A dispute over whether AI displaced a game writer spiraled into a personal attack — and ended with Saber Interactive’s chief executive apologizing to the former employee he had targeted.

The row began after Stella Sacco, a former lead writer on the recently announced Rideshare “Stimulator”, said Saber had replaced her with ChatGPT midway through development. Saber CEO Matthew Karch rejected the allegation that the company had replaced writers with AI, while Sacco held firm: “Everything I said was true.”¹

Karch then sharpened the confrontation in comments to This Week in Videogames. He said Sacco had been replaced by “someone more talented” and, in a remark that turned a workplace dispute into an AI flashpoint, added: “I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI.”¹

The company’s subsequent disclosures complicated the clean denial. Saber added an AI-content notice to the game’s Steam page, saying the main campaign was written by humans but that AI tools were used for voice generation and some localization. Its optional Free Ride mode includes AI-generated passenger missions and localized dialogue, while some radio stations feature AI-generated music.²

That distinction is central to Saber’s position: AI did not replace the campaign’s writers, it says, but it is embedded in several supporting features. Sacco’s complaint, meanwhile, concerns both her own removal and the company’s broader willingness to use the technology.

After the backlash, Sacco said Karch emailed her and “apologized unreservedly for the awful way he spoke about me in the press.”³ The apology cools the personal feud, but not the larger tension exposed by it: studios may insist that human authors remain at the center of a game while increasingly relying on AI around the edges.