Layoffs. Divestments. A financing drought. It’s easy to feel like the entire video game industry is collapsing, but is this an industry-wide problem or one that’s more specific to a continent that has perhaps dominated the landscape for far too long?
For Saber Interactive chief creative officer Tim Willits, “shifts and changes” are par for the course, but there’s a sense this latest reckoning is more reflective of how expensive it has become to build video games in North America, specifically—which remains the home of studios belonging to corporations such as Microsoft, PlayStation, Ubisoft, and more.
Saber currently has 3,500 employees across 15 studios around the world—but notably no development operations in North America—and Willits explains some of those regions are more “economical” than others.
“The mammoth publishers are in North America and mammoth anything takes a long time to change. So the struggle that classic North American publishers have does ripple over into other big publishers around the world. So, we have development studios in countries that are more economical, but we also have a culture where employees move and shift with all the projects,” he says, during a conversation at Gamescom 2026.
“With your classic publishers, you haven group of super talented people that are paid a lot of money to work on one game—and everyone knows there’s a ramp up and a ramp down, but an entire team should not be working on DLC. The problem is, that’s what they know. They don’t know any different.”
Offering an example of how Saber capitalized by doing the precise opposite, Willits explains the company’s 2020 PC and console titleSnowRunner(an offroad driving sim) has brought in hundreds of millions in revenue despite only costing around $6 million to make. By contrast, he claims some large teams in North America might spend three months working on a project only to torch the entire thing and start over. “It’s like, bro, we made an entire game that sold hundreds of millions of dollars for that money,” he says. “Look atWorld War Z.World War Zhas 32 million people who’ve played it […] and that team was around 50 people.”
For Willits, overscoping—or level sprawl, as it was known back in the day—is the death of profitability. “You have to be disciplined. Sometimes I play these triple-A games, and I can see dollar signs just flying off my screen. […] I’m not going to give any names, but there was a very detailed adventure game, and it had this library where every single book was a real book and every title was different. I was like ‘really?’ We don’t need that, so it’s what we avoid.”
When Saber does profit, it’s sometimes shared among slate investors—which are groups of financiers from the B2B or private equity sector who want to invest in multiple projects to hedge their bets. If, for instance, they back five titles and one doesn’t perform too well, it won’t result in a total crashout. Willits explains the term ‘slate funding’ originated in the film business, where investors would adopt a similar approach by sinking cash into a movie studio’s production slate.
Within the game industry, Willits says studios (where possible) should be looking to secure around half their production costs
“[If a game then does well] you have to share that profit, but you both win together and you don’t lose as bad if it doesn’t work out—especially if you have a number of games in the pipeline” adds Willits. “So, for us, we spread ourselves out. We have our co-investments. We do some co-development—where you have a small group of folks on one side working with a larger group of people, maybe in a region of the world that’s cheaper—and I’m not talking about 10 guys in America buying assets from China. These are real developers, but they just sit in Spain, Germany, Portugal, or even England. Then, we also do stuff that pays the bills. Like our remasters—such as Hitman—and we do ports. That is reliable, consistent money. [Those wins] support the big swings.”
