Saber Interactive has achieved a lot in the past few years, but the most noticeable recent news to come out of the the company was CEO Matthew Karch’s unfiltered response to accusations that a writer had been replaced with ChatGPT. When we sit down at Gamescom for the second of two conversations with Saber Interactive’s chief creative officer Tim Willits, it’s the first thing we ask about.
“That’s just Matt’s sarcasm, that’s all,” he says. “But the important thing is that we’ve never replaced anybody with AI. That’s crazy. And we don’t use generative AI in Space Marine, and Hellraiser, and Stuntman, and everything.
“But we are experimenting with it, because we don’t know where in the industry it’s going to be effective, where people will like it, where it’s useful. In Rideshare Stimulator, we are experimenting with it with the AI mode. Very clear that the other stuff was all written by humans. Even the side missions were all written by humans.”
He believes that in the future, we will probably see a developer “come up with such a clever and brilliant use case for true modern AI integration, everyone will be like, ‘Oh, that’s it’, and everyone will understand that that’s how it can be. But until that happens, it’s like other technologies throughout history. When they first come out, people are like, ‘What are we going to do with this technology? How’s it going to work?’ And then we all discover that it’ll fit into everyday life.”
Willits says that Saber doesn’t use generative AI in its production pipelines for things like code, environments, or textures. But he does see the benefits of the technology. “One of the things that I always wished that I could do in my career is draw, because I always felt I would have been a better designer if I could actually draw… So for me, one of the things that helps me is if I can have a vision in my head and I need a way to get it out, it’s something that I can definitely use.”
“It will be interesting to see where it goes. And I bet at next year’s Gamescom, I think we’ll have some bigger games that actually focus on it. And I’m curious to see how it plays out for us, I’m curious to see how it works in our Rideshare game, and how people are going to like it. It’s a great experiment.”
Eggs and baskets
Saber Interactive split from Embracer in 2024, in a process that Willits describes as “very easy”. It remains a huge company, numbering 3,500 employees spread across 15 studios in places like Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina, and Australia. “Now that we’ve started a game in Australia, the sun no longer sets on Saber development,” says Willits.
Notably, North America doesn’t appear on that list. The firm has “no real development in North America any more,” says Willits, although the company retains its headquarters in Florida and a publishing team based in the USA.
It’s a sign of the times: as ASGC’s Amir Satvat put it, “Head count moving from basically North America to basically anywhere else.” Saber has embraced this. “We are not afraid of any territories. Some publishers are afraid to work in territories they don’t understand, but we’re like, let’s go, let’s find some people that are talented, let’s give them what they need, and let’s make awesomeness. You don’t need to be in California to be a brilliant programmer or artist or animator.”
Willits is the guy who’s keeping it all ticking over. “My job is to just make sure the teams have what they need, make sure that they’re focusing on what’s key, make sure scope doesn’t get out of hand,” he says. And there’s a lot to keep an eye on.
“People have heard me criticise old-fashioned modern publishers that put all their eggs in one basket: they have these siloed teams that focus on one project,” says Willits. Saber, by contrast, has a lot of eggs, and a lot of baskets, along with the flexibility to move teams across projects as needed.
The company has its tentpole releases, like the upcoming games Stuntman: Hollywood, John Wick, Turok: Origins, and Jurassic Park: Survival. It pairs them with what Willits calls its “bread and butter stuff”, like the remaster of the original Hitman trilogy, which follows remasters of Tomb Raider, Crysis, and Halo. “That’s predictable, consistent work where you make money,” he says.
“And then we have our smaller bets, like Docked and Bus Bound. Rideshare’s like that. They’re predictable, we know what we’re going to spend, we can predict what we’ll make. And then we have a culture that lets people work on all different games. So nobody feels that they’re only on game A or game B, and we can pull resources from around the world to put the attention on a game when it’s needed.”
Willits says Saber is also exploring movie-style external development models. “We are talking to groups of people, like 18 to 20 super-talented developers in the US, that we can partner with. They bring the creativity and the genius and the vision, and we can bring the manpower. And instead of having 300 people sitting around in California waiting for the concept art to get done and just burning through that money, you can have a small group that focuses on the important things, and then we bring people in.”
AA beats AAA
Over the past few years, the publishing landscape has increasingly split between backing indies with tiny budgets or going all in on enormous evergreen titles, with few publishers still serving the “lost middle”. Saber is one of them, though. “We are big, strong proponents of AA,” says Willits, although he questions the definition. “Some people may say that World War Z was AA, but we have 32 million players. When you get that many, it’s like, is it really AA? I guess it’s defined by the budget.”
He sees the AA strategy as preferable to betting everything on a series of giant titles. “If you have one guy who has to get a home run every game, you are not going to succeed,” he says.
With more modest releases, “you can take more bets, and you can spread out your resources, spread out your money. There’s something called slate financing that movie industries have been doing for years. And you will see more of this in our industry, where a developer may work with private equity or a publisher, and they’ll invest in four or five games, and then three are hits, one is a loser, and everyone’s happy.”
The key to this strategy, however, is making sure the budget of any one game doesn’t blow up. “You’ve got to keep things in scope, and you’ve got to focus on what is actually important,” says Willits.
“I can just see the wasted money. I can see dollars falling out of the monitor”
“Sometimes I play these games – I won’t mention the game – and I can just see the wasted money. I can see dollars falling out of the monitor. But I can tell you that the development cost for [Warhammer 40,000] Space Marine 2 was a third of a major game that just released not too many months ago from a big North American studio. It was a third, and it sold 11 million more copies. You don’t need to spend $150 million to make a billion.”
He notes that while Saber can take a while to make its games, it also doesn’t have giant teams. “The problem is stuff like this: big North American development studios, they run about $2 million plus in burn rate a month. A month. SnowRunner, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars, cost us $6 million to make. That’s literally three months of development time in California.
“So just run the math on that. If it takes [a big studio] five years to make a game, that’s 60 months, that’s $120 million just in salaries.” Adding on things like marketing and publishing costs can easily push that up to $150 million, he says, while each game sold might only return around $25 after various deductions. “The math just doesn’t… you’ve got to sell a buttload, that’s the problem.”
IP for the win
In terms of strategy, Willits says Saber is a big believer in embracing recognisable IP. “We’ve done a good job being very agnostic with working with major IP holders,” he says. “We work with Universal, Paramount, Lionsgate, Disney.” World War Z, loosely based on the 2006 novel and 2013 Brad Pitt film, has been a particularly big draw. “I think more people played that game than saw the movie.”
When it comes to choosing franchises, “what’s really important is first we have to love the IP,” he says. “And then we have to really figure out what fans actually want. Like on Hellraiser, if we made that a roguelike game, it’d be terrible.” Identifying fan desires is a “huge part of the job”, involving A/B and focus testing.
Not every opportunity works out. “There’s a huge IP holder that wanted us to make a video game, but they wanted it set in a different time period.” Saber pointed out that fans wanted otherwise; the rightholder stuck to its guns. “We were like, ‘It’s not going to work’.” The project did not move forward.
“Every movie studio, they want to make video games, because that’s where the people are”
At Summer Game Fest Saber revealed it’s been working with Universal on Stuntman: Hollywood, which borrows from Back to the Future, Fast and Furious, and Jurassic World. The value of IP like Back to the Future is twofold, he says, not only providing a bit of nostalgia for “old guys like us”, but also offering a way in for the “muggles that aren’t hardcore video game people”.
The deal for the upcoming John Wick game, meanwhile, came about because Saber had previously worked with the Lionsgate on Evil Dead: The Game. “They felt that we respected their property,” says Willits, so when Lionsgate was looking for a team to work on a John Wick video game, they got in touch. “Being a good partner just opens doors. And every movie studio and every IP holder of a large franchise, they want to make video games, because that’s where the people are.”
Saber isn’t just handling movie properties though: the company has also been entrusted with other game IP. Willits praises IO Interactive as a partner for the upcoming Hitman Classic Trilogy Remastered. “They have some ideas, and we have some ideas – because we don’t want to just remaster games, we want to improve them where we can. We’re not going to cause problems with the franchise – fans always get worried when I say stuff like that. But it should be cool.”
“We can do something with 12 people if it’s cool”
“We also did a lot of the Tomb Raider remasters, there were some slight things that we added and improved on, but it all comes down to what works with the game, and what fans would want. Which is why working with IO directly is great, because they know.”
Beyond the galaxy of partner work, Saber is also nurturing its own IP. Willits highlights driving game MudRunner as the product of “one guy with a great idea”, representative of a company culture that encourages employees to explore prototypes. He says that Saber is interested in small titles as well as big ones like John Wick. “We can do something with 12 people if it’s cool. I mean, MudRunner turned into SnowRunner, and SnowRunner’s done so well. And that led into Expeditions and RoadCraft, and even some of our Road Kings technology.”
It all comes back to the culture of being flexible and letting people work on the “cool stuff” that they want to work on, he says. “We’re making video games. I mean, this is the best job in the world, and so if somebody has a cool idea, let’s hear it.”
But more generally, he sees a need for the industry to have greater discipline. “Developers need to be smart, they need to focus on what’s really important. You can make a great game with a handful of people, and you need to be smart about where you make your game.”
“You need to build a culture where people can work on multiple titles at the same time. Don’t get siloed. Don’t be like, ‘I’m this team. I’m not going to work on that game.’ That’s never going to work.”