Subnautica fans on a roller coaster right now

One of the best games of the last decade (with one of the more disappointing sequels of this decade) got its sequel half-announced yesterday, with the publisher stating it will be a "multiplayer-focused live-service game." Holy yikes, for a game that had an expansion-turned-offshoot that sucked in part due to it removing the sense of being alone exploring an alien world, this is awful news, right? Twitter and the game's subreddit agree, because that's the correct take.

A lot of g*mer seethe here, but by and large can be summed up by this pic

Subreddit wasn't have much fun either. I think they deleted a lot of the posts after the devs Corrected the Record™️, so a little hard to find threads but there's still a few up. There is a little coping, too, but it seems most people are unsurprised that the devs continue to misunderstand why their game was good in the first place.

Shout out to this based chad setting coping subnutters right.

Developer: We're making our next game use a shitty model that prioritizes money over fun and engaging content.

Sane people: We're not going to buy your game

Other people: Come on guys, just because every other GAAS game is terrible doesn't mean that this one will be.

Major "communism will work THIS time" vibes.

Finally, the devs speak out and clarify that nooo child, the game will not have a battlepass, it will simply have updates over time :^). They even go as far as to comment and lock threads that were pooping on the publisher statement.

Correct take from random dude (option 1 is probably most correct, with a bit of option 2).

No one has ever used that definition of GaaS until now. GaaS as a term comes from SaaS, which is built entirely around recurring revenue and subscriptions. Why would they use that to represent just doing typical patches and updates if there weren't ideas for recurring revenue? There are three possibilities in my mind:

1 The investor relations team used GaaS because it's popular right now and makes investors happy, but they aren't actually implementing any GaaS aspects

2 The playerbase is being duped

3 They were planning to go GaaS and aren't now because we all freaked out

Sadly, it seems most people take this to assume everything is copacetic and in fact we should all pretend Below Zero wasn't one of the most bland games of 2021, as seen in the [quote tweets of the IGN correction post.] (https://x.com/IGN/status/1755674941830152302/retweets/with_comments)

Not really that dramatic after the fact, but I guess it's nice the game got announced, sort of.