We might never get another Saints Row game, former director reveals: ‘I think the franchise is dead’
Saints Row is one of those franchises that just about anyone who has played video games knows. It's a staple of the olden days, especially its second entry. However, following the abject failure of its revival and the closure of the studio that made it, many believed, myself included, that Saints Row was done for good.
Hope remained in the period following, though, that the franchise could still be saved. Well, according to the original Saints Row's design director, Chris Stockman, the series is probably "dead." As posted by X user papaRPG, Stockman remarked on the state of Saints Row in a Discord exchange with a fan. During the conversation, he bluntly said that he believes the series is probably never coming back.
"Honestly, I think the franchise is dead," he wrote. "I get the sense that Embracer has zero ability to do anything with it."
"I wish things were different. I tried my best to offer a path forward, but they ghosted me," Stockman added.
Embracer Group owned subsidiaries that themselves held ownership of Saints Row developer Volition, which was acquired by Deep Silver and then by Gearbox, both of whom were under the Embracer umbrella. While Gearbox eventually got itself sold to 2K, Volition unfortunately had to go the hard way and was fully closed down following the utter failure of Saints Row's first and only reboot title.
Stockman was supposedly meant to save the franchise in subsequent years, with papaRPG writing last October that he was contracted by Embracer to come up with a new Saints Row pitch, supposedly conceived as a prequel to the whole franchise. As we see from the exchange above, it would appear that talks have since fallen through, with, as Stockman alleges, Embracer completely ignoring him and his ideas about a new Saints Row game.
Stockman himself shared this in a Reddit post on the SR subreddit, saying he was "asked to create a pitch for a Saints Row reboot." This would have been a second reboot after the first one was bashed by both critics and players alike.
"My dreams for this game just became a little more than just dreams," Stockman remarked, adding he was "going back to my roots." However, it seems that they will remain dreams after all.
Embracer has accrued a lot of bad rep over the years as a corporate giant that loves to pull the trigger on projects, and not in the positive sense. It has closed down many studios in the past, following rapid acquisitions of some of the industry's most beloved IPs and studios. It hasn't really done much with most of them, and Saints Row is certainly one of the most ill-fated of its roster.
On the other hand, players believe this franchise should not have gone the way it has, given that Rockstar really scaled back the frequency of its releases. The open-world crime sandbox game, as Saints Row titles were, is quite empty at the moment, with a void just waiting to be filled. Way back when, this franchise had to trade blows with GTA on the regular, but now it would stand uncontested—that is, until GTA 6 comes out.
"The fact that GTA has gone from 'yearly' to 'once a decade' has really opened up the 'open world crime simulator' market," one user on Reddit wrote. "Yet there is almost no company that wants to use the open spot," they added.
Others think GTA Online served that purpose and would've been an issue for the likes of Saints Row, but I believe the latter did have quite the opportunity in the last decade or so, fumbling it spectacularly, as Embracer tends to do.
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