Despite a rocky road to release, the underwater survival adventure game, Subnautica 2, has achieved massive success. The game sold more than 2 million copies on its first day in early access this Thursday, with over 600,000 players diving in during the opening hours. Within just over one hour, the official Subnautica X account announced that sales had already surpassed 1 million copies.
Later the same day, developer Unknown Worlds confirmed the momentum hadn’t slowed down and that sales had doubled, hitting over 2 million copies in just twelve hours as Subnautica 2 rocketed up charts.
Subnautica 2 Sold 2 Million Copies And Peaked At 651K Concurrent Players
According to SteamDB, Subnautica 2 peaked at 467,582 concurrent players on Steam, earning it a spot as the 29th most-played game in the platform’s history. And that’s just on Steam, and does not include players on Xbox Game Preview or the Epic Games Store. Unknown Worlds says the total peak concurrent player count across all platforms has now crossed 651,000.
But the journey to its launch was far from smooth. Before launch, Subnautica 2’s development was hindered by a legal dispute that led to Unknown Worlds’ leadership team being fired. Earlier this year, publisher Krafton faced accusations of ignoring a court order by telling staff the game would launch in May, even though that decision appeared to be in the hands of the newly reinstated CEO, Ted Gill.
Gill, Charlie Cleveland (co-founder and creative director), and Max McGuire (co-founder and technical director) were all fired by Krafton last year. They were accused by the publisher of having an “absence of core leadership” and that they felt “a profound sense of betrayal by their failure to honor the trust placed in them by our fans”.
The trio, for their part, say Krafton betrayed them by firing them right before delaying Subnautica 2. They allege it was a calculated move to block the Early Access launch and keep the game from selling enough to unlock a $250 million bonus for the team.
