Saber Interactive had a breakout hit in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and you can attribute at least part of its success to the fact that it was not made in North America. The company’s chief creative officer, Tim Willits, says it’s been dramatically scaling down its operations in the region.
In fact, Saber has “no real development in North America any more,” as Willits tells GamesIndustry.biz. The company is headquartered in Florida, and a handful of its subsidiaries are based in the US, but the vast majority of its development wings are spread across Europe.
Why the move? Well, it’s gosh-darned expensive to make games in North America, where industry salaries are driven up by their placement in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. Make a game in countries where salary expectations are substantially lower, and the cost of development goes down dramatically.
“The problem is stuff like this: big North American development studios, they run about $2 million+ in burn rate a month,” Willits says. “A month. SnowRunner, which has made hundreds of millions of dollars, costs 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.”
Cheaper game development means that publishers are free to take more risks, too. Back in 2024, Willits lamented that there are AAA projects that can’t even break even if they don’t sell five million copies. Saber seems more keen on building games for (relatively) smaller niches that might actually appreciate them.
“Sometimes I play these games – I won’t mention the game – and I can just see the wasted money,” Willits continues in the new interview. “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.”
Unfortunately, Saber’s business bets also include a big emphasis on AI, which came to a head when the publisher finally added an AI disclosure to Rideshare Stimulator amid CEO Matt Karch’s public feud with a former writer who claims she was replaced by ChatGPT. Karch is further convinced that “Half-Life 2 of AI” will someday come along change everybody’s minds about the tech. Me? I’ll be happy if we just get more human hands making games like SnowRunner and Space Marine 2.