Our colleagues at GamesIndustry.biz recently had the chance to sit down with Glen Schofield who, back in July, announced he was bringing his career in the games industry to an end. Before bowing out, the man best known for working on Call of Duty (Modern Warfare III, Advanced Warfare, World War II) and for creating Dead Space gave survival horror fans the hugely underrated The Callisto Protocol. Naturally, our colleagues took the opportunity to quiz him about what went on behind the scenes, and it seems Schofield would much rather the game hadn't come out as soon as it did.
The Callisto Protocol came out too early
“I was forced to ship the game. I beat myself up over it a lot. I was shocked by that decision because we had this bloody COVID thing,” he laments. “A million people died in the United States. I lost one of my best friends. Every month, between four and six people at my studio fell ill. There were even moments when our small team in Spain was at a complete standstill. So a little outfit like ours found itself without its rendering team for a while. Your main concern is the health of your staff. Making a game becomes secondary, because we're talking about lives here, about people.”
Those setbacks were not without consequences for The Callisto Protocol's content. Several levels and a few bosses had to be cut, as did one or two enemies from the bestiary.
COVID made things harder — but it wasn't the only problem
As was the case for every studio, COVID forced Striking Distance Studios to rethink how it worked. By his own admission, Glen Schofield “doesn't like working from home”. He prefers interacting directly with his teams rather than piling up Zoom calls. He reckons talking to young developers face to face, day in day out, is the best way to help them improve. “We tried everything because we were looking for the best way of doing things,” he says. “There were a lot of meetings.”
Schofield clearly points the finger at decisions made by South Korean publisher Krafton, with whom contact was severed right after the game's release. “They thought The Callisto Protocol was a total failure,” the former Striking Distance Studios boss continues. “What they didn't know was that, while they were complaining, we were working on fixes. I finished all the DLC and rolled out 86 updates. It was an insane amount of work. Every day we were down the mines making changes. Some were minor, some were bigger. The whole point was to get the game to the level it should have been at in the first place.”
Krafton didn't want The Callisto Protocol 2
The GamesIndustry.biz piece also reveals that Striking Distance Studios had to handle publishing and marketing duties for The Callisto Protocol itself, as Krafton had no teams capable of taking those on at the time. Having to release the game on both PS4 and PS5 (no fewer than 150 developers from PlayStation Studios Visual Arts and PlayStation Malaysia worked on it) racked up an extra $20 million in costs, not least shipping dev kits to more than 200 staff in the middle of a global chip shortage. A tall order, in short.
The Callisto Protocol's open ending clearly left the door ajar for Striking Distance Studios to deliver a sequel. Schofield confirms as much, adding that Jacob Lee's next adventure would have been on a whole other scale. This time, players would have faced a full-blown plague that had infected a vast space station, along with a host of ships whose welcoming parties would have been anything but warm. “We had a huge amount of concept art, and some of the things that didn't make it into the first game were meant to be used in the second,” he says.
Sadly, Krafton decided not to green-light it, no doubt because of the decidedly mixed reviews (The Callisto Protocol's Metacritic score sits at 69) and sales deemed insufficient. Yet in August 2025, Glen Schofield told The Game Business that the game had shifted between 6 and 7 million copies. For now, Krafton has not responded to GamesIndustry.biz's requests for comment.
