Glen Schofield blames Krafton management for The Callisto Protocol’s problems

Glen Schofield, co-creator of Dead Space, has blamed publisher Krafton for many of the problems with The Callisto Protocol. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, reported by Eurogamer, he said Krafton took back extra development time it had promised his studio, Striking Distance, during the Covid pandemic.

According to Schofield, Krafton had invested in Striking Distance and agreed to give it three more months of development, then withdrew the offer. “I was forced to ship the game,” he said. He added that he was angry with himself as well. With the extra time, the game would have launched in March 2023 instead of December 2022. Schofield has talked about the decision before.

Schofield described the pandemic conditions the team was working under. He said four to six staff members fell ill each month, and that the studio’s small team in Spain was sometimes shut down, at one point leaving it without its rendering staff for a while. Moving a studio of about a hundred people to remote work took constant calls and meetings, he said, and the team had to learn as it went. Looking back at the problems the game had, he said: “A lot of them were caused by Korean management.”

Schofield also said Krafton, best known for PUBG, did not have the experience to release a single-player game at retail, so Striking Distance had to set up its own internal team to handle it. He said Krafton required a PlayStation 4 version alongside the PS5 release, which he said would cost an extra $20 million and meant sending 200 dev kits to developers during a global chip shortage.

Krafton was unhappy with how the game performed financially and considered it a total failure, according to Schofield. He said that while the publisher complained, his team kept working: he stayed until all the DLC was finished and the studio had released 86 patches to improve the game.

The Callisto Protocol got a mixed reception at launch, Eurogamer notes. Critics pointed to technical and performance problems as well as issues with its combat design.