Saber Interactive's Tim Willits Urges North American Studios to Diversify and Conquer Fear of Global Development

Amid a prolonged period of industry-wide layoffs and economic pressures, legacy video game developers are facing intense scrutiny over how they manage their budgets and staff. In a recent interview, Saber Interactive chief creative officer Tim Willits outlined what he views as the critical flaws in the traditional, large-scale studio model and offered alternative strategies for survival.

According to Willits, the fundamental issue lies in how massive, single-location studios burn through cash. “The number one mistake that traditional legacy developers do is that they have two hundred employees in Texas, California, New York, whatever,” Willits said. “Each one of those developers is expensive. You have 200 people that you're paying $15,000 per person per month, which gets you way over two million. They're all working on a game and you do not need 200 people before you have a vertical slice, so you're burning money.”

While having 200 highly skilled developers is ideal during full production, the trouble restarts immediately after shipping. Willits noted that studios often struggle to “get those 200 super highly trained people onto massive production immediately,” leading to millions of dollars spent monthly while the next game is still years away from release. Rather than resorting to layoffs post-launch, Willits suggested that established studios should embrace work-for-hire, remasters, and small side projects to stay afloat.

“If you are a studio that has made mega hits, but it takes you five years to make a mega hit, it is totally okay if you do some work for hire,” Willits explained. “It doesn't make your mega hit AAA game any worse. If you have five or six things that help keep the lights on, it's totally okay. I would love to see one of these super studios do some fun side projects. There's nothing wrong with that.”

Saber Interactive itself has long followed this diversified blueprint. Alongside major projects like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, and Turok, the developer continues to take on reliable remaster work, such as an ongoing project updating the original Hitman for IO Interactive. Saber also keeps early-stage project teams incredibly small. “We don't put an entire team in a project until after the vertical slice,” Willits said, noting they start multiple games around the world with teams as small as five people before looking for co-funding partners like Focus Interactive.

Willits also challenged North American and British publishers to look beyond their own geographic comfort zones and move past communication anxieties. “Traditional North American and even British publishers are afraid of certain parts of the world. They're afraid of South America. They're like 'We don't speak Spanish or Portuguese'. Get over that and stop that fear,” Willits urged. He suggested that laid-off developers form core creative teams and buy in development talent from growing, same-timezone regions like South America to build their projects collaboratively.