Glen Schofield's dev team was audited twice while making Callisto Protocol

Callisto Protocol and Call of Duty dev Glen Schofield shares the tough realities of spinning up a new game dev studio, including audits from the powers above.

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Years ago, the owners of PUBG, Krafton, announced they were opening a new AAA video game studio called Striking Distance Studios with Glen Schofield at the helm. The idea was to create a new original horror game set loosely in the PUBG universe. It'd be a Dead Space successor called The Callisto Protocol. Unfortunately, the game didn't do nearly as well as Krafton hoped sales-wise, and years later Striking Distance was hit with layoffs.

A new interview with The Game Business reveals some of the major hurdles that Schofield faced while making The Callisto Protocol, including the incredibly high costs of having to build the studio from scratch--both establishment-wise and tech-wise. Striking Distance spent over $100 million making The Callisto Protocol, a figure that surprised even Krafton, who had audited the developer twice while they were working on the project.

Schofield explains:

My last game, my last place, they audited us....twice. Because they couldn't believe that we spent over $100 million.

And I'm like 'we had to start everything new. You had nothing, there was nothing.' We started a brand new studio in the United States. All of those costs are lumped in that. Then, we get going, and we were on PS4 at the time, and they tell us that we gotta switch to PS5. I came back a few weeks later and gave them the cost. They were like 'What? You're just going to PS4 to PS5!' I'm like, 'are you kidding me, at no cost?'

And then we had to build a publishing company. They didn't have one--they did, but it had only done PUBG. So we built one from scratch, we actually put it in Striking Distance Studios, and that was a major overhead that we had to add.

There's all new tech that we had to get, and the brand new studio...so all those costs get lumped in there. There's so much more.

Schofield also mentions that he expected to potentially lose money with The Callisto Protocol, and that the group would be lucky to "break even" on sales. The dev says that this is something he brought up with Krafton from the get-go, and that he expressed that maybe they'd make money on the second game and not the first.