The legal beef between Subnautica 2’s developers and studio Unknown Worlds owner Krafton has been settled, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. CEO Ted Gill will leave the company, and the game’s workers will get their long-promised bonus–and then some.
Gill told Bloomberg that he and Krafton had “mutually agreed to part ways.” Gill was one of three studio leaders, alongside Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, who were fired by Krafton in July 2025 and subsequently filed a lawsuit claiming the company had intentionally delayed the release of Subnautica 2 to avoid paying them an agreed-to $250 million bonus for hitting certain milestones, which they had pledged to share with the rest of Unknown Worlds’ workers. Krafton in turn claimed the three had abandoned the project and stolen data.
After a short trial in November, in March 2026 a judge ordered Krafton to reinstate Gill, and also move the deadline for the payout to account for the time Gill was unemployed. Subnautica 2 went on to have a hugely successful early access release in May, and the bonus seemed assured.
As indeed it now is, but the structure has also changed with the settlement. Bloomberg wrote that rather than being paid to the three studio heads, the payout will be paid in three annual installments directly to “everyone at the studio… even those who joined more recently.” Bloomberg also wrote that
Gill said that the developers of Subnautica 2, which has sold more than 4 million copies since its early access release in May, will be “compensated significantly more” than called for under the original acquisition agreement and will receive “further incentives” as the game continues to be updated.
There’s no public indication of how much that will all turn out to be, but it’s a very funny twist in this whole saga, which saw Krafton exec Changhan Kim turn to ChatGPT for advice on how to get out of the deal. The company “followed most of ChatGPT’s recommendations,” according to the judge’s March ruling, and… well, we can all see how that went.
Riley MacLeod
