"I Was Forced to Ship the Game": Glen Schofield Blames Krafton for Callisto Protocol Issues
Glen Schofield, the game developer best known for his work on Dead Space, holds Krafton, the South Korean owner of PUBG, responsible for the shortcomings of The Callisto Protocol, the horror game he made as a follow-up. Read more
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Many of them were created by Korean management.
Game developer Glenn Scofield, best known for his work on Dead Space, has blamed Korean company Krafton, the owner of PUBG, for the shortcomings of its horror sequel The Callisto Protocol.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Scofield was disappointed with Krafton's handling of his company Striking Distance, which he invested in during the Covid pandemic. Krafton apparently promised Striking Distance an extra three months of development time and then canceled it.
"I had to post the game," Schofield said. "I'm angry at myself, there's no doubt about it. I'm very shocked by this decision because we've had a damn covid. Millions of people have died in America. I've lost one of my best friends.
“Every month, four to six people in my company would get sick. The times [when] our little team was shut down in Spain. It goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while.
"The most important thing you are worried about, not that you are not normal, is the health of your team. Making a game has just become secondary because it's about life. It's about humanity."
Schofield has spoken about the decision to deny the extra three months of development time before . If not, the Callisto protocol would have been released in March 2023 instead of December 2022.
The sudden carpet-rolling also comes after years of the studio adapting to work during a pandemic, which Schofield said has been extremely difficult to do.
"When you have a hundred-person studio, you can touch a hundred people a day. When they're at home, you have to have individual calls, otherwise I can get everyone on Zoom," Scofield said. "But we did it. We did it all because we were looking 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 did the work and everything. We saw the problems we had. "Many of them were created by Korean management."
Before getting embroiled in a legal battle with the makers of Subnautica 2, Crafton was best known as the PUBG company. With the huge success of the Battle Royale shooter and its spin-offs, the publisher was ready to invest in the triple-A space — but apparently wasn't ready for that new role.
Scofield said Crofton lacked the experience to release a single-player physical game, forcing Striking Distance to build an in-house team to do so. Krafton also apparently mandated the release of The Callisto Protocol on PlayStation 4 alongside the PS5, Schofield said, which would cost another $20 million, and would require shipping 200 developer kits to developers during a global chip. Lack of either of these did not help The Callisto Protocol's fortunes, and Krafton was unhappy with its financial performance as a result.
“[Crofton] thought Kalisto was a complete failure,” Schofield revealed. "What they didn't know was that while everyone was complaining, we were doing the patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and released 86 patches. It was a damn lot of work. Every day you come in, you make changes. Some are small, some are huge. It was all about getting it where it needed to be."
The Callisto protocol was met with mixed reception at launch due to technical and performance issues, as well as due to major war-related design elements. In Eurogamer's review of The Callisto Protocol, Vikki Blake praised the game's production values but lamented its lack of depth and traction compared to Dead Space.