Krafton, the publisher behind PUBG, Hi-Fi Rush 2, and Subnautica 2, has started a voluntary resignation program for employees who aren’t on board with “the era of AI transformation.”
Amid its legal quarrel with Subnautica’s original developers, Krafton announced in October that it’s now an “AI first” company and pledged to spend upwards of $70 million in support of the controversial tech. Now, it’s taken its embrace of AI to an almost militant level, asking developers who aren’t on the same page to get lost, essentially.
The point of the voluntary resignation program, a Krafton spokesperson told BusinessKorea, here machine-translated from Korean, “is to support members in proactively designing their growth direction and embarking on new challenges both inside and outside the company amid the era of AI transformation,” adding that “the company plans to support members in autonomously deciding whether to continue the direction of change internally or expand externally.”
Employees choosing to leave Krafton under its new program will reportedly receive varying levels of financial support depending on their tenure, with the max being 36 months salary for those with more than 11 years at the company.
The issue of the use of generative AI in video game development is one of the industry’s most hotly debated, with major players including Krafton, EA, Ubisoft, and Take-Two publicly signaling support to varying degrees, and plenty of others – most prominently in the indie space – arguing AI will never be able to replace human creativity. Meanwhile, hot new extraction shooter Arc Raiders has drawn scrutiny for its use of text-to-speech AI for some of its dialogue, something developer Embark has been doing since its previous title, The Finals.