Saber Interactive, the studio behind Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 and SnowRunner, says it has effectively stopped making games in North America — not because of a layoff round or a closure, but because it’s cheaper and, in its telling, more profitable to make them everywhere else. Chief creative officer Tim Willits put it bluntly in a recent interview: the company has “no real development in North America any more.”

The numbers Willits is pointing to

Willits’ case rests on cost comparisons that are stark even by games-industry standards. He said big North American studios typically burn through more than $2 million a month, largely in salary and overhead. SnowRunner, which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Saber, cost roughly $6 million to make in total — about three months of what a major US studio spends just keeping the lights on.

Space Marine 2 tells a similar story. Willits said the game’s development budget was about a third of what a comparable big-budget North American title costs, while it outsold that unnamed competitor by 11 million copies. He’s also previously compared the sequel’s budget favorably to Doom Eternal, saying Saber made a game that looks and plays competitively for roughly half the cost.

Where the work actually happens

Saber still keeps its headquarters in the US, and it retains New World Interactive, the Insurgency studio with offices in Denver and Calgary. But the bulk of Saber’s roughly 15 studios are spread across Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina, and Australia. That footprint is largely a legacy of Saber’s growth under Embracer Group, which it split from in 2024 — a separation that also cost Saber studios like Aspyr, Demiurge, and Tripwire, while leaving its Eastern European and South American development base intact.

Willits’ framing isn’t just about geography being cheaper — it’s a direct argument that the industry’s most expensive development hubs are pricing themselves out of viability for anything short of a guaranteed blockbuster.

Part of a bigger conversation about AAA budgets

Willits isn’t the only Saber executive making this case publicly this year. CEO Matt Karch has separately argued that the industry’s habit of greenlighting $200-400 million AAA budgets is unsustainable and has contributed directly to the wave of layoffs that has hit North American and Western European studios since 2022. Saber’s pitch, in effect, is that its low-overhead global model is the alternative to that cycle — smaller budgets, similar or better quality, and no requirement to sell tens of millions of copies just to break even.

That argument lands at a moment when the rest of the industry is already grappling with exactly the tension Karch describes: record aggregate revenue sitting alongside tens of thousands of job cuts, as publishers try to reconcile ballooning budgets with an audience that isn’t growing fast enough to support them. Saber is essentially proposing that the fix isn’t better games or more players — it’s making games somewhere that doesn’t cost $2 million a month to operate.

Why this matters beyond one studio

Saber isn’t a struggling outfit making the best of a bad situation — it’s coming off Space Marine 2, one of the biggest sleeper hits of the last two years, and Willits says the studio has had to turn down more project offers than it can accept. That success is exactly what gives its cost argument teeth: this isn’t a company excusing mediocre output with a cheaper price tag, it’s a studio claiming its offshore model outperforms the traditional one on both cost and results.

If that argument holds up, it puts more pressure on North American and Western European studios that are already competing for shrinking headcount budgets against publishers who can point to Saber’s numbers as proof a leaner, globally distributed structure works. It’s a different flavor of the same restructuring wave that’s already reshaped Xbox’s studio portfolio and pushed smaller studios like Dontnod to the brink — just driven by a deliberate strategic choice rather than a funding crisis.

What to watch next

Saber hasn’t announced further changes to its North American footprint, and New World Interactive’s Denver and Calgary offices remain open for now. But Willits’ comments read less like a one-off remark and more like a studio publicly making the argument for why its structure should be the industry norm — worth watching as more publishers face pressure to justify AAA budgets that keep climbing even as the jobs behind them keep disappearing.

For more on the layoffs-amid-record-revenue paradox that frames Saber’s pitch, see our breakdown of gaming’s record profits, record layoffs contradiction, and for another studio on the opposite end of this cost equation, read about Dontnod’s financial crisis and threatened Paris layoffs.