My surprise trip on a gaming CEO's private jet

I'd long wanted to interview Matt Karch, head of Space Marine II’s Saber Interactive. I didn't expect to finally do so on a whim, and in such luxury.

Air Karch (not his name for it, but some of his employees call it that), on the tarmac in Burbank, December 2024. Photo: Game File

One of the first things I learned about the private jet of Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch, a man whose game company just had a very dramatic year, was that the aircraft we were sitting in was not his first private plane.

The previous one, purchased in 2021, was smaller and had been sort of a mistake.

That aircraft was decent, as private planes go, but it was too small and couldn’t fly to Europe directly from the U.S. without having to land in Iceland or some other intermediate stop. That was a problem for Karch, the American head of a company that has long had most of its development resources across the Atlantic and that, in 2020, had become part of the Swedish gaming conglomerate The Embracer Group, before parting ways in 2024.

So in 2022 Karch got rid of the old plane and bought the one we were sitting in on a Friday morning last December: a Gulf Stream 280. He bought it for $23 million, slightly below asking price, because whoever had first ordered it had cancelled it, Karch said. It was fresh out of the factory and in need of an owner.

I, of course, don’t own a private plane. Nor had I ever been on one until Friday, December 13, when Karch and I, along with three other senior employees from Saber, flew from the Los Angeles area to a small airport in northern New Jersey.

This hadn’t been my plan.

I had no idea on December 12 that I was less than 24 hours away from one of the most unusual interviews of my career.

I had assumed that the end of my flight back home would be signaled by an airline flight attendant checking that my seat was upright and my tray table stowed—not with a brief chime that played as the CEO of Saber, facing me nearly two hours into an interview, was saying:

“I think that the age of the $200 million, $300 million, $400 million triple-A game is on its way out. I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think it’s appropriate.

“I don’t know how best to put it….I think if anything has contributed more to the loss of jobs, it’s the multi-hundred million dollar budget.”

And then… wheels down.

How did we get there?

I’ll cover most of my conversation with Karch in future posts. He was frank and freewheeling, sharing his take on Saber’s colorful and largely untold history: the twists and turns of the company’s arduous 20 year journey from obscurity to recent hit-maker.

Today, though, I wanted to explain how this flight, which I agreed to less than two hours before take-off, came to be. And I’ll give you a sense of what Saber, according to Karch, is all about.