Saber Interactive scoops up Bigmoon Entertainment, two games in development

Saber Interactive, a New Jersey-headquartered game developer with offices throughout Europe, has expanded its reach to Portugal with the acquisition of Bigmoon Entertainment. Utilizing its own proprietary engine, Saber has been making games for over 15 years, but the developer is most recently known for the third-person zombie-apocalypse shooter World War Z, released in April 2019.

While the financial success of WWZ certainly helped the studio’s situation, CEO Matthew Karch told GamesBeat that “we would have sought to acquire the studio even if World War Z had been a more modest success,” calling the Portugese developer “a perfect fit for our roadmap of projects.”

Bigmoon’s credits include a number of racing games, a genre sorely missing from Saber’s catalogue. However, Karch explained that Saber’s purchase — the price of which hasn’t been revealed — was “more about their considerable technical ability” than experience in any specific genre.

Along with news of the acquisition, Saber also announced that two new projects are on the way from the studio formerly known as Bigmoon. Details on those games are scarce, but Karch did tell GamesBeat that one will be an action game in a space setting, while the other will be vehicle-based. Saber will also continue to work with other developers and publishers to port existing games to new platforms, as it recently did by helping bring The Witcher 3 to Nintendo Switch.

In an interview with GameDaily earlier this year, Karch elaborated on Saber Interactive’s expansion strategy. “We were a one-studio shop for a very, very long time,” he said in June. After realizing it was too dependent on publishers to stay in business, Karch and his business partner “re-invested” in the business, spreading from New Jersey to Russia and beyond. When developing NBA Playgrounds, for which Karch was able to secure an NBA license, “I realized that our team in Russia was not the team to do that particular game, and so we found a team in Spain that ultimately became part of Saber.”

Now that the pattern has repeated itself with Saber’s purchase of Bigmoon, the developer is well-poised to handle a number of projects across genres and platforms. There are no release dates for Saber Porto’s two new projects, but Saber is hard at work on a number of ports, with the Switch version of Dontnod’s Vampyr due out later this month.