Call me soft, but I'm still sad about the sudden, undignified death of Volition, the 30-year-old Saints Row studio that got executed by the Embracer Group after the latter's $2-billion mystery deal—pitched as a "groundbreaking strategic partnership"—collapsed at the last minute.
With Embracer scrambling to stay afloat and Volition's final game, a rebooted Saints Row, meeting a lukewarm critical and commercial response, the writing was on the wall for the developer that also made Red Faction and Descent back in the day.
It was a sad and shocking turn of events for such a storied studio. That is, unless you're Saber Interactive CEO—and former Embracer Group interim chief operating officer—Matthew Karch, who recently took the opportunity to put the boot into the dearly departed studio in a chat with Game File, held on Karch's private jet.
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"The Saints Row team is gone," said Karch. "They were so expensive for what they were. They didn't know what they were building. They didn't have any real direction. It couldn't last. And so, who's going to fund them for the next game after that disaster?"
Which is, shall we say, an unsentimental assessment, but in the cold clear light of day I can't fault Karch's logic. Volition's final three games before it went to a farm upstate were Gat Out of Hell (co-developed with High Voltage), Agents of Mayhem, and the rebooted Saints Row. None of them met with critical or commercial success, and a storied legacy doesn't mean much to company bosses and shareholders who are getting tired of throwing good money after bad.
But Karch goes on. "It would be nice in an ideal world for everyone to have a job," says the CEO, but "the days of throwing money at games other than maybe the GTAs of the world is over." Instead, Karch reckons we're in a time that calls for ruthless efficiency: "This business needs to mature. If it doesn't, the whole business is in trouble. Unfortunately, that means layoffs."
Which certainly sounds like hardheaded business guy talk, but I can't help but note that Karch's judicious, unromantic cost-cutting only seems to extend to people who make a lot less than he and his fellow C-suite execs do.
When it comes to the devs at Volition, Karch is ready to swing the axe. When it comes to Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors, who bet so much of the future on that $2-billion deal that eventually collapsed (and which Karch confirms was with Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group after years of silence from Embracer itself), Karch is quick to spring to his defence: "They made mistakes. Lars is a very, very trusting person. He's a good person… when [the Saudi deal] didn't get done, he fell on the sword in such a hard way." Wingefors remains CEO of Embracer. Volition is gone for good.
When Game File's Stephen Totilo asked Karch if, perhaps, some high-level heads should have rolled at Embracer, the CEO was nonplussed. "There are no bosses. That’s the problem. Embracer had no structure. So how are they going to have bosses? … Nobody was getting rich at Embracer. I mean, people had stock. But it's not like anyone was taking big cash payments… There was nobody, like, ‘Oh, the studio head is making eight million and he just fired 10 people who were making a hundred thousand dollars.'"
It's worth noting that this quote was delivered on Karch's own private jet, flown by Lars Wingefors' former pilot. You can see a photo of Karch grinning in front of it in the original piece.
So, perhaps it is the case that tough decisions had to be made about Volition; the studio hadn't made a great game in a long time and, at least until the revolution, this is an industry where you do have to make a profit in order to survive.
But Karch's statements seem like a prime example of the kind of executive doublethink that so many of us who don't make 6-figure salaries find so distasteful and unfair: when someone has to pay for a botched $2-billion deal, the C-suite is all too willing to make the hard choices that cost devs their livelihoods. But when someone suggests maybe the bosses who set up those deals might face a consequence or two? Well, no, that's just not how this works.
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