One of the messiest public relations implosions in recent gaming memory just got a notable coda. Saber Interactive CCO Tim Willits has told PC Gamer that the studio has no plans to change how it communicates publicly — despite CEO Matthew Karch spending a week torching his own reputation in the press over an AI writing controversy that drew widespread industry condemnation. To fully understand what Willits is responding to, you need the complete timeline of what actually happened. It’s quite a story.
How It Started: Stella Sacco’s Post on Bluesky
On August 11, 2026, writer and narrative designer Stella Sacco noticed that Saber Interactive had just revealed a new game — Rideshare “Stimulator” — without any AI disclosure on its Steam page. She’d worked at Saber as lead writer on the project from July 2023 to July 2024. What she posted next kicked off the entire controversy.
“I didn’t even see this had been announced. I was lead writer on this one! And Saber replaced me with ChatGPT midway through development. All the passenger voices were AI too. Either they changed direction at some point or they’re not disclosing it on Steam.”
Sacco elaborated in a follow-up statement to PC Gamer: “They took me off the project to use ChatGPT to write the rest of the text, including planned live updates. If they changed plans in the intervening years, that’s great. But again: I was there, and it was my job to write the game, and then it wasn’t once Matt Karch decided using ChatGPT would be great publicity for the game.”
She also described the internal dynamics that led to her dismissal: her direct manager had argued against the AI pivot, telling Karch that Sacco was “funny and good at this” and experienced with live games. But according to Sacco, Karch insisted that “gamers love new tech” and using AI would be “great marketing.” She said she warned Karch directly that players hated AI in December 2023 and would hate it even more by the time the game came out — essentially predicting the exact backlash that followed.
Saber’s First Response: Denial
Saber’s initial response to Sacco’s post came through PC Gamer in a statement that flatly denied her account: “Neither Saber nor Unigine have replaced any writers with AI for Rideshare or any other game. In fact, Saber’s staff of writers has tripled since 2023.”
Sacco responded on Bluesky with characteristic dry humor: “Saber PR responded to my post by saying that the story was written by people and no writers were replaced, buuuuut also that the game uses AI generated text and voices. C’mon man lmao.”
She was correct. Even as Saber denied replacing her with AI, the company simultaneously acknowledged that Rideshare Stimulator does use AI tools — specifically for voice generation and localization, and for generating AI passenger missions. The Steam page at this point still contained no AI disclosure, which was itself a violation of Steam’s own policy requiring developers to disclose AI-generated content. That missing disclaimer became a significant part of the story.
Matt Karch’s Statement: The Point of No Return
This is where the situation went from “PR problem” to “full industry meltdown.” CEO Matthew Karch sent a follow-up statement to This Week in Videogames that, by any reasonable measure, made everything significantly worse.
In it, Karch said he “would have been happy to replace” Sacco with AI. He suggested her departure was performance-related, claiming she “violated” her agreement with the company — a characterization Sacco immediately and publicly disputed. The statement mixed personal commentary about Sacco with further admissions about the game’s AI usage, all while the Steam page still had no disclosure.
The reaction was swift and severe. Gaming outlets across the industry covered it. Writers, developers, and industry veterans piled on. The phrase “Stella who?” from Karch’s statement became particularly notorious — it was read as dismissive and contemptuous toward a freelance writer who had simply told her own story about her own professional experience.
Sacco’s own response to Karch’s statement was measured but pointed: “I’ve been firm from the beginning that I was telling the truth; I think we can all now agree that’s been borne out.”
The Steam Disclaimer Finally Appears
Saber eventually updated Rideshare Stimulator’s Steam page to include the AI disclosure that had been conspicuously missing since the game first went live for wishlisting on July 30. According to the disclosure, the game uses AI tools for voice generation and some localization, and generates AI passenger missions that players can skip if they only want human-written narrative content.
Karch had previously said the disclaimer would come “once the game was finalized.” The timing of its eventual appearance — after the controversy had already exploded — did not go unnoticed by the gaming community.
The Private Apology
On August 15, Sacco posted that she had received a long email from Karch the previous night. “He apologized unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press,” she wrote. “The email’s full text will stay between us.”
Karch also posted a public statement on LinkedIn describing it as an “insightful week” but adding that “the digital ecosystem thrives on outrage and surface-level takes.” That framing — positioning the backlash as a product of internet outrage culture rather than legitimate criticism of how his company handled a writer — did not land particularly well as a follow-up to an unreserved private apology.
Tim Willits Steps In — And Says Nothing Has Changed
Now, weeks later, CCO Tim Willits has weighed in on what lessons Saber is taking from all of this. Speaking to PC Gamer at Gamescom, his answer was effectively: none, really.
“Sometimes we ‘say what we mean’ too much,” Willits said, framing the controversy as an excess of candor rather than a failure of judgment or ethics.
When PC Gamer pressed directly on whether the backlash had prompted any internal reflection on communications strategy, Willits reportedly said “no.”
He then drew a comparison to a previous Saber controversy — the decision to release World War Z as an Epic Games Store exclusive — and used it as evidence that controversies blow over regardless of their nature: “People got mad at Saber because we put World War Z on Epic, and people were like, ‘oh, Saber’s destroying the industry.’ Now 30 million people have played World War Z. And the games will speak for themselves, even in our experiment with Rideshare.”
He closed by encouraging people to play Rideshare Stimulator when it comes out and make their own judgments about it.
Is the World War Z Comparison Fair?
It’s worth examining Willits’ framing, because the comparison to the Epic exclusivity controversy doesn’t quite hold up under scrutiny.
The World War Z situation made players angry about where they could buy a game. It was a business decision about distribution that affected consumer choice. The Rideshare Stimulator situation involved a CEO publicly dismissing and insulting a freelance writer who had told her own story about losing her job to an AI tool — and doing so while the game’s Steam page was missing a legally required disclosure about its AI usage.
Those are meaningfully different categories of controversy. One is about platform politics. The other involves how a company treats an individual worker and whether it’s being transparent with consumers about how its product was made. Treating them as equivalent — both just “dust ups” that will fade once the game comes out — misses that distinction entirely.
The gaming community’s reaction to AI in games has also been consistently strong and negative. Sacco herself warned Karch when the AI push was first mandated that players hated AI in December 2023 and would hate it even more by the time the game launched. She was right. Willits’ confidence that the game will speak for itself assumes the AI implementation will be good enough to overcome that skepticism — which is exactly what Sacco told her bosses wouldn’t work before any of this became public.
What Saber Has in Development
The controversy arrives as Saber has an unusually full slate of projects. The studio had a notable presence at Gamescom 2026, with two titles on the show floor:
- Turok: Origins — A revival of the classic N64-era first-person shooter franchise
- Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival — A horror game based on the Hellraiser IP
The studio is also working on Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3, though that project has been largely quiet since its initial announcement. In a separate interview with Eurogamer at Gamescom, Willits struck a notably confident tone about the studio’s current position, saying Saber believes it “can get any IP” in an era when many studios are struggling between major releases.
Whether Rideshare Stimulator performs well enough to validate Willits’ “let the games speak for themselves” philosophy is something only its release will answer. But the way Saber handled the controversy — the initial denial, the CEO’s public comments about Sacco, the delayed Steam disclosure, and now the CCO’s confirmation that nothing has changed — has left a mark on the studio’s reputation that a good game alone won’t automatically erase.
The broader AI-in-games debate that Saber stumbled into shows no signs of cooling. The gaming community’s sensitivity around generative AI has only intensified throughout 2026, with high-profile incidents ranging from award strippings over AI use to publisher backlash over undisclosed AI-generated content. Saber managed to land itself at the center of that conversation in the worst possible way — not by making a policy argument about AI, but by the way it treated the person it replaced.
Sacco’s final public word on the matter was worth noting: “I’ve been firm from the beginning that I was telling the truth; I think we can all now agree that’s been borne out.” The apology email exists. The AI disclaimer is now on Steam. The question of whether Saber learned anything from how all of that unfolded has now been answered by Tim Willits, in a word: no.
