We’ve waited a long time for The Callisto Protocol, the hopes for the survival horror title were high. Not only should the game from “Striking Distance Studios” be a spiritual successor to “Dead Space”, many developers were even recruited from former employees of the cult horror game. Even the inventor, Geln Schofield, was on board. As we have already reported, the ratings for The Callisto Protocol in the national and international press are very divided and take the game with rather average ratings. And the PC version is particularly in focus: the new horror game was released there in anything but good technical condition, the Steam ratings for the release are “mostly negative”. The average ratings of the trade press and the criticism of the PC version have now caused publisher Krafton’s shares to plummet.
The Callisto Protocol with “largely negative” reviews
On Steam, probably the largest and most important platform for PC games, The Callisto Protocol (buy now €173.99) was really punished for its rather poor technical condition: The user ratings for the release are over 5000 votes “mostly negative”. However, the players are not complaining about the quality of the story or the gameplay of the horror title. Rather, the poor performance and constant stuttering are in the foreground.
For example, one user writes: “I really wanted the game to be really great, but unfortunately the performance is a joke. Despite 50 to 60 FPS on Ultra, I have mega lags and stutters that make the game simply unplayable”. Other Steam players also see it similarly: Again and again there are stutters in the game, even on high-end computers, and sometimes even complete freezes in which the game shows a still image.
One can only speculate as to why that might be. Recently, games that run quite well on other consoles have appeared again and again with problems on the PC. The most prominent example of this is probably Cyberpunk 2077. But Elden Ring also had problems with the release. One reason for this could be the missing shader compilation, which forces the game to load shaders during gameplay instead of at game start.
Patch Announced, Stock Plunges
In the meantime, the developers of “Striking Distance Studios” have noticed that something is wrong with their game on the PC and have already announced a performance patch. However, that doesn’t help publisher Krafton’s stock either. Since the release, which gave the horror game average ratings from the trade press and a meta score of 76, it has plummeted: the South Korean publisher’s share has fallen by almost ten percent.
Krafton is best known for one game: Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG). It was a worldwide success and is still very popular. Nevertheless, investors always want to seize new profit opportunities, and with The Callisto Protocol they probably speculated on building a brand like “Dead Space”. It remains questionable whether this is still possible after the reviews and the technically rather poor PC version.
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It is also questionable why game developers publish such unfinished games at all. Often the reason is an impatient publisher breathing down the programmers’ and designers’ necks and driving them to the crunch. It is not 100% clear whether that was the case here, but there is a lot to suggest. Because the developers should have noticed the technical condition of the PC version before the release with certainty. By the way, The Callisto Protocol did very well in our test. Nevertheless, we also devalued the PC version.
