Space Marine 2 CEO allegedly calls out industry for “imposing morals”

A statement allegedly belonging to the developer of Space Marine 2, Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch has ruffled some feathers over accusing the games industry of “imposing morals” on their players.

The statement appeared underneath an Asmongold video, the YouTube account named @MatthewKarch has only been active since May 24, 2024. Just long enough to give it an appearance of legitimacy, but short enough to bring it into question. Karch allegedly said:

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.

A second comment appeared to come from Oliver Hollis-Leick, creative director for Saber Interactive who also shared a similar sentiment.

This account appears much more legitimate and includes personal videos featuring Hollis-Leick at work.

The Warhammer 40k franchise has been a popular topic of discussion online as Games Workshop tries to bring the “grim darkness of the far future” to wider audiences with multimedia projects like games and movies.

While some individuals on both sides of the issue are eager to present it as something partisan, overall it seems consumers are fed up of being condescended to or receiving censored products. While not directly about Space Marines 2 one X user had this to say about writing targeted at modern audiences.

Thinking about this again. What plagues so much of modern gaming is how they write and design like they’re always in earshot of HR and have never had a human interaction. Its all so fake, a clean facade of surface level quips, small talk, acceptability and smoothed out politeness pic.twitter.com/ybSthg9kzn

— LA/ENDER (@LavenderGhast) September 16, 2024

While we’ve been unable to confirm if the comments are authentic, there’s already been a backlash to them.