Saber's newest game trailer takes a shot at Gearbox's boss, if you look closely
Saber's CEO tells Game File that it's payback for a section of Gearbox's Borderlands 4
The first hint that something might be up with the recent debut trailer for Saber Interactive’s Rideshare Stimulator is an unusual choice of words—aside from that second one in the game’s title.
“Don’t take your passengers too seriously,” the trailer’s narrator says, as he describes this upcoming game. It a car game about the gig work of driving eccentric people to their destinations, a riff on Crazy Taxi.
And then, he says: “When I think I’ve met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in.”
“Randiest”?
That suggests “randy,” which usually means having strong sexual desire. Yet none of the oddball backseat occupants featured in the trailer seem particularly lustful. One is an old man who considers his grandson a failure, another shares the theory that birds might control traffic lights, another says he’s banned from an aquarium.
A little later, there’s a license plate, shown 63 seconds into the trailer, on the front of an SUV:
USB DRV
It’s a Texas plate. The symbol between those letters is a cog wheel.
If you know, you know.
That’s a reference to Texas-based Borderlands game development studio Gearbox Software (their logo features a cog wheel). More specifically, it’s a reference to Gearbox’s co-founder and president Randy Pitchford, who in 2018 found himself explaining the nature of video he’d saved on a USB drive that was found at a Medieval Times restaurant before being returned to the studio: “It was ‘barely legal’ porn. This girl’s handle was ‘Only 18.’” The “girl” in the video had committed a solo sex act that Pitchford, an avid practitioner of magic, found remarkable. “I realized, this is not a sex worker…This is a fucking magician.”
Back then, the USB drive was central to competing lawsuits against Gearbox by the studio’s former lawyer and by Gearbox against him. A settlement in late 2019 “exonerated” Pitchford, per the Hollywood Reporter.
The USB story has resurfaced at times, now in a trailer from a company that not long ago was corporate brethren with Gearbox.
Saber vs. Gearbox
The head of Saber told Game File that the reference is payback.
“The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4,” Saber CEO Matt Karch told me when I asked him about the license plate. “Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living.”
Having interviewed Karch during a cross-country flight in late 2024, I can confirm that Karch was unimpressed with Pitchford during their time both working in the Embracer group.
I’d approached him not out of surprise that there was animosity but that it was manifesting publicly now.
Gearbox was founded in 1999, worked on a port of Halo early on, and developed hit series such as the loot-based sci-fi shooter Borderlands before it was purchased by The Embracer Group in early 2021 for $363 million (with a possible earn-out of over $1 billion, if certain targets were hit by 2027).
Saber was founded in 2001, worked on a remaster of Halo early on, had a big hit with zombie shooter World War Z and was purchased by Embracer in early 2020 for $150 million, with a potential earn-out of up to $375 million.
For a few years, the Embracer group was a voracious acquirer of game studios. Then, as investment dried up, it choked. In March 2024, Embracer sold Saber to an investment company controlled by Saber CEO Matt Karch, and it sold Gearbox in an all-stock deal to long-time Borderlands publisher Take Two Interactive. Other studios were shut down. Hundreds of developers were laid off.
Gearbox didn’t say much about their Embracer experience, nothing too direct, at least. In the summer 2024, Pitchford told reporter and occasional Game File contributor Nicole Carpenter that Borderlands 4’s story was in some way thematically connected to Gearbox’s experience at Embracer: “There’s this cultural and emotional shift in me, personally, and at the studio. What does it mean to trade some autonomy for organization?”
When Borderlands 4 came out, there was something stranger: the matter of “Embracer’s Bluff,” a location in the game featuring an AI-powered toilet and a large trash dump, according to a detailed Kotaku account of the place. Gearbox never commented on it; Take Two never got back to me about it when I asked them last year.
By contrast, since Saber exited Embracer, Karch has been one of Embracer’s biggest defenders, casting their management as well-meaning and supportive despite the layoffs and studio closures that resulted from their excessive expansion.
Like others, Saber’s Karch saw Embracer’s as a shot. With Rideshare Stimulator’s trailer, he’s returned fire.
“It’s amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them,” Karch told Game File.
A rep for Gearbox did not comment by press time.
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Item 2: In brief…
🚫 Wal-Mart has laid off the staff of Restart, a games media outlet launched in 2024, Aftermath reports.
🟥 A GTA VI preview is on the way, at last, via an “extended look” that will premiere, unusually, on Netflix at 3pm ET on August 27, then officially go live elsewhere six hours later.
Last week, Game File noted that Take Two label Rockstar Games is overdue for showing off GTA VI, based on the timing of the initial hands-off previews of GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2.
During a call with investors, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said pre-orders for GTA VI were “unprecedented and astonishing,” but added the company can’t predict how many of those pre-orders represent bonus sales vs. sales that otherwise would have been made at launch.
During the same call, Zelnick was noticeably bullish on the future of playing games over streaming cloud connections (predicting wider adoption in three or so years). He sounded unbothered by Sony’s plans to stop making discs for new games (he said the business is 90% digital already and predicted that there could still be limited edition physical editions of games “in the same way there’s still vinyl in the recorded music business.”)
👀 Take Two wrote off $43 million in their spring quarter after deciding “not to proceed with further development of an unannounced title in its pipeline from a third-party developer.”
🤔 Some rare age-demographics from a big publisher: Capcom recently told investors that “users in their 20s account for approximately half of the users of both Pragamata and Resident Evil Requiem.”
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, August 11
Game releases: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (Switch 2; already out for PC, PS5, Xbox) continues the Bethesda strategy of putting Elder Scrolls games on everything; Royalty Free-For-All is a Smash Bros.-style fighting game featuring public domain characters such as Mother Goose brawling with Oliver Twist in a stage based on the original Little Shop of Horrors movie.
Wednesday, August 12
Game release: Pro Jank Footy (PC, console) is an arcade-style Australian Rules Football game with increasingly ridiculous rules, the more you play (I enjoyed the Steam demo)
Thursday, August 13
Game release: Super Mario Sunshine (Switch 2, originally released in 2002 on the GameCube) is released for Switch 2’s Nintendo Switch Online service. This game is the black sheep of 3D Mario games. It’s the successor to the breakthrough Super Mario 64 and the rare Mario game built around a single (vacation resort) theme. Mario’s got a water-spraying backpack, a Yoshi pal and a lot of blue coins to collect.