A person claiming to be Saber Interactive boss Matthew Karch has posted an entry in an Asmongold video on YouTube that has received a lot of attention.
He writes that he is tired of games that try to impose messages and morals on players, and wants them to go back to being just about entertainment again, something he says his own Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II but also Black Myth: Wukong are prime examples of. He goes on to argue that modern games are far too complex and demand too much from the player:
“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. I spent some time as Chief Operating Officer at Embracer and I saw games there that made me want to cry with their overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers. 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.”
PC Gamer has contacted Saber Interactive to find out if it is really Karch who wrote this, but has not received an answer, something one might suspect they would have given immediately if it was a hoax. On LinkedIn we get a clue though, as Karch has commented on a screengrab of the post and writes “Whoever wrote that seems pretty sharp”, which probably means that it is actually him who thinks this, or that he at the very least fully approves it.
The fact that today’s games are often insanely large and complicated is not a controversial position, but something that is frequently debated. But the post makes it clear that Karch thinks today’s games are far too agenda-driven (woke, as it is popularly referred to), and this has led to a widespread debate, with some saying that the Saber boss is a hero and others saying that his stance is problematic.
What do you think, is the gaming industry too agenda-driven today and should there be more focus on entertainment?