Sabre won’t say whether their CEO wrote this highly sarcastic comment about games “imposing moral rules on players”

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Yesterday I watched a YouTube video about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, in which various gesticulating internet gents opined that they had “forgotten what it’s like to be the target audience” for games, praising the modern (and for our money, pretty good) Warhammer 40K shooter as a throwback that was “dripping with masculinity” without an overabundance of emotion or actual social relevance. I then went through the several thousand comments under the video, many of which expressed similar longing for a hypothetical good elderly days before those conniving feminists invaded the medium, turned every game into an LGBT+ crying simulator, and threw all Real Men into a huge hole. I did this because I was looking for one particular comment by someone claiming to be Matthew Karch, CEO of Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive.

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The poster thanks YouTuber Asmongold for video and characterizes Space Marine 2, along with the recent Black Myth: Wukong, as a “throwback” to the “old school” when “games were just fun and immersive.” He also recalls games he allegedly encountered during his time at renowned developer Embracer that “made me want to cry because of their over-the-top attempts to convey a message or impose morals on players.” This comment has now been picked up and widely shared, as Saber comes off as anti-woke, “woke” being usurpeda catch-all term for leftists, especially those who campaign against racism, transphobia, and sexism. Here it is in full:

Hey man. I’m the CEO of Saber. I love your videos. When we signed on to make Space Marine 2, all I wanted was a retrospective game. We got to work on something that was inherently “old school.” I can’t even fathom a lot of the games we play today. They’re too complicated and too demanding. We used to work on Halo, and that game could be boiled down to the most basic of shooting loops, but it was completely immersive. That’s what we wanted to get back. I hope games like Space Marine 2 and Wukong are the beginning of a return to a time when games were just fun and immersive. I spent some time as COO at Embracer, and I’ve seen games there that made me want to cry because of the over-the-top attempts to convey a message or impose morality on the player. We just want to do a few glory kills and get the heart pumping a little bit. To me, that’s what games should be about.

Is this Actually Matthew Karch? Saber won’t say. User in question registered his account in May 2024.. He describes himself as a “typical male – a lover of loud guitars, violent games, fast cars and all kinds of whiskey,” which is certainly typical. Suspicious. Yesterday I asked a PR rep to lend a hand confirm the authenticity of the account. Fast forward to this morning and Saber said IGN AND My city that they won’t comment on the topic, which is usually PR jargon for “yes, it’s true.” Except.

Except that I honestly have a challenging time believing Karch is the author, since the “enforce morality” gambit is such a blatant bit of culture war bait. There’s a mention of Wukong, a Soulslike made by a company with reputation for sexism which, after the discovery of PR guidelines warning streamers about “feminist propaganda,” became a pillowtop for people who live in fear of anime breast shrinkage. There’s the cliched appeal to “gamers,” as if people who regularly play games are some unfortunate protected demographic, and the needlessly broad and perhaps confusingly puerile commentary that games should simply be about “fun and immersion.”

If I were Karch, I would find it embarrassing to be associated with such a see-through mishmash of thinly disguised reactionary talking points. It sounds like it was cobbled together on 8chan to enrage the Twitterati. It sounds like it was generated by an AI using the “reads like it was cobbled together on 8chan to enrage the Twitterati” prompt. I’d probably want to come out and disavow it.

Space Marine 2 is proving to be an compelling line to walk for those who oppose the “woke” approach. As a Warhammer 40K game, it’s an compelling line to walk for anyone, at any point on the ideological spectrum. In some ways, it’s a fairly “woke” game. The cast includes Black Space Marines and women in frontline combat roles – a source of anguish for some members of the Warhammer player base who believe that contemporary Games Workshop has been irrevocably tainted by the heresy of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion. On the other hand, it’s a story about fat brothers stomping on space bugs while bawling about god-emperors. There was a bit of heated, granular discussion degree of interest in the game on the Steam forums.

Of course, all of this is just the latest shimmer in the decades-long optical turmoil that is Games Workshop’s Imperium of Man, on whose behalf these Space Marine tanks wage war. Created in part in response to Thatcherite Britain, the Imperium is a satirical and grotesque depiction of a xenophobic, mass-murdering, patriarchal theocratic empire. You shouldn’t seriously believe in the values ​​presented. But some people do thatpartly because after years of telling and selling stories in that setting, the power of the satire got lost under the merchandising. I think it’s because of this submergence of political relevance that “Karch,” whoever he really is, doesn’t seem aware of the irony of mocking other games for “enforcing morality.” (Thanks to Nic for suggesting that last point.)

Someone claiming to be Space Marine 2 imaginative director Oliver Hollis-Leick also commented on Asmongold’s video, though his comments are much more reserved. Here’s his full response.

Creative Director of the game here. I wrote Space Marine 2 with Craig Sherman, Randy Begel, and Matthew Garcia-Dunn. Hearing everything you have to say about the story and the characters resonates so strongly with our actual approach. It’s great to hear that you’re paying attention to the exact things we were intentionally focusing on. It’s been four and a half years of intense work and passion, and watching videos like this makes it all worth it.

As it happens, I interviewed Hollis-Leick earlier this week. We talked about a variety of things, from innocent chit-chat about implementing a jetpack in a game to how to create a Space Marine fantasy that doesn’t advocate bigotry and genocide. I had intended to publish a piece this week. But in delicate of this alleged comment by Karch, and in delicate of the game’s reception more broadly, I’m going to give these bits more attention.

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