to warrant a dev response.

The real killer seems like a tale as old as time: a multiplayer game with no players. Today's vicious market is one thing, but even in 2022, a potential snowballing death for anything with multiplayer was a very real hazard. A lot of the recent Steam reviews for Moonbreaker praise the painter sandbox and core gameplay, but lament that there's almost nothing to do since there is – at the time of writing, quite literally – nobody playing it.

All of that being said, it wasn't until this increasingly public Subnautica 2 spat that the full depth of Moonbreaker's cratering really came into focus. Krafton has branded it a failure, and in a recent post of his own, which called the leadership changes a "shock," Cleveland described Moonbreaker as quite a sore spot.

"I tell you all this because I want to tell you that game development is in my blood," he said in a post that described the leadership changes as a shock. "So is iteration and early access. Our games have thrived because of it, and one of our games failed because we thought we knew better.

"I was most passionate about that game, and it fell flat. We worked on it 5 years before our early access, thinking that this time we were experts and we knew better. But fewer people played that game than even that humble Half-Life mod," he added, referring to the Natural Selection mod that launched the studio back in 2001. Natural Selection 2, a standalone shooter, came out in 2012. It currently has 102 more players than Moonbreaker.

"Even though our studio had financial success in that period, and even though many fans fell in love with the game, it really wounded me and I needed time to heal. Sometimes it feels like I’ll never get over that one."

As Cleveland says, Moonbreaker's failure obviously wasn't enough to derail the studio – Subnautica sold a lot of copies, and its followup Below Zero did well too – but it seems to have had a noticeable impact on some people and perhaps relationships at the studio. Krafton was undoubtedly disappointed when the first game from the studio it just paid $500 million for, which had been riding high after two big hits, was an incomparable flop. Meanwhile, folks like Cleveland had whiplash from the severe contrast in performance. Now it's a question of whether Subnautica 2 the game, not Subnautica 2 the contentious and unreleased project, can overcome its own hurdles.

"No subscriptions. No loot boxes. No battle pass": Subnautica 2 devs address concerns following major leadership changes, insist "it will remain a single-player first experience."