Space Marine 2 studio boss hopes for a 'reversion' to a time before games were 'imposing morals' on players

Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch—or someone claiming to be him—has stirred up controversy with a comment on a recent Asmongold YouTube video in which he decried the current state of videogames, saying too many of them are built around "messaging or imposing morals on gamers."

"Hey man. CEO of Saber here. I love your videos," an account named 'MatthewKarch' said in response to the video, which is actually an hour-long "reaction" to a 20-minute video posted by Legendary Drops. "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."

In many ways it's a fairly anodyne comment—I miss the old days of my youth—but the specificity of "imposing morals on gamers" was immediately picked up as ammunition in the never-ending online culture wars: Hundreds of replies to the comment poured in heralding Karch as "the gaming hero we all been waiting for" and bemoaning the supposed rise of politics in videogames while celebrating the underperformance of  Dustborn and Concord as evidence that games have become 'too woke.'  It got similar traction on social media.

Weirdly, there's some question as to whether it was actually Karch who posted the comment. Some people noted the YouTube account behind it is relatively new, having only been created in May 2024, while Karch himself has been in the business for decades. The comment itself, particularly the part where it denigrates other developers by saying their work "made me want to cry," also doesn't come off as the sort of thing you'd expect from the head of a large game studio.

Saber Interactive hasn't helped clarify that situation, declining to comment on whether it was actually Karch who posted the YouTube comment or an imposter. Yesterday, however, Karch put up a comment on LinkedIn that could be taken as implying that he did in fact write it: "Whoever wrote that seems pretty sharp," he said. At the very least, it's an endorsement of the message, but if Karch really didn't write it, you'd think he'd just come out and say that it was an imposter.

Wherever the comment originated, it's ironic that the subsequent discussion about "messaging" and "imposing values" is arising from Space Marine 2. In 2021, Warhammer 40,000 company Games Workshop released a statement explaining that "the Imperium of Man stands as a cautionary tale of what could happen should the very worst of Humanity’s lust for power and extreme, unyielding xenophobia set in," and explicitly condemning the presence of hate symbols and groups in the WH40K community.