Saber CCO Tim Willits blames layoffs on games industry overspecialization: ‘Studios that have a couple hundred employees that work on one game are going to struggle’

With mega-games like GTA 6 on the way, it’s hard not to feel like games are always getting bigger—both the software itself, and the teams that make it (GTA 6 has an entire dedicated NPC team “art-directing” its every background character). But in an interview with PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens, Saber Interactive CCO Tim Willits said a reliance on games with huge scopes and highly specialized teams may be responsible for some of the industry’s many, many woes.

“The industry always has some cycles, some ups and downs, and one of the things that we have done well to avoid some of the issues that other studios have had is we spread out our resources,” Willits said. “We develop games that are across the scope spectrum, for lack of a better description.” While games like Space Marine 2 and the upcoming Jurassic Park: Survival take a lot of manpower, the studio relies on remasters and smaller games to fund those “big bets.”

“We have a culture where people can work on any game, and we can move resources around. So we avoid the ‘silo problem’ that you find with big studios,” he continued. “Studios that have a couple hundred employees that work on one game are going to struggle. They’re going to really struggle to survive. Because before a game hits a vertical slice, you do not need hundreds of people on that.”

He noted that if there’s a studio culture where nimble developers can realize smaller passion projects, those can then turn out to be big hits unexpectedly—an example he gave was SnowRunner, a “mega franchise” for Saber with over 46,000 user reviews on Steam. That started as “an experiment by one guy.”

“So take some of these totally talented developers that maybe have lost their job or you don’t know what to do with them, and put them on a project. You know, sell it for $5. Take a risk … we look at every project, no matter how big it is. If we have the resources and we can reliably make money from that project, why not do it?”

Willits said it’s also a creative boon and morale-booster on top of the financial benefits. When asked if he’d turn the studio into a Rockstar-sized hitmaker if he could, he said no. “I have the best job in the world now,” he explained. “I do feel that other people at Saber love [the variety of game we develop] as well. You know, you’re not stuck working on one game for five six years. We just make so much, and everyone’s involved in so many different things that it’s fun.”

All this being said, Willits also theorized the games industry’s current woes right now aren’t as bad as you might think in the first place: In the same interview, he said it’s “actually, honestly, a good time” for the medium right now despite it all. As for AI’s impact on all this, well, Willits said that’s not so bad either—in fact, he argued that “of course” id Software would have used it back in the day—Willits himself was studio director at id from 1995 to 2019.