Glen Schofield says Krafton forced The Callisto Protocol out early

Glen Schofield, the co-creator of Dead Space and director of The Callisto Protocol, says publisher Krafton forced his team to release the horror game before it was ready.

Schofield said he was forced to ship the game and blamed Krafton for its shortcomings, in comments reported by Eurogamer on 13 October 2026. He said Krafton promised his studio, Striking Distance, three extra months of development time and then withdrew the offer.

That extra time would have moved the release from December 2022 to March 2023. Krafton had announced that The Callisto Protocol would launch globally on 2 Dec 2022 for console and PC, according to a Krafton press release. It released on that December date.

Schofield said many of the problems came from Korean management, and that Krafton lacked experience with a single-player physical game, meaning a story-led game sold as a boxed disc rather than run as an online service. He said Striking Distance had to build its own internal team to handle that physical release.

He also said Krafton required a PlayStation 4 version alongside PlayStation 5, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. Schofield put the cost of that older-console version at another US$20 million. It also meant sending out 200 dev kits, the special test units studios use to build and check console games, during a global chip shortage.

After launch, Schofield said Krafton viewed the game as a complete failure. He said he stayed on to fix it, releasing 86 patches plus DLC, the extra downloadable content sold after launch.

The Callisto Protocol arrived to mixed reviews and was plagued with performance issues, including stuttering and frame-rate drops on PC and console. There were also reports of studio crunch, the industry term for sustained overtime to hit a deadline, during development, according to IGN.

Striking Distance had promoted its approach as "Horror Engineering", a mix of lighting, sound, animation and close-up creature design meant to keep players tense. Schofield later said the difficult launch left him unsure if he would direct another large-budget game.

What makes this stand out is the detail. Developers rarely put a number on a rescinded delay or on the cost of supporting an older console. For players, this means a clearer record of why a December game needed months of patches.