Glen Schofield, the Dead Space creator who founded Striking Distance Studios, says Krafton yanked a promised three extra months of development time and forced The Callisto Protocol out in December 2022 instead of the March 2023 window the team had planned for. The rug-pull landed square in the middle of the pandemic, when a studio of roughly 200 people watched 10 to 20 staffers fall ill every month, entire departments like VFX and animation sidelined for weeks, and a small Spain outpost shut down entirely—costing Schofield one of his closest friends along the way. He called the decision out plainly in a GamesIndustry.biz interview: he was stunned because “we had fucking Covid,” with a million American deaths and a global chip shortage making the added PS4 version mandate another $20 million headache.

The accelerated schedule meant cutting four boss fights, multiple levels, and enemy variants to hit the date. Schofield admits he’s “mad at myself” for not pushing back harder when Krafton cited Korean stock-market timing. Post-launch, the team kept grinding through 86 patches and all the DLC while the publisher reportedly viewed the title as a “complete failure” and went silent on the studio until May 2023. Schofield says the game still turned a profit—somewhere in the 6-7 million copies range according to his sources—but the relationship had already soured.

Krafton’s management gets the direct blame for treating a pandemic-era AAA production like any other quarterly target. Schofield’s account lines up across multiple outlets, from the original PC Gamer coverage to Eurogamer and Inven Global summaries of the same interview. The receipts are his own words on the health crisis, the broken promise, and the patch marathon that followed. When the money people override the people actually losing staff to a virus, the product ships broken and the studio pays the price in credibility and morale.