I am just going to link to MassivelyOP’s coverage of this Krafton (Krapton) drama (where the latest posting covers the unsealing of the “breach of contract” complaint filed by the founders of Subnautica 2 against Krafton). The unsealed/redacted lawsuit. In short, it is NOT a good look for Krafton (I believe they should face serious repercussions if it is proven they did wrong). Should this proceed (like if the South Korean courts don’t throw it out or Krafton tries to settle), discovery will be interesting (so long as Krafton’s corporate legal pounds it into the heads of those who are deposed, that they need to tell the truth). And sometimes, I don’t know about their legal department (see below).
For a period of time, I covered the “wacky” antics of Krafton (previously known as Bluehole, Inc) with how they handled certain matters related to PUBG. The easiest is to just peruse the Krafton, PUBG, and PUBG Corp categories (looking at the oldest entries first). The company is currently living on PUBG’s ongoing success as a money maker (far surpassing their original cash cow which was the MMORPG, TERA) where they’ve long been trying to find ways to capitalize on that. I mean, look at how much more failures they’ve had (many of these are the equivalent of “throw a dart at the wall while blindfolded, and see what sticks”).
Part of this involves understanding the history of Bluehole -> Krafton transformation and how PUBG Corporation (what used to be a small subsidiary studio known as Bluehole Ginno) fit into all of that. Krafton’s CEO Chang-Han Kim ascended via that route (I wrote a brief history about him/Ginno Games here – it’s just that short paragraph above the photo; the rest of that post is more about the studio/game he was co-founder of). I’ve always maintained that as a software engineer, he’s brilliant (a KAIST graduate). But I think his overall business acumen is not all there.
Some of the past PUBG related lawsuits were of the WTH variety. They filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games (Fortnite) only in South Korea (local jurisdiction where they thought they’d have better legal standing) only to drop it a month later. The wildest one was their lawsuit against a Chinese government ministry (who refused to take up Krafton’s/PUBG Corp’s trademark case for the Chinese translated phrase for “chicken dinner”.
A friend/colleague who has lived/worked off/on in South Korea (in the finance industry during that period when venture capital flowed heavily into the countries gaming industry) and was an early private investor in the original Bluehole Studio, had way more 411 (neither of us care to get involved in any of that though; it’s up to investigative reporters to dig on their own for that dirt). I slowly stopped following Krafton’s madness on the business side in recent years (I have no idea of whatever other lawsuits/drama they’ve been involved in ever since).
None of this shows up highly on search because I’ve long had my blogs to not be crawled/visible by search engines (it is no different after this migration from Blogger). I write mainly for my own humor. Similarly, I have no interest in dogpiling onto this whole thing except to give my own thoughts on the matter.
Hearing and then reading up about this entire Subnautica 2 saga though, none of it surprised me. It is believable that Krafton’s leadership would pull a stunt like that; their public handling of the matter (public assassination of the character of the founders) highlights this amateur level tendency that they’ve displayed in the past when they were tripping all over themselves with PUBG’s early access success back in 2017 with the reorganization and rebranding attempts. In short, a lack of professionalism (but then again, we are talking about the gaming industry which are run by these types).
Unlike in the past where they were privately held, they are now a publicly traded corporation on the KOSPI. Maybe this incident (if everything is true), will teach the Krafton executives a much needed lesson in humility. I’m also not naive to understand that given how big Krafton is now, that the possibility for corruption exists. Like everything else in life, time will tell.
NOTE: I didn’t bother really proofreading this before hitting publish; the stream of conscious writing reads poorly (I’ll try and edit parts of it).
