Three notes about Subnautica 2
1. My impressions 2. The devs talk to me about the console version 3. A conspicuous change to recent Subnautica press releases
First of all, Subnautica 2, released into early access on Thursday after a long development cycle and a lot of legal drama, is lovely.
Yes, it can be stressful when you dive a bit too deep on the ocean planet of Proteus, your oxygen running low and some sort of alien barracuda gnashing its teeth at you. But it’s viable to spend a lot of time near the surface, just drifting through the gorgeous aquatic environment. Float around up in the gorgeous shallows. Kick the flippers to chase down colorful fish. Find some text logs in mysteriously destroyed undersea bases, as you try to figure out what went wrong.
Maybe you’re the last person alive on this planet? That’s something worth investigating. Maybe that can be a pretty chill experience.
The conceit of Subnautica 2, developed by Unknown Worlds, is that your human protagonist has woken up in an undersea base on a strange planet, trying to figure out what happened to the rest of the explorers, and just how to not die.
Almost all of the action I’ve experienced so far has happened in a beautiful underwater seascape of rainbow fish, coral domes, and deep caves filled with ore and strange plants. At night, the bioluminescent flora and fauna illuminate the sea floor like it’s the Vegas Strip.
At the start of this survival adventure, you can catch the local fish with your hands, but you can’t digest them. That’s the developer’s way of teaching the player to seek out biological adaptations—peculiar, glowing plants, of course—that transform a hero’s body to make it more in sync with the surrounding ecosystem.
Early gameplay in Subnautica 2 involves comfortably meditative loops: diving into the ocean from whichever base can print your body after your most recent death, grabbing some fish, using a newly crafted scanner to identify odd plants, managing your oxygen level to not dive too deep (and die), eventually gathering enough resources to build a base, learn some recipes, craft extra gadgets, and explore some more. So far, there’s nothing revolutionary and nothing all that different from the brief moments of earlier Subnautica games that I’ve played, but it makes for an appealing experience nonetheless.
Subnautica 2 benefits from its relative non-violence. Sure, there are fish that butt heads and some menacing ones that’ll chase you down. But distraction and evasion are more the order of the day than direct conflict. The game is, most often, peaceful, at least in the hours I’ve played. That vibe is partially due to a decision made by Unknown Worlds co-founder Charlie Cleveland over a decade ago, when he decided to leave guns out of the original Subnautica. It’s easy to picture this first-person game giving players a gun. It doesn’t. Appalled by the scale of mass shootings in America, Cleveland said back in 2016 that the world might benefit from one less piece of art glamorizing guns. ”I’ve never believed that video game violence creates more real-world violence,” he said at the time. “But I couldn’t just sit by and ‘add more guns’ to the world either. So Subnautica is one vote towards a world with less guns.”
It’s a PC hit, but there’s also a console angle: Unknown Worlds and publisher Krafton have already announced that Subnautica 2 has already sold two million copies, in less than one day of release. The game’s numbers on Steam, more than 467,000 peak concurrent players on launch day, verify that Subnautica 2 wasn’t just the platform’s most-wishlisted game but now a widely-purchased hit.
Subnautica 2 is also on Xbox, its lone console at the moment. The game is in “Game Preview,” which is Microsoft’s jargon for what Steam calls “Early Access.” Microsoft, moreso than rival Sony and certainly more than Nintendo, has supported the early access release for games on console (the principle, if you’re not aware, is that users pay for an incomplete version of the game, with the promise that developers will add to it over time and potentially charge other players more, once the game reaches its full release 1.0 version).
Subnautica 2 is not just in Game Preview on Xbox but in Game Pass. And save files from the Steam or console version can be uploaded to the cloud and then accessed on any device. I brought my Steam Deck save to the Xbox, so I could play the game on a big screen. It looked great.
Ahead of release, I joined a media call with the game’s developers and asked about Unknown World’s approach to early access on consoles, noting that the previous Subnautica, Below Zero, had also been out early on Xbox.
“The studio actually was one of the very, very first participants of the Game Preview program on Xbox, and at that time they developed a really good relationship with the people over at Microsoft,” Subnautica 2 lead developer Anthony Gallegos told me. “So when it came time for us to do Early Access, it was really important for us figure out if there was a console partner that we could do that with.”
Gallegos said that Unknown Worlds plans to keep Subnautica 2 in early access for at least two years, and he promised feature parity between PC and console throughout that time.
“Every patch that goes out will go out on Xbox and Steam and the Epic Games Store, all of our store platforms at the same time, because we have cross-play,” he said. “We’re even looking at trying to figure out like, are there ways that we could do different branches with the Xbox? But that’s still sort of the discussions we’re having. Because we typically always run experimental branches [on PC.]” The goal, he said, is to give players on all platforms as early a view of the game as possible.
Things are still kind of awkward. Subnautica is the rare video game that is releasing in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the dev studio’s former leaders against the studio’s relatively new ownership. A partial decision in the suit restored one of Unknown Worlds’ leaders, Ted Gill, to studio CEO just two months ago. But the legal battle over whether parent company Krafton tried to deprive the leaders of a chance to earn a nine-figure payout as a result of the game’s performance is still ongoing. Note that the two other ousted studio leaders involved in the suit are Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire. (Remember those names, as you read on!)
During the pre-briefing, Krafton’s host encouraged reporters to ask Gallegos and a colleague about the game’s development, but she shut down a question asked by Dean Takahashi of Games Beat about what it was like for the developers to be building this game during a lawsuit.
“That’s not something this session is set up to cover,” the host said. “Anthony and Scott are here to talk about Subnautica 2 in depth, so happy to take any questions on what’s inside the game.”
That wasn’t a big surprise. But I was surprised when I was reading the press release sent out today to trumpet Subnautica 2 selling two million copies.
As recently as March 12, right before Gill’s reinstatement, press releases about this game, from the firm Berlin Rosen, described the game like this:
Subnautica 2 is latest entry in the genre-defining Subnautica series. The game takes players to an entirely new alien world within the Subnautica universe, introducing new ecosystems, modular vehicles, and cooperative gameplay while bringing the series’ signature exploration and survival experience to life using Unreal Engine 5. The game is scheduled to enter Early Access on PC and Xbox Series consoles in 2026.
And the the beginning of a similar description from April 2, two weeks after the ruling about Gill:
Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the ocean survival genre and has sold 18.5 million copies worldwide.
Since then, things have changed. The description in Berlin Rosen’s most recent press releases has been much more overt about just who is behind this game:
Here’s one from April 30th:
Created by Unknown Worlds, founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which has sold more than 18.5 million copies worldwide and helped define the ocean survival genre.
And here’s one from May 8:
Developed by Unknown Worlds — founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire — Subnautica 2 is the official sequel to the Subnautica series, which helped define the underwater survival genre.
Today’s name-checked the studio, Cleveland and McGuire, too.
I asked a Berlin Rosen rep today if they could share any insight about the change. They said they checked with Krafton and that the publisher had nothing to share.
Item 2: In brief…
📈 ARC Raiders, one of the biggest games of 2025, remained hot this year, selling 4.1 million copies in the first three months of 2026 and subsequently passing the 16 million lifetime mark, according to Nexon’s latest financial results.
😮 Capcom sold more than 59 million video games in the 12 months the ended March 2026, a record for the company, per the company’s latest annual financial results.
Capcom’s stated long-term goal: “100 million units in annual sales.”
The Resident Evil and Street Fighter maker emphasizes a global strategy, driven by PC sales and doing business in 244 countries or regions (eight of those locals are now responsible for more than a million copies of games sold per year; up from five regions just four years ago (check page 27 and 28 here)
Capcom’s headcount rose from 3,766 at the end of March 2025 to 3,976 at the end of March 2026, with forecasted growth to 4,230 by March 2027. (By contrast, Square Enix, which has been struggling to release hits, cut its workforce from 4,604 to 4,290 in the past year, according to its latest financial results).
🇻🇳 A Bloomberg report about a government-supported Vietnamese video game showcase and recruitment drive included this stand-out anecdote:
“You have to constantly innovate,” says Nguyen Van Khiet, a 22-year-old developer, whose all-black attire looked subdued compared with the cosplayers milling around. “We don’t have enough developers, programmers and artists.” He received five job offers after networking at the event, underscoring the demand for coders.
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, May 19
New release: Forza Horizon 6 (PC, Xbox; PS5 later this year) brings the series’ open-world racing to Japan, after recent games set in Mexico and Great Britain. (People paying for the deluxe edition could start playing it on the 15th).
Wednesday, May 20
New releases: Thick as Thieves (PC) is a heist game overseen by Deus Ex/Thief veteran Warren Spector. Until April it was bring promoted primarily as a PvP game, which made this release date for what’s now a PvE game surprising. Phonopolis (PC) is an avant-garde adventure game about resisting an oppressive leader, from the always-interesting studio Aminata Design (Machinarium, Samorost)
Corporate: Ubisoft and the Embracer Group both report their full annual financial results to investors.
Thursday, May 21
New releases: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book (Switch 2) is a new Nintendo-published sidescroller whose dev studio is as yet unannounced. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies (PC) is a new role-playing game from the same studio, if not the same exact people, that developed the renowned 2019 detective role-playing game Disco Elysium. (Another game to keep an eye on: cute puzzler Walk the Frog.)
Corporate: Take Two Interactive reports its full annual financial results. As always with them, there’s the question of whether they or Rockstar will make any GTA VI-related news, such as saying how much the game will cost.
Friday, May 22
New release: Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; Switch 2 later this year) is the first new Lego game from core franchise team TT Games since 2022’s Lego Star Wars the Skywalker Saga. (People paying for a deluxe edition can start playing on the 19th; and some others accidentally already got it). Bubsy 4D (PC, console) is a slick new 3D platformer in a year that’s been rich with them.
Event: Japanese indie game festival BitSummit begins in Kyoto, running through Sunday.