"A lot of them were caused by Korean management."
Glen Schofield, the game-maker best known for co-creating Dead Space, has blamed Korean company Krafton - the owner of PUBG - for the shortcomings of his horror game successor The Callisto Protocol, which it published.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Schofield expressed frustrated bewilderment at Krafton's handling of his Striking Distance company, which it had invested in, during the Covid pandemic. Krafton allegedly promised Striking Distance three extra months of development time and then rescinded it.
"I was forced to ship the game," Schofield said. "I'm mad at myself, there's no doubt. I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking Covid. A million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends.
"Every single month, four to six people in my company were getting sick. There were times [when] our small team in Spain was shut down; it goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while.
"The main thing you're concerned about, not that you aren't normally, is the health of your team. Making a game just became secondary because this is about life. This is about humanity."
Schofield has discussed the decision to deny the three extra months of development time before. Had it not, then The Callisto Protocol would have been released in March 2023, rather than December 2022.
This sudden rug-pull had also come after years of the studio adapting to working during a pandemic already, which Schofield said had been very hard to do.
"When you have a studio of a hundred people, you can touch a hundred people a day. When they're at home, you have to do individual calls, or I could get everybody together on Zoom," said Schofield. "But we did it. We did all these things because we were searching for the best way to do it. There were so many meetings.
"We had to learn on the job and just change everything," he added. "We got it done and everything. We saw the problems that we had. A lot of them were caused by Korean management."
Before it was embroiled in a legal battle with Subnautica 2 creators, Krafton was mostly known as the PUBG company. Having found so much success with the battle royale shooter and its off-shoots, the publisher was ready to invest in the triple-A space - but it seemingly wasn't ready for that new role.
Schofield said Krafton lacked the necessary experience to release a single-player physical game, forcing Striking Distance to build an internal team to do that. Krafton also allegedly mandated a release of The Callisto Protocol on PlayStation 4 alongside PS5, which would cost "another $20 million", Schofield said, and require sending out 200 dev kits to developers during a global chip shortage. None of that helped The Callisto Protocol's fortunes, and Krafton wasn't happy with its financial performance as a result.
"[Krafton] thought Callisto was a complete failure," Schofield revealed. "What they didn't know while all they were doing was complaining, we were doing patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches. That was a lot of fucking work. Every day you're going in, you're making changes. Some are little, others are massive. That was all to get it back to where it needed to be."
The Callisto Protocol received a mixed reception at launch, owing to technical and performance issues but also to core design elements relating to combat. In the Eurogamer review of The Callisto Protocol, Vikki Blake praised the game's production values but lamented its lack of depth and tension compared to Dead Space.
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