How many big IP games are too many big IP games? I don’t know for sure, but it seems Space Marine 2 and John Wick developer Saber Interactive has found out already.
During a recent interview for IGN, Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber, revealed the company (which controls 13 studios across the world) is predictably getting lots of offers from rights holders to turn movie (and TV) licenses into high-profile video games after the success of the aforementioned WH40K game and mid-sized winners like World War Z and Evil Dead: The Game. “Now they come to us… We’ve had so much success with our past IPs and our license collaborations that big studios are coming to us,” he said after briefly teasing a partnership that hasn’t come together… yet.
It might sound unreal in today’s games industry climate, but some companies are suffering from success, and in this case, that’s limiting the amount of projects Saber can take on: “I can’t say it, but there’s a game that they came to me twice, and so it’s my ‘like someday in the future, I will brag about it’… I can’t say it now because I’ll get in trouble, but it’s the coolest IP ever, and I can’t make the game because we just have too much going on.”
This is where we start theorising about what that “coolest IP ever” could be. Instantly, we think about stuff like Star Wars, but Saber is technically still doing the KOTOR remake, so that shouldn’t be an option. Looking at the company’s recent output and what’s currently in the works, I also think it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see a Saber dev team taking on Alien or Predator, but are those IPs worthy of that much hype? It depends on who you ask, I’d say.
Personally, I’m thinking about The Lord of the Rings. Years after Embracer Group took over the rights to LOTR and The Hobbit, we still haven’t heard about any big-budget project that’s in active development, and putting myself in Embracer’s shoes, I’d at least want to hear from Saber. That’s just me making a wild guess, but that IP is due a proper comeback in gaming.
In any case, Saber has a lot lined up when it comes to tie-in games (and most of them look enticing). We know of (at least) John Wick, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 3, Jurassic Park: Survival, Hellraiser: Revival, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and even an open-world RPG based on Avatar: The Last Airbender. That’s just the stuff that we know about, and doesn’t include original projects.
