We continue to summarize the results of 2020 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Andrei Iones, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Saber Interactive.
Andrew Iones
How was 2020 for the company?
The year was extremely "non-standard" for the company in every sense of the word. And I'm not talking about the "crown".
We have never grown so fast or appeared so often in the headlines of industrial news. At the beginning of the year, Saber Interactive became part of the Embracer Group. This has opened up completely new horizons for us.
We have always been a successful company — first as a developer, and then as a publisher. They grew steadily every year. The merger with Embracer has given our development a reactive speed.
If earlier we grew organically and joined studios with which we had a close working relationship, now we are acting proactively. We are looking for studios that have potential, that are close to us in spirit.
In 2020, Saber's geography has expanded significantly. We were joined by 7 game studios, including such industry veterans as 4A (developer of the Metro series), New World Interactive (creators of Insurgency: Sandstorm) and Zen Studios (authors of a series of iconic pinball games). We now have large development teams in Serbia (MadHead) and Argentina (Nimble Giant), successful young teams in Bulgaria (Snapshot) and Italy (34BigThings).
As for joining the New York-based Sandbox PR agency, it will allow us to strengthen our position in the development of our own publishing business.
It cannot be said that the new status has fundamentally changed something in the work. As always, we are focused primarily on developing cool games. In April, we launched Snowrunner. The game sold a million copies in less than two months, and mods for it were downloaded more than 3 million times. We have released several landmark projects with our long-time partners: the reissue of Crysis Remastered, the arcade fighting game WWE2K: Battlegrounds and five games from the Halo series for the PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Witcher 3: Next Gen was announced, which is currently under active development.
Taking into account recent acquisitions, Saber now employs more than 1,400 employees. Some of them work in offices, but because of the pandemic, we had to, like the rest of the world, rebuild formats. This is not an easy task, even when you have 50 people, when there are almost fifteen hundred of them in ten countries, the task turns into a real challenge.
What new trends in your niche do you consider worth paying attention to?
New generations of consoles have been released this year. It is clear that in the near future they will be the trendsetters.
We were one of the first to receive devkits, but many developers were not so lucky: due to the pandemic, production capacity dropped significantly and the industry faced a serious shortage. Of course, you can't discount PlayStation 4 and Xbox One: they have a huge number of devices sold, but all AAA games will support new standards, and their developers will figure out how to surprise owners of new consoles.
What new market trends would you note in general?
An unambiguous industrial trend is the course towards the unification of studios. The current mergers and acquisitions are not a successful "retirement" for the founder, but a new stage of development, when all the resources of the parent company are devoted to helping new studios reach their potential.
Playing games as a business is not the easiest task. The constant search for money, publishers, the inability to hire the right number of specialists, or the financial need to release a game without bringing it to mind — more than one talented team has crumbled because of these problems. A big, strong partner standing behind you takes care of all these worries, and studios can focus on what they know best — making games.
What will be the stake in the development of the company in 2021?
Our course has not changed for many years — we make cool games and help our partners make cool games. We currently have more than 30 projects in the works, most of them have not been announced.
If we talk about new directions, we are seriously planning to develop the publishing of both our own games and games created by third-party companies. We have accumulated considerable publishing experience. For example, we published WWZ and Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered. Although Snowrunner and Crysis Remastered were not published directly by Saber, we were at the very epicenter of their publishing process. We have significantly strengthened the publishing team, which he headedTodd Hollenshead, former head of id Software Studio. And, of course, we will continue to implement the M&A strategy, look for new studios that will join our growing family.
Which third-party game releases are you interested in this year? Which ones did you pay attention to as a gamer?
There were no games that really caught on this year. It's understandable: what happened with Saber is more exciting than all the games combined.