Saber won't say whether their CEO wrote this highly baity comment about games "imposing morals on gamers"

Yesterday I watched a Youtube video about Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, in which sundry, gesticulating milords of the internet opine that they had "forgot what it's like to be the target audience" for games, hailing the new (and for our money, fairly good) Warhammer 40K shooter as a throwback affair that "oozes masculinity", with no excess feelings or real-life social relevancy. I then combed through several thousand comments below said video, many of which expressed similar longing for the hypothetical Good Old Days, before those wily feminists invaded the medium, transformed every game into a LGBT+ weeping simulator, and threw all the Real Men into a big hole. I did this because I was searching for one particular comment written by somebody claiming to be Matthew Karch, CEO of Space Marine 2 developers Saber Interactive.

In it, the poster thanks youtuber Asmongold for the video and characterises Space Marine 2 together with the recent Black Myth: Wukong as a "reversion" to an "old school" era, when "games were simply about fun and immersion". He also mentions games he allegedly encountered during his time at noted layoff manufacturer Embracer "that made me want to cry with their overblown attempts at messaging or imposing morals on gamers". The comment has now been seized upon and widely disseminated as Saber coming out as anti-woke, "woke" being an appropriated, catch-all term for leftwingers and especially those who campaign against racism, transphobia and sexism. Here it is in full:

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. 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.

Is this actually Matthew Karch? Saber won't say. The user in question registered his account in May 2024. He describes himself as a "generic male of sorts - lover of loud guitars, violent games, fast cars and all sorts of whisky", which is certainly generic. Suspiciously so. I asked a PR representative to help me confirm the account's legitimacy yesterday. Fast forward to this morning, and Saber have told IGN and Kotaku that they won't be commenting on the subject, which would typically be PR speak for "yes, it's real". Except.

Except that I genuinely find it hard to believe that Karch is the author, inasmuch as the "imposing morals" gambit is such a brass-necked piece of culture war bait. There's that drive-by mention of Wukong, a Soulslike created by a company with a reputation for sexism which, following the discovery of PR guidance cautioning streamers against "feminist propaganda", has become a pillow fortress for people who live in terror of anime boobs getting smaller. There's the boilerplate appeal to "gamers", as though people who play games habitually were some kind of hapless protected demographic, and the needlessly broad and perhaps deceptively childlike comment that games should simply be about "fun and immersion".

If I were Karch, I'd find it cringey to be associated with such a transparent jumble of thinly camouflaged reactionary talking points. It reads like it's been slapped together on 8chan to rile up the Twitterati. It reads like it's been AI-generated, using the prompt "it reads like it's been slapped together on 8chan to rile up the Twitterati". I would probably want to come out and disavow it.

Space Marine 2 is proving an interesting line to walk for those who rail against the "woke". Being a Warhammer 40K game, it’s an interesting line to walk for everybody, at every point on the ideological spectrum. In some respects, it's a pretty "woke" game. The cast includes Black Space Marines and women in frontline combat roles – a source of anguish for certain members of the Warhammer playerbase who are convinced that modern-day Games Workshop has been irrevocably tainted by the heresy of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. On the other hand, its a story about bulky bros stamping on space bugs while bellowing about god-emperors. There’s been some heated granular discussion of the game's degree of wokeness on the Steam forums.

Of course, all this is just the latest flicker in the decades-old optical muddle that is Games Workshop’s Imperium of Man, on whose behalf those tank-footed Space Marines wage war. Conceived partly in response to Thatcherite Britain, the Imperium is a satirical and grotesque portrayal of a xenophobic, mass-murdering, patriarchal theocratic empire. You’re not supposed to seriously buy into the values depicted. But some people do, partly because after years of people telling and selling stories in such a setting, the thrust of the satire has gotten lost beneath the merchandising. I guess it's thanks to that submerging of the political relevancy that "Karch", whoever he really is, doesn't seem alive to the irony of deriding other games for "imposing morals". (Thanks to Nic for suggesting this last observation.)

Somebody claiming to be Space Marine 2’s creative director Oliver Hollis-Leick has also commented on the Asmongold video, though his comments are a lot more guarded. Here's his response in full.

Creative Director of the game here. I wrote Space Marine 2 along with Craig Sherman, Randy Begel and Matthew Garcia-Dunn. Hearing everything you have to say about the story and characters resonates so strongly with our actual approach. It's great to hear you calling out the exact things that we intentionally focused on. It was 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 in the week. We discussed a bunch of things, ranging from more innocent chat about the game's jump pack implementation to how you do a Space Marine power fantasy that isn’t an endorsement of bigotry and genocide. I was going to publish a write-up this week. But in the wake of this alleged Karch comment, and more broadly in light of the game’s reception, I’m going to give those pieces more thought.