Dead Space Creator Blames Krafton Management for The Callisto Protocol's Problems

Glen Schofield, the game developer best known as one of the creators of the popular Dead Space, blames the management of South Korean company Krafton, owner of PUBG, for the shortcomings of his latest horror game, The Callisto Protocol, which was developed by

Game developer Glenn Scofield, best known as one of the creators of the popular game Dead Space, has blamed the management of Korean company Krafton, the owner of PUBG, for the shortcomings of his last horror game, The Callisto Protocol, which was published by the same company.

In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Scofield expressed his confusion and frustration with the way Crofton handled his studio, Striking Distance, during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the game developer, Crofton, which invested in the studio, initially promised Striking Distance three months more development time, but then took it back.

I had to release the game. Undoubtedly, I am also angry with myself. I was totally shocked by that decision because we were in the middle of the damn covid crisis. One million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends.

Every month, four to six people in my company would get sick. There were times when our small team in Spain was completely shut down; Disease spreads in such a small environment and you lose your rendering team for a while. In this situation, your most important concern is the health of the team members. Making the game is of secondary importance, because human lives and humanity are at stake.

Scofield had previously talked about overturning the three-month extra development time decision. If this time had not been canceled, The Callisto Protocol would have been released in March 2023 instead of December 2022. This sudden lapse of promise occurred while the studio had been trying to adapt to the working conditions during the pandemic for years; A subject that, according to Scofield, was a very difficult task.

When you have a studio of 100 people, you can be in close contact with 100 people every day. But when they're at home, you have to make individual calls or get everyone together on the Zoom platform. However we did it because we were trying to figure out the best way to move the projects forward and there were a lot of meetings. We had to learn on the job and change everything. We finally got it done, but we could see the problems we had. Many of these problems were caused by the management of the Korean team.

Crofton was best known as the developer of PUBG before getting into a legal battle with the makers of Subnautica 2. After achieving many successes with this battle royale shooter game and its subversions, this publisher was ready to invest in the AAA games space; But it seems that he was not ready to play this new role.

According to Scofield, Crofton lacked the experience to physically release a single-player game, forcing Striking Distance to form an in-house team to do so. In addition, Crofton is said to have required the studio to release the game for the PlayStation 4 in addition to the PlayStation 5; A decision that Scofield said cost another $20 million and required sending 200 development kits to programmers amid a global chip shortage. None of these contributed to the success of the game, and as a result, Crofton was not satisfied with its financial performance.

Crofton thought Kalisto was a complete failure. What they didn't know was that while they were just complaining, we were working on updates. I waited until all expansion packs were finished and we released 86 patches for the game. This was an overwhelming amount of work. You go to work every day and make changes, some small and some big. All these efforts were to bring the game back to where it should be.

The game The Callisto Protocol faced mixed reactions at the time of its release due to technical and functional problems as well as some of the main design elements in the combat section.