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One of the unexpected stories this week has been that of a rather public spat between former Saber Interactive writer Stella Sacco, who claimed she was replaced in favour of AI, and the publisher’s CEO, who tore into her via a statement sent to This Week in Videogames.
“Stella who?” asked Matt Karch, “I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her. We have already said we are using AI for certain parts of the game and will update the Steam page once we have finalized the feature set.”
Karch also added that “it was always our intention to reveal this until Stella violated her confidentiality clause and revealed this before we were ready.” Sacco, who claimed she was replaced “with ChatGPT” in 2023, called the statement “remarkably pathetic for the CEO of any company to be making.”
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You can read both parties’ full statements in the articles linked above—the most recent development is that Saber Interactive has been seemingly pressed into adding a Steam AI disclaimer to the game’s store page, which is present at the time of writing, but was notably not present when the game was put on the store on July 30.
“Once it’s finalised we will update the Steam page,” Karch told IGN. “In Rideshare we added an unrelated experimental mode to the game to play around with these concepts. It’s not the core experience. And even in this case it required us adding two writers and multiple coders to work with AI tools to try and get a reasonable result. Maybe we are bad at business but the net cost of incorporating these features was significantly higher than leaving them out.”
Karch then goes on to say that “my PR team is always terrified by even broaching the subject but I would be happy to engage in a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should help shape gamer experiences.”
The disclaimers in question make reference to not just these AI-generated dialogue, but also “a mix of radio stations featuring human-made music and AI-generated music. Stations containing AI-generated music are clearly labeled as such in the game.”
Karch chalks up the entire debacle to a “publicity stunt… This person was removed from the project three years ago. We have actually increased our writing staff since 2023. If I wanted publicity for this little game though, then I guess I have Stella to thank for it.”
The entire situation, to put it extremely lightly, is a bit of a mess—regardless of whether or not Saber’s landed itself in troubled waters (Sacco seems to think so), if I were a videogame publisher, I might ask myself why I felt the need to wait to be “ready” to reveal something core about how my game was made, and why I might be making my PR team “terrified”.
Could it be that AI is broadly unpopular with the gamers Saber Interactive is claiming to serve? Surely not.
