Highlights

  • The troubled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is not dead, a well-known industry insider said, citing two sources at Saber Interactive.
  • A mid-November report claimed the opposite, stating that Sony had pulled funding from the project, causing all development on the game to cease.
  • While the project itself may not be dead, there is no indication that Sony is still involved in the KOTOR remake, which was originally announced as a timed PS5 exclusive.

The troubled remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is not dead, a well-known insider has said. This bit of unofficial insight into the project directly refutes a mid-November report indicating that the KOTOR remake has hit a hiatus.

That previous claim originates from Jeff Grubb, an established reporter with a consistent track record of industry scoops. During a November 17 episode of the Game Mess Mornings podcast, Grubb said that Sony pulled funding from the project and has essentially moved on from it despite still having co-publishing rights. As a result, the game "is not being worked on right now," he explained. The claim arrived some half a year after Grubb predicted that the KOTOR remake would never come out.

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Saber Is Reportedly Still Working on the KOTOR Remake

But his latest update on the troubled project has now been partially refuted by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who indicated that the KOTOR remake is not dead. Discussing the state of the game on the ResetEra forums, Schreier said he doesn't believe the project has been completely shelved, citing two sources at Saber Interactive who both told him the company is still working on the remake in some capacity.

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That notwithstanding, the insider seemingly substantiated Grubb's claim that Sony pulled out of the project, having highlighted how there's a difference between asking whether a given game is alive and whether it's ever coming out. Likewise, asking what Saber's title will "actually look like" is an entirely different question, Schreier said. If Sony indeed moved on from the project, that would help explain its decision to delist the 2021 KOTOR remake reveal trailer back in late September.

I've talked to two people at Saber who both say they're still currently working on it, so I don't believe that the comment that it isn't being worked on "in any way" right now is true.

As a reminder, the game was originally announced as a timed PlayStation 5 exclusive that was eventually also meant to reach PC, which is why Sony was initially acting as its sole publisher. But a lot has changed since then, including the very developer in charge of the project, with Embracer Group reassigning the KOTOR remake from Aspyr Media to Saber Interactive—another one of its subsidiaries—in September 2022. Two months earlier, Schreier reported that Aspyr paused all development on the project after its vertical slice of the game failed to impress Sony.

Back in June, Embracer announced a large-scale restructuring operation meant to curb its costs in response to a "worsening" global economy. As part of those still-ongoing efforts, the company said it will carefully review each of its many studios and projects, inevitably closing some of the former and canceling a portion of the latter. So, even though industry insiders can't seem to agree on whether the KOTOR remake is alive or not, the likelihood of it seeing the light of day in the foreseeable future without external funding doesn't appear to be high right now, and will remain as such so long as Embracer stays its current risk-averse course.