Saber got the contract to develop Halo Anniversary because its CEO offered to do it for free

The 2011 remake of Halo: Combat Evolved was developed by Saber Interactive because, according to its CEO, he offered to do it for free.

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”.

Saber’s reward would eventually come, albeit as a result of what Karch said was an accident. The studio was given the task of making a similar remaster of Halo 2, which would eventually evolve to become part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection (the various parts of which were worked on by different studios).

One of its new tasks working on The Master Chief Collection was porting its Xbox 360 remaster Halo Anniversary to the Xbox One, but Karch said Microsoft forgot to send a contract for that part of the work until just before the game was released.

According to Karch, he refused to sign the contract unless Microsoft removed the clause that killed the previous Halo Anniversary royalties. Microsoft, who Karch called “good guys”, agreed to modify the contract, and Saber’s royalties for its part in The Master Chief Collection amounted to what Karch says was tens of millions of dollars.

Karch said Microsoft’s contractual oversight was what gave Saber the money it needed to stop relying on publishers. “We’ve watched other people make money on our work,” he recalled telling his partner Andrey Iones. “Now we’re going to make money on our own.”

Last year Embracer sold off Saber Interactive, the group home to studios 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks and more, to a group of private investors for $247 million.

COO Tim Willits then took to X to confirm that despite the sale, its ongoing projects Jurassic Park: Survival and John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando were still in development.