$70 games ‘will go the way of the dodo’, believes Saber CEO

Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch believes the ‘$70 game’ will eventually become a thing of the past, as developers move to reduce costs and risk in an increasingly challenging AAA games market.

Speaking to IGN, former interim COO of Embracer Karch discussed Saber’s divestment from the troubled group, and where he sees Saber’s place in the market as a standalone publisher.

The exec said he believes Saber, which encompasses studios like Nimble Giant (Star Trek Infinite), 3D Realms (Ion Fury), and potentially 4A Games (Metro), occupies a position between independent studios and AAA publishers.

Karch cited Helldivers 2 as an example of the type of “middle market” game it would like to emulate. He told IGN that one of its upcoming titles, Space Marine 2, will retail for $70, but only because he’s concerned audiences would see a cheaper price as emblematic of poor quality.

“I think that as games become more expensive to make, the $70 title is going to go the way of the dodo [bird]. I do,” he said.

“I just don’t think it’s sustainable… Look, you remember the hype for Cyberpunk, which I think actually ultimately performed okay, but when the expectations are so high and so much money is put into one title, it’s hugely risky for the company that’s doing it. What if it fails?

“You remember what happened when Ubisoft a couple of years ago, all their titles slipped out of the year, and then all of a sudden they were in an entirely different place? It’s hard to recover from that.

“I think the market is going to shift to development which is not necessarily lower quality, but there’s going to be an emphasis on trying to find ways to reduce costs.”

With thousands of job cuts announced across the games industry in the past 18 months, Karch acknowledged that AAA development is going through a major shift and claimed that past trends of sky-high budgets and lengthy development periods aren’t sustainable.

“I think that there’s going to be a real shortage of game content over the coming few years,” he said. “You’ve seen how many layoffs there’s been, you see how many games have gotten killed. But we have a lot of good projects going on that I’m proud of and that I feel really, really strongly about.”