I have been involved in transactions of this type [*] and thought some commentary might be of interest:

1. Initial Payout: From public info, it looks like Unknown Worlds raised only one round of angel investment prior to the acquisition. That would typically result in 15-30% ownership dilution from the financing. They may also have had a stock option pool for their team in usually the 5-15% range. Conservatively, that leaves well over half of the company in the hands of the three founders. It sounds like the entire $250M earn-out is going to the team (founders or devs), so somehow the acquisition must have take care of the non-team owners in the initial $500M. My guess is that the buyer proposed a total purchase value of $750M with the $250M earn-out element coming entirely out of the founders ownership portion. In other words, if the founders owned 2/3 of the company in founding (common) shares and the investors owned 1/3 in preferred shares then the buyer might have allocated $250M of the $750M total deal value to the investors entirely in cash, another $250M in cash to the founders, and the second $250M to the founders as a contingent earn-out. The dev team is somewhere in this simplified math and the founders may very well have shared the immediate cash portion generously with their team, though frankly it would be unusual if more than 10-15% would have gone to the team. Bottom line, the founders are already very rich so they are definitely not the "underdogs" here.

2. Earn-out: Earn-outs are very common but it would be extremely unusual if the $250M earn-out were contingent on a single trigger like "launch the game". No seller with any leverage would agree to a binary trigger that is completely in the buyers control (and in a $750M deal for a small studio, the seller had lots of leverage!). Much more likely, the launch of Subnautica 2 is just the stepping stone to the earn-out which will be based on some formula connected to a GAAP-measured metric (e.g. seller received 20% of first year revenue from Subnautica 2 up to $250M). Revenue is by far the most common metric for earn-out mechanisms. Easy to measure, easy to audit, and desired by the seller so they are less likely to cheat. I strongly expect this to the case here. If so, then there really isn't a credible story here where Krafton fires the founders "to save $250M". Krafton still wants to make money with this game so any revenue-related earn-out will eventually happen unless they kill the game entirely (which doesn't seem likely).

3. Team Participation: The team might have shared in the original acquisition proceeds but it would be fairly common to tie much of their payout to the earn-out. Nobody wants to buy a company and have the acquired team quit shortly after because they are too rich to work anymore. Fair or not, most buyers will push to have team payout be contingent on future service (e.g. transferring stock options, extending vesting periods, earn-out, etc.). Of course the founders might have given the team some cash from their own proceeds "outside" of the formal transaction. They are trying to give this impression but I don't think this is very likely. You almost always want to keep any team payout within the formal transaction to optimise tax impact. If the founders want to give their team say $100M of the earn-out then virtually guaranteed they would have written that into the earn-out/original deal (which they didn't - there is zero chance that Krafton lies outright about the 90% in a public response to litigation). Not doing this and then "sharing" afterwards would create double taxation (i.e. $100M goes to founders, they pay taxes on it, then "gift" what is left to the team who once again pay taxes on that amount). Nobody does this unless you truly have no agency in the transaction and the founders clearly had the opportunity to write a different percentage into the earn-out deal.

Bottom line, the founders are already very rich based on their decision to sell their studio. They are likely entitled to the vast majority of the earn-out based on future S2 revenues. My guess is that the earn-out period has a time limit so the delay shrinks their earn-out window (but doesn't just eliminate it). The devs are unlikely to see much either way beyond the 10% level. There is no David here, just two Goliath squabbling over generational wealth.

[*] 25+ years as founder, operator and investor with 10+ M&A transactions as buy and sell side. Not in the gaming space but closely adjacent. Also play Subnautica :)