In the second part of an ongoing interview with Saber CEO and co-founder Matthew Karch on Game File, Karch told journalist Stephen Totilo about the numerous games Saber had developed in its early days, when it was just making enough money to release each game.
“The hardest thing about being in independent development is relying on somebody else,” Karch said, referring to games like Will Rock, TimeShift and Inversion, which all failed to make the studio royalties for one reason or another.
However, when Saber was asked to pitch to Microsoft for the chance to remaster the original Halo game, Karch said he decided to tell the platform holder that the estimated cost to make the game would be zero.
According to Karch, the Xbox executive was shocked, but Karch believed it was the right thing to do for Saber’s reputation.
“I said I’d do it for free, because it’s Halo,” he explained. “It’s the biggest franchise in the world at the time. I said: ‘It’s like putting a Harvard diploma on your wall. Everyone in the world is going to want to work with me after they see that I’ve worked on this last Halo game, and it is going to open up doors. So I’ll suck it up and I’ll do it at a loss.'”
After Xbox said he had to propose some sort of number, Karch said he proposed $4 million, assuming no other studio would be able to make such a low bid, mainly because his studio’s original location of St Petersburg, Russia was a very cheap location to work from.
Saber got the job and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary was released on Xbox 360 in 2011, but according to Karch, Microsoft “applied certain clauses” to the contract which “reduced his royalty to zero”.
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