KRAFTON, owner of Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds, has responded to the lawsuit filed by Unknown Worlds co-founders, doubling-down on allegations that co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire had "abandoned" their roles at the studio, and that their absence had been impacting the development team for Subnautica 2 as far back as July 2023.
Backing up slightly, Charlie Cleveland, Max McGuire, and Ted Gill, each co-founder of Unknown Worlds and together creators of the original Subnautica, sued their former employer, KRAFTON, after KRAFTON fired all three of them and delayed Subnautica 2 from its initial 2025 release window into 2026. There's a whole whack of events that led up to that lawsuit you can check out in a bullet-point list, here.
A key element that KRAFTON has pushed since the public dispute between Cleveland, McGuire, Gill, and KRAFTON began is KRAFTON's allegation that the co-founders weren't actually working on Subnautica 2 at all, and in the company's response filing published August 12, 2025, KRAFTON tries to drill that point home even further.
KRAFTON claims that once it had successfully acquired Unknown Worlds, Cleveland and McGuire took their earnings from the sale and "quickly lost interest in developing Subnautica 2," the filing reads.
"Cleveland and McGuire abandoned their roles as studio-wide game director and technical director to focus on their personal passion projects and quit making games for Unknown Worlds entirely. And Gill, who remained, focused on leveraging his operational control to maximize the earnout payment, rather than developing a successful game."
The filing continues to allege that Cleveland in particular had left his videogame development career to pursue filmmaking, another point that KRAFTON has brought up before.
KRAFTON goes on to allege that two months prior to Cleveland, McGuire, and Gill claiming the game was ready for an early access launch, the development lead on Subnautica 2 said the first stage of early access for the game would be "about 12% of our intended 1.0 scope," and that the lead joked the game "would be in development for 30 years" at the current pace it was going earlier this year.
To further its point about Cleveland and McGuire leaving their posts, KRAFTON claims the two co-founders declined to return to their roles as game director and technical director, and that Gill had even stated "there's no coming back to a job they didn't have." Following that, KRAFTON includes a statement allegedly from Cleveland, in which Cleveland admits that Subnautica 2's development began with the intention of having a younger generation of development talent at Unknown Worlds take the helm for the sequel, and that he knew that he "wasn't going to be running that team" from the beginning.
All of this will be worked out in the courts over the course of the coming months, potentially even years, and right now the dispute can be boiled down to both sides flinging claims at the other that we can't yet know to be totally true.
Whichever way it goes, it'll be interesting to see how this dispute ends, and which of the claims being flung end up sticking.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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