Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim WIllits Blasts AAA Video Game Developers In Space Marine 2 Interview
Saber Interactive seems to actually care about gamers, and that's why Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a successful video game where others have failed.
Gamers have made waves this year with their purchasing power and vocal opinions about what they want and don’t want from video games. Some studios, like Ubisoft, have taken the opportunity to attack their customer base. However, Saber and Focus Entertainment, who developed Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, are embracing gamers and firing shots at their competitors.
It seems the developers took good care of the Warhammer 40K property with Space Marine 2. The storyline honored the original and respected the lore, which made the player base happy after worries that they would be following the example of many other IPs, pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas for “modern audiences.”
The result was a smash hit, with Space Marine 2 reaching over 2 million sales in its first couple of weeks on the market, with 225,600 concurrent players on Steam at its peak, making the game the most successful Warhammer 40K game ever.
The extreme leftists in the industry went into a tailspin when Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch went onto an Asmongold video talking about Space Marine 2 to leave a comment.
He said, “Hey man. CEO of Saber here. I love your videos. When we signed the deal to make Space Marine 2, all I wanted was a throwback game. We had the chance to work on something which by its nature was ‘old school’. I can’t even comprehend many of the current games that we play these days. They are too complex and too much of an investment. We worked on Halo back in the day, and that game could be distilled down to the simplest of shooting loops, but it was entirely addicting. That is what we wanted to recapture. I hope that games like Space Marine 2 and Wukong are the start of a reversion to a time when games were simply about fun and immersion. We just want to do some glory kills and get the heart rate up a little. For me that is what games should be about.”
Now Saber’s Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits is echoing Karch’s sentiment, putting AAA video game publishers on blast for their bloated and unplayable games. He spoke with IGN about the ridiculous budgets of some of these games and how development costs get out of control, something Saber and Focus Entertainment didn’t allow with Space Marine 2.
Willits said, “We don't need to sell four million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success. There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell five million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than five million?”
He continued, “There are examples like that, and we do not want to be that business. We want to be a developer that focuses on the core experience, what makes the games actually fun, and then do it really well and then make it affordably.”
“Look at SnowRunner! Dude, SnowRunner is literally driving trucks through mud. That's it, I'm done. I just described the game. 15 million people played it because the experience is perfect. Look at World War Z. Like, come on, we're not going to get an Academy Award for that game, but 25 million people have played it because it's just this perfectness, and that's what we do well.”
Both Saber Interactive executives are right about the industry as a whole. Overdeveloping games does no good, and when these companies don’t focus on the gamer and their “core experience,” trying to reach out to modern audiences with D.E.I. overload, it’s been shown to completely torpedo games in 2024. If developers want their games to be successful, no matter the budget, they must focus on gamers first. It should be a simple concept, but it’s one that all too many studios fail at.
What do you think of Saber Interactive’s Chief Creative Officer throwing shade at other AAA video game studios in an interview about Space Marine 2? Leave a comment and let us know.
For a great science fiction with spy thriller action that appeals to real readers, get The Stars Entwined on Amazon and support Fandom Pulse!
These guys get it. May they see profits in millions as long as this attitude prevails.
Just make good game :v
It's nice that the evil overlords realised way way too late how big gaming is.
Of course, by its nature and now more than ever before, it's easier for one man to make a game than make a good film.
Really if there wad advice to young men to give, it'd be that in addition to whatever work you pursue, tinker away on a video game as a hobby.
Of course not everyone has the game making guts, but there's always room for clones of this or that game.