We could already see from the pre-release tests that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 was going to be a real treat. Not only has it turned out to be what it promised, but also what the developers at Saber Interactive had intended. And we know this precisely because the studio’s CEO has shared a message in which he explains why the game ended up being what we know today.
It doesn’t aim to revolutionize the video game industry, but it does aim to do something much more important. This was the headline we chose for our analysis and now we know that it was a bigger success than we imagined thanks to Matthew Karch, CEO of Saber Interactive.
Matthew Karch shared a reflection in the comments of Asmongold’s channel, a well-known content creator and video game fan. He says that his bad experiences in the industry helped shape Space Marine 2 and its development was based on the idea of recovering the retro style and offering pure fun, without any further aspirations.
Hi. This is the head of Saber Interactive. I love your videos. When we signed the contract for Space Marine 2, all I wanted was a retro game. We had the opportunity to work on something (Warhammer 40K) that was “old school” in nature. I can’t understand most of the games we play today. They’re too complex and too much of an investment. We worked on Halo back in the day, and that game could be boiled down to just shooting, but it was addictive.
This is what we wanted to bring back. I hope that games like Space Marine 2 and Black Myth: Wukong will mark a return to a time when games were simply fun and immersive. I spent some time as Director of Operations at Embracer and saw games there that made me want to cry with their over-the-top attempts to convey messages or impose morals on players. We just want you to do some glorious kills and get your heart rate up a bit. To me, that’s what video games should be.
The result of this philosophy is a video game that has won over many people and has maintained peaks of +100,000 simultaneous players daily on Steam (plus consoles), according to SteamDB, since it was released early. And it certainly achieved its purpose: Space Marine 2 is fun and addictive to the core.
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