“Don’t sell an undercooked pie. Fry it up,” — Saber co-founder on game production

Video interview, edited transcript below

App2Top.ru Q: How did you get into the industry and launch Saber?

Andrew Iones

Andrey: My first job — at that time I was still studying at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University — was at the game studio Creat Studios. I was the first programmer there, then the presenter — there were simply no others then.

We made graphics for game videos for projects of large American companies. That they are large, we found out much later. Then we didn’t have an understanding of what kind of partners they were.

There, at Creat Studios, I met Anton, one of my best friends (Andrey is talking about one of the three future Saber founders — Anton Krupkin. — Ed.).

At some point I left the company, moved to America, to New York, and found a job in a small company. Then 2001 happened, the dotcom bubble burst. It directly affected me. The owners of the company decided that it was time to cover up the IT business. So I found myself out of work.

By that time, I had a good friend in New York, Matt (here we are talking about Matthew Karch, another founder of the company. — Ed.). He also loved games since childhood. At some point we decided why not try to do something ourselves. We are all “cool”: a blunder and in six months we will earn a million each.

It took longer and turned out to be a little more difficult than we imagined at the time.

Saber today has many offices, many studios, but for a long time the head office was in the USA, and all development is in St. Petersburg. Did you initially decide that the business would be in America, and the production in Russia?

Andrey: Yes. At that time we thought that it was best to do business from the States. There have been successful companies in Europe, Russia, and, of course, in other regions. However, the largest gaming partners at that time were in the USA.

If all the money, all the projects are here, then it seems logical to look for partners and talk to them here.

What was the strategy originally, what did you want to offer the market?

Andrey: There was no such thing that we wanted to offer something to the market. We wanted to make games that would allow the business and ourselves to survive.

We didn’t have a billion-dollar idea that we believed in. We started from the thought “Let’s try to make games, and then we’ll see what happens.”

Even before assembling the team, we figured out what could be done with small forces and inexpensively. There were two options: make a shooter and make a race. As a result, we decided to make a shooter. And so it went. We’ve been making shooters for 20 years now. Naturally, now not only them, but it all started with shooters.

Saber’s first game was called Will Rock. At the time of its release in 2003, it was compared to Serious Sam. Were you greatly inspired by her?

Andrey: We looked at her every day. For us, she was an example of a “simple shooter”. Serious Sam (2001) was the foundation from which we started when developing Will Rock.

And not for us alone. Already after Will Rock, another “simple shooter” was released, whose developers were inspired by both Serous Sam and our game. I’m talking about Painkiller (2004) from People Can Fly.

How successful was Will Rock?

Andrey: From the point of view of finances, Will Rock cannot be called a successful project.

The only thing that can be called a success is that we managed to form a team and release at least something.

Development was very difficult. I probably haven’t left the St. Petersburg office for six months. He worked for 40 hours in a row, slept for 3-4 hours, then returned to the office and worked again.

Will Rock Boxing

Why do you say that Will Rock was not successful? The press seemed to take the game warmly.

Andrey: The ratings were certainly warm. But the question is how much money you earn from it. You won’t be full of grades. You need to feed the team and yourself. I couldn’t feed them. Then we mostly just invested.

On the other hand, it was Will Rock who created some kind of name for us, allowed us to form the core of the studio, taught us how to work with external publishers and work in general. During its development, we learned about the milestones, learned how to pass them and plan a little.

In this sense, this Will Rock is a successful project for us, but definitely not from a financial point of view.

If there was no financial success, then how did they survive? Did you do something in parallel?

Andrey: It was impossible to do anything in parallel at that time. There was a team of a dozen people who worked very hard.

Then, during TimeShift, it was also impossible to do something in parallel. We have been learning to create several projects at once for a long time.

So after Will Rock, they immediately started TimeShift?

Andrey: Yes. When we finished making Will Rock, we started thinking about what we could do next. Matt came up with an idea about time manipulation. Accordingly, they began to make a prototype.

The prototype was made for a year. During this time, we almost went bankrupt, because it’s hard to make a game without external funding for a year. Our team remained small, but it was hard to find money. In principle, it is difficult for any normal person to find several tens of thousands of dollars if he was not born into the family of George Soros or Bill Gates.

It was only when we made a prototype that we were able to find a partner who found our idea interesting. This partner turned out to be Atari.

Is it true that TimeShift was born in agony and radically altered?

Andrey: I wouldn’t say it was agony. It was our first experience of serious communication with the dear and beloved industry.

When we started working with Atari, it seemed to be one of the market leaders. However, a year and a half after signing the contract, she went broke and began selling her projects.

TimeShift was sold to Vivendi. So we got a new publisher who was ready to finance the development of the project.

Together with a new publisher, new people came to the project, a new producer with his vision. This has obviously led to product changes. The project changed for a year under new requests, and then a few weeks before it was sent for gold, the president of Vivendi called us. There was something like this dialogue between us:

Vivendi: “We will delay the game until Christmas.”
Saber: “Before Christmas this year? Will we get a two-month delay for fine-tuning?”
Vivendi: “No, we are delaying the game until Christmas next year. And for this year, let’s add PlayStation 3 support.”
Saber: “Good.”
Vivendi: “And let’s change the whole plot during this time. We did a market research here, it seems to us that history should be rewritten in this way.”
Saber: “Good.”
Vivendi: “And here are a few more pages of alterations.”

After that, we got the devkits of the new PlayStation. When our game reached certification a year later, it was either the third or the fifth game in Europe that passed this certification at all. It was just the beginning of the process, Sony itself did not know how to carry out this certification at that time.

TimeShift 

Delaying the project for a year — wasn’t it a mistake?

For us, the question definitely did not stand like that. It was about survival.

You have one project, one partner. If you don’t accept the terms, you will stop being paid. You can’t do anything about it.

Then the developer could not bring the game to the market on his own. The only option was to work through a publisher.

So it was definitely a normal decision for us. Plus, we were given a year of life and allowed to get a good experience on launching on PlayStation 3.

Has the team grown a lot during the development of TimeShift?

Andrey: When we started the game, there were about 12-15 of us. When we finished TimeShift, we already had people under 70. That is, yes, it has increased.

It turns out that it was during the development of TimeShift that you grew into an AAA-class team?

Andrey: Yes, we then grew out of a developer of budget projects.

Have internal processes changed a lot during development? It is generally believed that indie development is more of a mess, and in large companies everything works like clockwork.

Here it is necessary to define what is a “mess” and what is “working like clockwork”.

I think these are very conditional categories. If you release something, then you somehow cope with the existing chaos.

As for us, from year to year we tried to reduce the level of mess, including increasing the transparency of processes.

We had to seriously rebuild the processes when we started working with Microsoft on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The game had a release date carved into the rock. The release of the product was timed to coincide with the decade since the release of the original game. The date could not be moved.

Important: the game didn’t just have to come out, it had to have an extremely high level of quality. And Microsoft wanted to be sure of both the timing and the production of the future game.

Throughout the development, Microsoft constantly asked us the question: “How do you know that the game will be ready by such and such a date? Why do you think so? Reveal to us your process of comprehension.”

These were good questions that we didn’t really have an answer to, even though we didn’t fully realize it. We were working. We worked for days. We were constantly thinking about how to speed up development, how to pump up the team with people and resources. But at the same time, up to a certain point, we were not sure whether we would finish the game by the deadline.

However, when a question is asked regularly at every meeting, you start to wonder if you really know the answer.

We decided to approach the answer methodically.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is a unique project that allowed us to evaluate the progress of development. Our task was to reproduce large volumes of content at a very high level of quality in a very short time.

In order to clearly calculate all the deadlines, we began to make lists with leads for each level, which were supposed to answer questions in the spirit of:

• what do we need to produce for a specific level;
• what types of assets are there;
• how much time is needed for the production of each asset.

Based on the collected information, the leads had to calculate how much time was needed for each level.

For example, they could calculate that 500 man-days are needed for such a level.

Then we looked at how many people are working on it now. For example, three. It turns out that in the current composition, the team will spend 170 man-days on the level. There are 20 working days in a month. So we find out what they will do for the next 8 months.

This is very bad, because we need to do this amount of work in 4 months.

After that, we start thinking, what are the options? To speed up production, they usually resort either to developing new tools that optimize processes, or to hiring new people.

We are implementing one of the scenarios.

Work on such a methodology requires constant inclusion. We updated the lists every week, looked at what had been done, how much remained to be done, how much time had passed, and so on.

At first we made such lists for each level, then we started making more detailed lists: by special effects, by lighting, by other components, not only by graphics.

Thanks to this, we began to clearly understand where we are in time, and where and why, on the contrary, we are behind schedule. Also, these graphs made it possible to visually answer Microsoft’s questions.

They also removed all conversations on the topic: “Let’s make you even more beautiful.” We could show the documents and say, “Guys, look, we don’t have time.”

This is the situation when the conversation turns from emotions, from the theses “We are trying very hard” and “We spend millions of money on advertising, do as we say” to a constructive dialogue “Let’s look at the lists and weigh everything.”

Of course, not all projects are like that. But to a certain extent, you can use something like this in any development.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

Why, after Timeshift, did you move away from the concept of developing games based on your IP to creating games based on someone else’s franchises?

Andrey: It was an era of survival. When Microsoft comes to you and says, “Would you like to make Halo?“, you say, “Yes, of course.”

Given the size of the IP, you are ready to develop a game of this level for free. There’s no need to laugh, that’s how it was. It was part of our conversations with Microsoft at that moment.

There is no big strategy here. You just understand that you need to move forward. You have an opportunity and you grab this opportunity by the tail.

Why did Microsoft come to you, because at that time you had a different product portfolio?

Andrey: We were the team that could do a complex project. TimeShift was just one of those.

Friends from Microsoft said they were looking for a partner who would help them make Halo. Matt and I decided that it would be cool if we could participate in this and boarded the first plane that flew to Seattle.

Was it difficult to convince Microsoft to give you Halo for development?

Andrey: There were no ready-made solutions at that time. We could only say that we would sort everything out. When, how — at that time, no one yet understood. I had to start doing it to figure it out.

I do not know how to convince at all. We can only say that we will do it, we are very interested, we will lay down our bones… but what else? That’s the only way.

So, behind Will Rock and TimeShift. And you partner with Microsoft. What did you understand and want at that moment as a company?

Andrey: We clearly understood that we wanted to have at least two projects in parallel, because you can’t depend on one source of funding. It’s very, very risky.

How did you rebuild the company to work on two projects in parallel? Have you decided that you won’t recycle anymore?

Andrey: You can’t say you won’t recycle anymore. You have obligations to your partners. The same notorious rock-cut release date.

Of course, when developing such products, it is not necessary to drive the team into a corner and say that we are working seven days a week for the next nine months. This is not a good solution. You can do this once, after which you will pay people a bonus and let everyone go on vacation. But you can’t live in this mode all your life.

So everything, of course, works a little differently. You start thinking about how you can plan a project so that there is less crunch. It won’t be without him at all, but let him be less, less often, will not touch 100% of the team, but will touch these 10 people now, and in two years someone else.

Crunches are primarily a consequence of poor planning. Certainly those crunches that go on for six months or a year. Crunch for two weeks is generally bullshit. You worked two Saturdays, then took a week off and forgot. It’s not a problem.

The problem begins at the moment when the crunch is on a multi-month basis. Months-long crunches occur due to poor planning. Either you have not put enough people on the project, or you are trying to do more than you can, or your production processes are not optimized, or you simply do not plan and do not understand what awaits you. Accordingly, for two years you work normally, and for the third you work in this mode.

The better the planning, the fewer crunches.

Around the same time, you released a couple of budget footers for films. Then you abandoned this practice. Why?Andrey: What does “refused/not refused” mean? You choose opportunities at every moment.

What is the management of a large company? You play chess, you have resources, you put them on the board, trying to maximize the result.

The result does not have to be expressed in finance.

Sometimes it’s a reputational result, sometimes you start working with large companies that you haven’t worked with before. Accordingly, you are building a new relationship.

If you have any additional resources, then you can put them on solving some other task, come up with some task for them.

The most terrible thing is when you have 100 people sitting and they have nothing to do. This is a disaster. You realize that it costs you a lot of money every month, and you don’t really want to fire them. You know many of these people, when you hired them, you told many that they could safely take out their mortgages, that they would have a job. You also understand perfectly well that a year or two will pass, another project will begin and you will really need these people, because they are trained, they know how processes work, they are good employees.

Accordingly, there is a concept: if there are resources, you need to come up with some projects for them. Projects can be experimental, they can be budgetary.

The same Battle: Los Angeles – The Game is a great example. We were able to get a license for the film, which was released a year after signing the contract. The development time was 9-10 months. We sat and did it.

You can’t make a project of all times and peoples in such a period of time. It doesn’t happen that way. The date of the game according to the film is also cut into the rock. That’s why you’re doing a relatively small project.

At the same time, it cannot be called a pass-through for the company. Conversely. On such a project, you definitely learn something. In the case of Battle: Los Angeles, we learned how to work with film studios, how to get permission to use licenses, how to make a project in time without postponing the release date.

Here, in principle, the same situation as with Halo was. We couldn’t miss the release date of the film. Perhaps he himself was no longer so big, but he had a tangible marketing budget. It would be strange, marketing is there, but games are not.

Battle: Los Angeles – The Game

That is, such budget games help not to lose employees, teach them to work with partners and are a testing ground for various concepts within the company?

Andrey: Keep such games in good shape, although this is not quite the right word here. Teams do not forget what it means to be certified. Now, 5-7 games are certified every year. Then it was much rarer. Maybe once every two years. Therefore, it was cool to just at least get certified on some project. We honed our teeth on this process.

At the same time, we learned to work without an external publisher, producer, designer. We did everything ourselves. It was a very important experience.

You have a lot of projects created on internal solutions. Is this such a policy?

Andrey: We don’t do everything on our own engine. We choose the solution that makes sense at the moment.

Where it is necessary to do on our technology, we do on our technology, where it is necessary to do on Unreal, we do on Unreal.

For example, we make sports games in Spain on Unreal Engine, because the Spanish team has the relevant experience, they have an understanding of how everything is done on it, respectively, everything is done very effectively on this technology.

We have games that are made on CryEngine, we have games that are made on Unity. We are ready to work with any technology.

Naturally, inside the Halo sits Bungie Engine, which is almost 25 years old, glued together with our engine. We are doing a project on the CD Projekt — REDengine engine. For example, what is Witcher 3 on Switch? This is a very highly customized REDengine.

But at the same time, some of the important projects for the company, like World War Z, you do on internal solutions.

Andrey: If you have your own technology, it opens, let’s say, doors.

It was impossible to make TimeShift on someone else’s engine. It was also impossible to make World War Z on someone else’s engine.

Quake Champions, which we did, would also be quite difficult to do exclusively on someone else’s solution. Try to run the game at 240 FPS on a fairly low-level hardware with a network and everything else, and even make a picture so that your eyes burst, and you can’t do another one, because id Software has always made the best picture. We did it, but it would have been very difficult to do it on another engine.

So engine support is definitely a strategic thing. And it’s a pretty expensive story. There should be a lot of people and they should be very intelligent people.

World War Z

Speaking of very recent releases, would World War Z have been possible without budget action movies on film licenses?

Andrey: Of course, it sharpened our teeth. We have established relationships with film studios. We began to understand how these agreements are concluded: what is possible, what is not. So, yes, we were moving from small projects to big ones.

Was World War Z originally conceived as such a big project, or did you want to make a B-shooter first?

Andrey: It was originally conceived as a larger-scale project. Another thing is that initially there were no resources for it.

When it started, we, like, did a remaster of Halo 2. It was quite difficult to gnaw out an adequate-sized team on it.

But on such a project, perhaps, at the initial stage, a large team was not needed.

Any game is always a story about building gameplay. We needed to come up with a gameplay in which there would be thousands of zombies.

Before you come up with gameplay, you need to make technology. Otherwise, even at the prototype stage, you will not be able to play with it in any way, no matter how powerful a car you have: it will still be 5-6 frames per second.

There is no technology, you can’t customize the gameplay, you can’t experiment with it. Until you make the technology, you’re not going anywhere.

What is technology? In our case, we were obliged from the very beginning to have this thousand zombies on the screen. There had to be AI, there had to be a network, there was nowhere without it. But again, making a network before you saw a thousand zombies on the screen is also hard. Yes, you can think about it, but don’t experiment.

Due to the complexity of the technology, the process stretched for a very long time.

How long did World War Z take?

Andrey: We made the game first as a small team. A really big team has been on the project for the last year and a half.

Is it possible to say that you took up development closely after the film of the same name was canceled and you realized that no one would rush the deadlines?

Andrey: Here we have never been tied to time. We understand that too large a project cannot be tied to a fixed date.

Binding to a date is generally evil. If we are talking about a personal project, it is better not to have a specific release date. It is better that there is at least some option for backlash.

It’s a shame to sit on a project that, as you know, is good, but which lacks two or three months to polish. You can definitely do it, but you have to release it today. This is some kind of moronism.

Here Ubisoft last year postponed a large number of projects for some time. I think — well done. As a result, they will have high-quality projects. That’s the way it should be. Why sell an undercooked pie, fry it up.

Against the background of the success of World War Z, the launch of The Witcher on Switch — can we say that 2019 was the most successful year in the history of Saber?

Andrey: The whole history of the company says that every next year is better for it in some way than the previous one. Somewhere much better, somewhere a little bit better.

There really was a big breakthrough in 2019. We have released a lot of projects.

We started working more effectively with studios. We have Portugal, we have put our Belarusian and Swedish history on the right track.

Why did you decide to launch production teams outside of Russia? How did it happen?

Andrey: I won’t dwell on every story. I will give an example of the story with the Spanish unit.

We’ve known the team for a long time. Just as at one time we sold ourselves to Microsoft as a team that knows how to make shooters, so the Spaniards sold themselves to us as a team that knows how to make sports games.

They did them very well. The problem is that in the middle of the process they went bankrupt. When I found out about it, I got on a plane and flew to Madrid to organize a new Saber with them.

We liked them. They liked us. We have already worked with them before. We understood that the studio was talented, that we could help them develop. That’s why we launched a new office together with them.

NBA 2K Playgrounds 2

How many studios do you have now?

Andrey: Now we have six countries (the interview was taken before the acquisition of two new teams. — Ed.), the development is carried out in five.

Why did you start buying new assets at all?

Andrey: We have a map of projects. They are all scheduled between the teams for a very long time ahead.

If you want to launch a new invented project, you either wait for one of the teams to be released (you can wait for years), or you find a new studio.

The bottom line is that you can only put a new major project into production somewhere else.

Good. Now the company has many projects and many studios. Everything was going well, but why was Embracer Group sold?

Andrey: Embracer is also another big step forward.

First. Thanks to the takeover, we essentially became a public company. It is extremely difficult to enter the market ourselves. Embracer, we can say, has become a shortcut for us to enter the IPO in this regard.

Second. This is the emergence of a large number of new opportunities.

How, for example, did the symbiosis of Saber and the Spanish studio work? Saber allowed her to grow significantly. But this growth was not subsidized. The studio has been developing and developing games that are in demand in the markets and, of course, earn money. Before that, the company was bankrupt, and working within Saber made it successful.

Similarly with Embracer. Of course, we are not bankrupt at all, but working within such a holding opens up paths for further growth. And that’s cool.

How do you see the strategy of Embracer Group and Saber inside it?

Andrey: Collect a bouquet of companies.

There are six large ones that she owns directly. These are Amplifier Game Invest, Coffee Stain Holding, DECA Games, Koch Media, THQ Nordic and us.

All companies are different, with different views on the industry, but they can all help each other.

I’m not talking about production here. In this regard, neither they nor we need to help. Nevertheless, if I see that there is an opportunity to make a port of a popular game or a remaster for it, then I will be happy to take it up.

Plus there are a lot of IP inside Embracer. Now we can make games including them.

And naturally, it has become much easier and faster to negotiate such a thing. We often talk to all the key people of the holding. Literally every week.

Let’s talk a little bit about independent publishing now. At some point you started publishing your own projects. Why?Andrey: It is important to be able to publish independently. There are projects that you want to release without intermediaries.

But, of course, today not all of us publish ourselves.

However, for example, we published World War Z ourselves. Focus Interactive was only a marketing partner.

We have completely released some projects ourselves. So it was with NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 and with Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered, where we were responsible, among other things, for retail and marketing.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered

What does it depend on whether you take a partner for the publication or do everything yourself?

Andrey: Two things play a role here.

The first. A lot depends on what a partner can do for you at all. If he is an expert, if he has real experience and more of it than you, then this is a reason to think about working with them.

Second. Payment issue. If you can negotiate on meaningful terms, then that’s cool. No matter how cool the expertise is, if you give 100% of the revenue for it, then you definitely don’t need to do that.

How did you come to the decision to publish third-party projects?

Andrey: We have published many projects. We realized that we know how to do it efficiently.

Today in the USA we have our own marketing, our own PR, we know how to work with social networks, with influencers, we understand how to organize retail, how to make deals with distributors. Plus, we have partnerships, including with Microsoft and Epic Games.

In fact, we built a factory for publishing games and realized that not only those projects that we do ourselves can be stuffed into this factory.

What projects are you ready to consider now? Only ready-made?

Andrey: We are now starting publishing activities with the consideration of external projects for publication. We have a certain number of potential partners with whom we will launch cooperation in the near future. These projects are at completely different stages. Someone is almost ready, someone is at the stage of vertical cutting.

All this is unprincipled for us.

Are you ready to finance the development of third-party projects that are taken for publication?

Andrey: Yes, of course.

We look at it this way: if we have a project in development, it is not so important for us whether it is inside or outside. It doesn’t matter, it costs money anyway.

Can you name the order of the amounts that you are willing to invest in projects for the publication?

Andrey: There are no strict restrictions here. Do we have money in general? Yes, of course there is.

But at the same time, some publishers call the amount, for example, how much they are willing to invest in a vertical slice.

Andrey: I don’t want to do projects before the vertical slice. I want to do projects before the finals.

We talked to a lot of mobile companies. Many of them have an interesting expression: “We know how to kill projects quickly.” The point is that if projects don’t fire, they wind it down. They talk about it as their expertise.

Our main distribution model is premium. So our expertise is to find those projects that will be good, help the team make them and release them, and not kill them.

Spend six months, a year, several hundred thousand and millions of dollars on a vertical slice and then cut it. Why do that? Choose an idea that is viable, choose a team that will implement it and be prepared that it will cost you a little more and longer than you planned. It is ok. Just sit there and calmly do the project, if you believe in it. If the team consists of experts in their field, the game will be released on time, if the team is less expert, the project will be delayed for six months or a year. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ll still end up earning.

What genres of games are you looking for?

Andrey: There are different projects. They must satisfy a certain number of criteria. First of all, they should look normal.

A casual game that will sell ten thousand copies on Steam does not interest us. Yes, she will beat off the salary of five developers, but in absolute numbers, she will earn three kopecks. It’s better not to do this.

The fact is that any project eats up the resources of people who are expensive in time.

For example, I’m looking at myself. Here I have 24 hours a day. I can spend my time on this, I can on that. Most likely, a small project will not go anywhere without me. And here’s the question: why waste time on a project that, say, will earn $ 50 thousand? It’s pointless. There must be some volume, some potential.

And the last question. Within Embracer, do you have any competition for projects with other publishers of the group?

Andrey: Of course, it exists, but it is not an internal competition. Let’s say I won’t try to outbid a deal with THQ. I’m sorry I’m saying this publicly, but it’s obvious. And THQ most likely won’t interrupt my deal.

In addition to THQ, for example, there is Koch. One has one portfolio of projects, the other has another portfolio. They can be called competitors. At the same time, even their offices are located nearby, they speak the same German language. Much closer in terms of interests. And yet everyone finds their mushrooms in the forest. It’s all good.

And we have a similar situation. At the same time, we will be able to help each other, we will be able to drag some of their project from PC to Switch or to Stadia or something else. They will be able to make us distribution. This is purely a question of finding synergies, of which there are quite a lot. And we are just starting to open them.

Thanks for the interview!

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