According to a report by the Korean website K-Odyssey, The Callisto Protocol is severely struggling after Krafton spent over $160 million during its development phase.
Multiple Korean analyst firms have lowered their financial estimates for The Callisto Protocol sales. Samsung Securities wrote:
The company expected cumulative sales of 5 million copies, but considering the current sales ranking, cumulative sales of 2 million copies will not be easy until this year.
The budget is certainly worthy of the AAAA moniker given pre-release by Krafton. However, the final version of The Callisto Protocol turned out to be underwhelming in many regards. In Wccftech’s review (7.2/10), Kai Powell wrote:
While an incredible looker in screenshots and death scenes, The Callisto Protocol suffers from a lack of intriguing content that makes the twelve-plus hour journey through Black Iron Prison worth two, even perhaps one single playthrough. Crafting and skill trees are both minimal in nature (with both costing a heavy amount of credits where players might only be able to fully upgrade two or three weapons in the full playthrough) while melee combat and combat encounters as a whole feel largely scripted. The horror elements stand out as reason alone to play Striking Distance’s debut horror game, but you might want to find yourself getting thrown back into Black Iron Prison rather than see the journey through to the end.
PC gamers got the worst deal. On release, the game suffered from insane shader stuttering issues and low ray tracing performance. The bad reception was so overwhelming that it contributed to Krafton’s stock going down. Developer Striking Distance Studios has since released some patches which alleviated but did not fully solve the issues yet.
