Honestly I think ultimately all the drama worked out for them.

If my understanding was correct, the problem they had was that the bonus was structured in such a way that if Subnautica 2 did well but not great, they could pay more in bonuses than it earned. Somewhat similar to the ‘welfare cliff’ that people can encounter where it’s better to be unemployed than work a low paying job in terms of benefits.

Of the 3 possible outcomes: S2 doing poorly, S2 doing just ok, and S2 doing amazing, it’s obviously easier to just guarantee it’ll do poorly. They can’t guarantee a smash hit, which means they faced a significant chance S2 would do well enough to qualify for the bonus, but bad enough that paying the bonus would be a net loss. So that’s what they tried to do.

Only that backfired obviously, except now the publicity has basically guaranteed it’s going to do really well, which is still ultimately good for Krafton.