•Glen Schofield, the creator of Dead Space, has said he felt “forced to ship” The Callisto Protocol by publisher Krafton while his studio was grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I was forced to ship the game. I’m mad at myself, there’s no doubt. I was so stunned by that decision, because we had fucking Covid. A million people died in America. I lost one of my best friends. Every single month, four to six people in my company were getting sick,” Schofield said in an interview with Gameindustry.biz.
“There were times our small team in Spain was shut down; it goes through a small place like that and you lose your rendering team for a while. The main thing you’re concerned about, not that you aren’t normally, is the health of your team. Making a game just became secondary because this is about life. This is about humanity.”
Schofield had a long career in games before The Callisto Protocol: he created and served as executive producer on Dead Space, produced three Call of Duty titles, and worked on Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Cain.
The Callisto Protocol, developed by Striking Distance Studios under Krafton, failed to meet high expectations after the publisher reportedly invested $100 million into it. It received middling critical reception—this outlet gave it a 79 in its review—but a major factor in its downfall was framerate stuttering, which led to harsh negative reviews at launch.
Schofield’s comments suggest the issue might have been resolved with additional development time, or avoided had the studio not been struck by the pandemic midway through production.
The troubles contributed to layoffs at the studio in August 2023, followed by another wave in February 2025. Schofield later retired from video games entirely in 2026 after his next project couldn’t secure funding, commenting that “maybe I’ve directed my last game.”
Later in the Gameindustry.biz interview, Schofield said Krafton viewed Callisto as a total failure while he was working to fix it behind the scenes.
“[Krafton] thought Callisto was a complete failure. What they didn’t know while all they were doing was complaining, we were doing patches. I waited until I finished all the DLC and put out 86 patches,” he said. “That was a lot of fucking work. Every day you’re going in, you’re making changes. Some are little, others are massive. That was all to get it back to where it needed to be.”
The game did release those patches and updates—both to address the stuttering and to add new chapters to its story—but Schofield’s remarks suggest they were not enough to save his final project as a director.
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