Subnautica 2 and InZoi publishers announce voluntary layoff program “amid the era of AI transformation”

Subnautica 2 and InZoi publishers Krafton have launched a voluntary redundancy program in what appears to be a bid to shed ballast and winnow out unbelievers as they reorganise around the usage of generative AI.

As reported by Business Korea and passed along by Automation Media, the redundancy program follows a quarter of record profits. Krafton will dole out severance packages in tiers, with people who’ve been there one year or less getting six months salary, while those who’ve been there for over 11 years get 36 months.

According to a company spokesperson, “the core purpose is to support members in proactively designing their growth direction and embarking on new challenges both inside and outside the company amid the era of AI transformation.”

Krafton announced plans to refocus on generative AI for game development in late October. These refocussings include splurging $20.8 million / 30 million Korean won on retraining the workforce to use generative AI tools, while implementing some kind of automated management system.

They’re also going to spend $69.7 million/100 billion won on a new GPU cluster – that is, a frosty warehouse full of computers with phat graphics cards that pool their might to complete difficult tasks, like patterning a dataset to produce a mean Piña Colada recipe without exhorting the end user to drink sawdust.

Krafton have also announced a hiring freeze across all roles save for those related to developing new intellectual properties or doing things with fancy chatbots, as detailed by CFO Bae Dong-geun in an earnings call on 4th November. The emphasis will be on individual staff being more productive, instead.

“Excluding organizations developing original intellectual property (IP) and AI-related personnel, we have frozen hiring company-wide,” Dong-geun said, adding that “rather than reducing costs through AI First, individual productivity must increase at the company-wide level, so we are stopping hiring for now, and we will organize and disclose later whether there will be changes to the five-year franchise IP strategy announced earlier this year.”

This week, Epic’s Tim Sweeney gave an “optimistic” defence of generative AI in response to Eurogamer’s unimpressed Arc Raiders review, arguing that “when tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people.” It sort of feels like Krafton timed these announcements to wind him up.

Generative AI aside, Krafton are slap-bang in the middle of a legal war with ousted Unknown Worlds founders over the quality and release timing of Subnautica 2. I think Brendy and I have basically written a whole book on the subject by now. Here’s the last news article we wrote, in which Unknown Worlds accuse their old bosses of leaking things to the press.