XAfter an eight year stretch as vice president and general manager of the Epic Games Store, Steve Allison has left Epic Games to take up the mantle of chief business officer at Saber Interactive.
Allison said in a statement (via Games Industry) that he's "extremely impressed" with what Saber Interactive's founders have built. "Saber's strength is the talented studios that build high-quality games at 30-50% the cost of industry norms. The upcoming slate is exceptional with Space Marine 3, Jurassic Park, Turok, Hellraiser, the upcoming John Wick game and several unannounced projects that we can talk about very soon."
Prior to joining Epic in 2018, Allison served as senior vice president of publishing at Telltale Games. He also held executive roles at Midway, Atari, and Accolade. Saber Interactive CEO Matthew Karch said Allison "has done more to shape and modernize the game industry than anyone else I know," joking that he's "not only one of the most knowledgeable and experienced individuals in games" but also "incredibly handsome."
"We are lucky to have him help lead Saber into the next phase of our journey, even if I need to avoid joint photo ops," Karch said.
It's not clear exactly when Allison left Epic, although his LinkedIn page indicates he was still serving as Epic Games Store chief in July. His former boss, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared a tribute of his own on X. "Thanks to Epic veteran Steve Allison for launching the Epic Games Store in 2018 and driving it to 78 million monthly active users today!"
Some of the responses to Sweeney's message highlight the awkward side of Allison's tenure on the Epic Games Store: After almost a decade of operation, the launcher still kinda sucks, and it's not just me saying so, but Allison himself. He literally said "the launcher sucks" in February, right around the same time he announced that Epic would be "ripping out the guts" of the launcher as part of a major technical upgrade aimed at making the whole thing not suck.
The Epic Games Store has grown significantly since it went live in 2018, in part by giving away literally hundreds of millions of free games—billions of copies in total by now, surely—a strategy it pursues to this day. 78 million MAU is definitely nothing to sneeze at, but Steam remains the big dog in PC gaming stores: Valve doesn't share Steam's monthly numbers but Simon Carless at GameDiscoverCo did some back-of-napkin math and estimated that Steam is doing, very roughly, around 200 million MAU.
Saber Interactive was founded in 2001 and released its first game, a Serious Sam clone called Will Rock, in 2003. Apart from the title, which remains one of my favorites, Will Rock wasn't very good, but Saber persisted, and after releasing TimeShift in 2007 it teamed up with 343 Industries on Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. The studio was acquired by Embracer in 2020, becoming one of its major subsidiaries; four years later, following Embracer's implosion, Saber was sold to a company owned by Karch for $247 million, taking most of the studios operating under its Embracer division with it—becoming kind of a mini-Embracer in its own right.
