Subnautica 2 Sold 2 Million Copies in 12 Hours. Its Publisher Is Being Sued for $250 Million.
Subnautica 2 achieved a massive early access launch with over 2 million copies sold in 12 hours and 400,000+ concurrent Steam players, representing a 9x increase over the original game's peak. However, the studio behind it is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with publisher Krafton over a reported $250 million payout, with the studio's leadership team having been removed amid the conflict.
Subnautica 2 has launched into early access and immediately rewritten the franchise's record books — over 2 million copies sold in the first 12 hours, and a peak concurrent Steam player count somewhere in the neighborhood of 600,000. That last number depends on who you ask, but the scale is undeniable either way.
VGC reports the peak hit nearly 600,000 concurrent players on Steam, while lower trackers have pegged it around 453,000. We're going with VGC's figure as the more authoritative read, though the gap is worth flagging. Either number puts Subnautica 2 in rare company for an early access launch, comfortably above what most premium releases manage and within shouting distance of the kind of numbers usually reserved for live-service juggernauts like Counter-Strike 2.
For context on what this means for the franchise: the original Subnautica peaked around the 67,000 concurrent mark on Steam. A roughly 9x jump in peak players, before the game has even left early access, suggests the audience has grown well beyond the cult following that carried the first two games. Subnautica: Below Zero never came close to this kind of moment.
The complication, of course, is the lawsuit hanging over all of it. Krafton, which acquired Unknown Worlds in 2021, is locked in a legal dispute with the studio's former leadership — Charlie Cleveland, Max McGuire, and Ted Gill — over a roughly $250 million earnout payment tied to the studio hitting performance milestones. VGC notes that Krafton dismissed that leadership team earlier this year, a move the founders have argued was timed to avoid paying out. Krafton's position, broadly, is that the game wasn't ready and the original team mismanaged the project.
The awkward part: the game came out, and it sold 2 million copies in 12 hours. Cleveland has publicly noted the game topped charts globally and crossed a million copies on day one. That's not the launch trajectory of a project that needed saving, and it's going to make Krafton's argument harder to sustain in court — though "the game is good" and "the contract was met" are very different legal questions.
What's confirmed: the sales numbers, the player counts (give or take the peak figure), and the existence of the lawsuit. What's still emerging: how the legal fight actually resolves, whether the launch's success materially changes Krafton's exposure, and how Unknown Worlds operates going forward without the founders who built the studio. Worth watching all of it.