SWtOR Gone Wrong

A judge ordered the reinstatement of a video game developer after he was fired as part of a scheme cooked up by a CEO using ChatGPT. Facing the possibility of paying out a massive bonus to the developer of Subnautica2, the CEO of publisher Krafton used ChatGPT to create a plan to take over the development studio and force out its founder, according to court records.

The Monday ruling details the bizarre story. Unknown Worlds Entertainment is the studio behind the 2018 underwater survival game Subnautica. The company has since been working on the sequel, Subnautica 2. In 2021, South Korean publisher Krafton bought Unknown Worlds Entertainment for $500 million and promised to pay out another $250 million if Subnautica 2 sold well enough.

Krafton’s internal sales projections for Subnautica 2 looked great, and looked like it would be on the hook for the additional $250 million. In an attempt to avoid paying this, Krafton CEO Changhan Kim turned to ChatGPT for help avoiding paying the developers the $250 million bonus. “As Unknown Worlds prepared to release its hotly anticipated sequel, Subnautica 2, the parties’ relationship fractured,” the court decision said. “Fearing he had agreed to a ‘pushover’ contract, Krafton’s CEO consulted an artificial intelligence chatbot to contrive a corporate ‘takeover’ strategy.”

Kim partnered with Krafton Head of Corporate Development Maria Park and the company’s legal team to work out options. He toyed with finding a reason to fire the founders. 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.”

But the CEO would not accept defeat. “And so Kim turned to ChatGPT for help,” court records said. “When the AI chatbot responded that the earnout would be ‘difficult to cancel,’ Kim complained to Park that the [payout] was a ‘contract under which we can only be dragged around.’”

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. They looked to buy time,” court records said. “Kim sought ChatGPT’s counsel on how to proceed if Krafton failed to reach a deal with Unknown Worlds on the earnout. The AI chatbot prepared a ‘Response Strategy’ to a ‘No-Deal’ Scenario.”

This was a piece of ChatGPT’s “Project X” for Krafton:

“a. Preemptive Framing - Repeat that protecting quality and fan trust is the highest priority, undermine the ‘Large Corporation VS. Indie’ framing b. Securing Control Points - * Lock down Steam/console publishing rights and access rights over code/build pipeline through both legal and technical aspects. * For the earn-out freeze, keep room for negotiations through provision stating ‘immediate removal if specific development results are achieved’ a. Systematic materials for legal defense - Prepare contract interpretation memorandums, log all communications, seek external consultation b. Team retention - Operation of retention packages for key personnel and rapid backfill pipelines in anticipation of resignation/departure scenarios c. Two handed strategy - Create a structure that allows for both hardball (Legal+ Finance) and softball (Support/Incentives) approaches so moderate factions within Unknown Worlds can push for compromise.”

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. Those fears were compounded when Kim fired the game’s original creators and entered into a legal battle with them.

and why is there like NO other content apart from some abandoned fics and 4+ hour long YouTube videos of peoples game play. where is the fanart!? the ships!? WHERE ARE MY BABIES!?

There's a lot of completed fic out there, it's just usually a few years old at this point, and there's a lot of fanart, it's just also older. A lot of former swtor blogs (like myself) moved on to other games over the years after swtor kept getting worse. It got SO bad that the game was recently taken away from Bioware and given to another studio. THAT bad.

There were a number of contributing dev-factors to many in the fandom packing their bags and leaving. I don't know where you are in the story, so I don't want to spoil things for you, but basically all the story content after KotFE was... divisive, to say the least. It was pretty clear that the devs didn't give a damn about the years of story they'd built anymore, and for players that did care about companion characters, they were given pretty insulting narrative endings for almost all of them, drawn out over the course of irl years. For those playing non-force classes, it also felt as though the story was suddenly completely irrelevant to them - If you sign up to play Boba Fett, you're gonna be confused and probably disappointed when the story suddenly makes you be Luke Skywalker.

It looks like people have mentioned this in the notes, so I won't go too into detail on it, but the harassment. Oh my GOD the harassment. Fleet chat became a nightmare of slurs and bigotry, and it wasn't always like that, it was, like a lot of what the devs did, a slow frog boil.

Then there's the stuff that actually made people keep playing the game, the mechanical stuff that the devs started letting go. First, the economy became a nightmare. FtP players were capped at a ridiculously low amount of credits and prices skyrocketed to the point where if you weren't actively money farming as a subscriber, the GTN was unusable. Abilities that were rp-focused or immersed you in the class started to be removed - Infamously, people were really sad to see Sith Marauders lose the force choke ability. The release of 7.0 honestly broke the combat system and so for many removed the reason they'd log in every week. For anyone who was into the raiding scene, your raid team was basically thrown back to beginner level by how badly the new combat worked. The weekly rewards system being so limited (idk what it's like now, but it was really bad for the first year) made players feel as though they were being shoved towards content they didn't want to play, like galactic starfighter.

Fandom-specifically, there was kind of all the usual stuff you see on tumblr - the bad actors, the toxicity/harassment, the ship wars. It wasn't really that much worse than what you see in any other fandom, but the small size of the fandom made it stand out for some people, and there were some popular creators/writers who ended up just sort of throwing in the towel, and all of it was of course happening at the same time as the devs were torching their own game. I know for me personally, once I finished my longfic in 2022, I did it with kind of the sense that it might be the last thing I did in the fandom. I'd finished my passion project and was finding, as a lot of fandoms do, that creativity and passion are really difficult to sustain when the source material is actively being ruined

8 distinct class stories with arcs for each planet + planet stories some of which would intersect with the other side's stories for the same planet + tons of side quests some of which were really memorable at the time (all of which were completely voice acted, some with significantly different outcomes, some with recurring characters, to say nothing of the bonus series etc.)

to

1 main planet story per side (rep & imp) and a handful of sidequests (a lot of which came from the computer terminals, so less voice acting, fewer characters to interact with [and consequently fewer opportunities to flesh out your characters], and overall a quieter, less lived-in world)

to

1 story shared between all characters with almost no regard to your choices from the main game, and with little to no influence of the choices you made IN THAT SPECIFIC CURRENT STORYLINE, to say nothing of the things mentioned above re: companions, not-force-sensitive characters, etc., with pretty much no sidequesting at all (and a lot of it for a while had no voice acting from your character and a lot of recycled huttese-or-other-alien-languages-voicelines for the NPCs)...

so when KotFE and KotET (the last ones that I was still able to fully play in person) rolled around, the world felt just like a canvas on which the devs told their story, rather than a world in which my characters existed and could have distinct, different impacts on. Which, don't get me wrong, I don't mind, but then I'll play a linear RPG where I just want to experience the world and story instead of actively shaping it through My Decisions Matter (TM), not a game explicitly touted as having specific storylines for Republic and Empire and the different people therein.

Add to that that for me, there was a personal issue of me not being able to play for years because I only had a glorified tablet, and when I had a proper PC again and wanted to go back to it, it turns out they basically delete inactive accounts and that combined with my old login-email being deleted since then means I lost multiple years worth of gameplay, story, and troves full of ingame stuff (including cartel market), so the only things I have left of my characters are screenshots and memories.

But SWTOR is still an important game for me, even though going back after losing all that seemed pointless. My profile picture is still my old main character, my online handle god-knows-where is still his name, and I spent wonderful years on this hellsite reading stuff from and talking to a number of absolutely delightful people (special shoutouts to @jakey-beefed-it @motheatenscarf @darthvronton @depizan @cole-saberhagen @kotorswtor @catpella @ravenkinlegacy @frauzet and god knows how many more) about this game and our characters.

Further update: Greg is trapping goblins in the Dollar General