Krafton’s internal sales projections for Subnautica 2 looked great, and looked like it would be on the hook for [an additional $250 million sales bonus]. In an attempt to avoid paying this, Krafton CEO Changhan Kim turned to ChatGPT for help avoiding paying the developers the $250 million bonus.
According to court records, Park pinged Kim on Slack and told him that attempting to avoid paying the bonus would be legally risky. “Hi CEO . . . it seems to be highly likely that the earn-out will still be paid if the sales goal is achieved regardless of the dismissal with cause,” the Slack message said according to court records. “Therefore, there isn’t much that we can practically gain other than punishment with a simple dismissal alone, whereas I am worried that we may be exposed to lawsuit and reputation risk.”
Both ChatGPT and his actual employees told him there was basically no way out of the contract, but ChatGPT will agree with you if you keep asking it:
Kim pressed the chatbot for an answer. “At ChatGPT’s suggestion, Kim formed an internal task force, dubbed ‘Project X.’ The task force’s mandate was to either negotiate a ‘deal’ on the earnout or execute a ‘Take Over’ of Unknown Worlds.
Kim followed ChatGPT’s advice rather than his lawyers’ advice, according to the court records. The first step was posting a message on Subanutica’s website to get fans on his side. According to court documents, Kim said the goal of the message was to “secure public support from fans and legal validation of our legitimacy.” He then suggested that ChatGPT write it for him. It achieved the opposite of his intended goal. Fans found the message bizarre and worried about the future of the game.
Fearing he had agreed to a ‘pushover’ contract [...]
He spazzed out because he thought the game would sell well, the dev would earn their reward, and he would look like a chump for keeping his word. Honor societies need to be launched into the sun.
When Robert Downy Jr. got a ridiculously good-in-hindsight contract for Iron Man from Disney, did Disney get mocked and called a chump? Not really. They just say that RDJ had good intuition in his contract-making since it was a gamble.
Same would have applied here. It's not a pushover contract, and the CEO is a moron for thinking it was. it's the devs getting a solid agreement and thus producing a solid product. Without the good contract, it's perfectly likely they wouldn't have tried as hard, and thus, not wind up with as much sales.
CEO should have taken the "L" which wasn't an L, paid out the devs, and parlayed the good reputation from that into big pre-sales for another game which they put less money into and rug-pull that one on the customers. Like sane AA game studios do.
The article is hilarious
Both ChatGPT and his actual employees told him there was basically no way out of the contract, but ChatGPT will agree with you if you keep asking it:
Hahahahahahahaha
You missed the best part:
He spazzed out because he thought the game would sell well, the dev would earn their reward, and he would look like a chump for keeping his word. Honor societies need to be launched into the sun.
When Robert Downy Jr. got a ridiculously good-in-hindsight contract for Iron Man from Disney, did Disney get mocked and called a chump? Not really. They just say that RDJ had good intuition in his contract-making since it was a gamble.
Same would have applied here. It's not a pushover contract, and the CEO is a moron for thinking it was. it's the devs getting a solid agreement and thus producing a solid product. Without the good contract, it's perfectly likely they wouldn't have tried as hard, and thus, not wind up with as much sales.
CEO should have taken the "L" which wasn't an L, paid out the devs, and parlayed the good reputation from that into big pre-sales for another game which they put less money into and rug-pull that one on the customers. Like sane AA game studios do.