Saints Row is dead. Long live Saints Row? No, it’s actually dead, at least according to the design director on the first game, Chris Stockman. As Eurogamer reported, Stockman said as much in a Discord for his new company, Bit Planet Games. A thread on X from user papaRPG popularized a screenshot of Stockman responding to a comment lamenting the series’ recent radio silence in January: “I think the franchise is dead,” he wrote.
“I get the sense that Embracer has zero ability to do anything with it,” Stockman continues in the screenshot. “I wish things were different. I tried my best to offer a path forward but they’ve ghosted me.”
More recently on the Bit Planet Discord, Stockman reiterated that the ball is in Embracer’s court. He wrote Feb. 17, “As long as they are in business they own it … they could license it to me or contract us to manage it, but I’ve done all I can do to try and make that happen.”
The novelty of open-world playgrounds has worn off and that style of game isn’t as omnipresent anymore, megalithic Rockstar blockbusters like Red Dead and GTA notwithstanding—if Saints Row really is dead, that’s a fate it shares with Prototype, Crackdown, Sleeping Dogs, Sunset Overdrive, and so on. It’s hard to imagine what form a reboot could take to actually feel fresh. If you just want to play the old ones though, they’re still there and a lot of fun.
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