Saber CEO Confirms Rideshare Stimulator Trailer Takes a Deliberate Shot at Gearbox's Randy Pitchford

The next entry in the long, weird history of CEO-on-CEO beef just played out inside a trailer for a taxi sim nobody was asking about. Matt Karch, the co-founder and CEO of Saber Interactive, openly confirmed that the latest Rideshare Stimulator reveal trailer contains a string of deliberate references to Gearbox Studios boss Randy Pitchford, and that the references are payback for shots Gearbox took at Embracer inside Borderlands 4. Karch laid it all out to Game File's Stephen Totilo, who first flagged the Easter eggs, and the quote is about as blunt as a CEO quote gets: "The dig is because Randy took shots at Embracer in Borderlands 4. Without Embracer, Randy is performing magic tricks at birthday parties for a living." That is a real sentence a real publisher said in 2026 about a real peer, and it is now in the official record.

If you missed the original trailer, the references are not subtle and clearly were never meant to be. A car rolls by with a Texas license plate that reads "USB DRV" and wears a gear-shaped icon, which is a two-for-one nod at the infamous USB drive Pitchford once left behind at a Medieval Times restaurant and at the home state of Gearbox. A voiceover in the trailer then says, "When I think I've met the randiest of passengers, someone even stranger gets in," before another line lands: "Take a ride in my chariot, and I will take you to my castle." That second line is a reference to Pitchford's long-running ownership stake in Hollywood's Magic Castle, the historic magician's club he bought back in 2022. The whole sequence reads less like a hidden Easter egg and more like a name tag taped to the bumper.

Why Karch Is Firing Back Now

The backstory matters here. Before Embracer imploded, the Swedish holding company was the parent of both Gearbox and Saber, and Karch sat on the Embracer board of directors while Pitchford ran Gearbox underneath him. When Embracer's spending spree collapsed in 2023, the two studios went in opposite directions. Take-Two acquired Gearbox in 2024 and absorbed Pitchford into the Rockstar-adjacent umbrella, while Saber split off as an independent publisher and eventually went public on its own terms. Karch has publicly defended Embracer's strategy as well-intentioned even as the rest of the industry roasted it, and the Borderlands 4 joke he is upset about landed right on that nerve.

The specific Borderlands 4 reference is a location called Embracer's Bluff, an in-game area that Kotaku flagged earlier this year as a fairly obvious joke at the former owner's expense. The area apparently includes a massive trash pile, an AI-powered talking toilet, and a king mayor who lounges in a bathtub. None of that is subtle either, and Karch clearly took it personally. He closed his Game File comments with a line that reads like a goodbye letter to a co-parenting situation that never quite healed: "It's amazing to me how fast people forget those who went above and beyond for them. Clearly, several years later, some things haven't been forgotten, however."

Take-Two Has Already Made Its Pitchford Peace

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick was asked about Pitchford's antics all the way back in August 2025 and made the corporate answer obvious: "I love Randy, first of all. Let me just say that on the record. And I love his big personality. I love his passion and he is one of the all time great game makers. He also can be controversial at times, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. I still love him to death." That is the kind of quote you give when the person you acquired is a known quantity and you have decided the brand risk is worth it. Zelnick also floated the read that some of the controversy is itself a kind of performance, which is the kindest possible interpretation of the USB drive saga.

The USB story, for anyone who needs a refresh, is one of the more jaw-dropping footnotes in modern game industry history. Pitchford has admitted he left a USB stick containing confidential Gearbox material and a pornographic video in a Medieval Times restaurant. The drive was returned to Gearbox and its contents became widely known, including a clip Pitchford later described on the Piff Pod podcast as featuring a barely-legal model performing an act he likened to a magician's trick. He said at the time that he downloaded the video to study the performer's technique, which is the kind of sentence that ends careers in any other industry and barely moves the needle in this one.

How The Industry Is Reacting

Reaction has been exactly what you'd expect from a gaming Twitter that lives for a public feud. Stephen Totilo's original Game File post pulled solid engagement with millions of views and a wide spread of likes, and Kotaku and IGN both picked up the story within hours. The CPG Console & PC Gaming account summed up the mood with a single line that captures the whole situation: "Gaming feuds stay weird. This one was basically wearing a name tag." Plenty of replies tag the joke as obvious, a few defend Pitchford as unfairly targeted, and a surprising number of people seem to genuinely want to know when Rideshare Stimulator is out so they can play the trailer back at 0.25x speed to find the next reference.

There is a side note worth flagging because it landed in the same 24-hour window. Pirat_Nation reported on X that a former lead writer on Rideshare Stimulator claims they were replaced by ChatGPT partway through development and that all passenger voices were AI-generated at the time of their departure. That claim is single-source for now, and Saber has not responded publicly, so it is worth treating with the appropriate skepticism. If it turns out to be accurate, then the USB DRV plate is not the only piece of Rideshare Stimulator news worth discussing this week, and Saber's marketing team is going to have a very different kind of week than the one they planned.

The Take: Studios Need Better Venting Channels

Here is the uncomfortable part. None of this is healthy and all of it is funny until somebody gets fired, sued, or acquired. Trailers are not op-eds, and when a CEO uses a marketing asset to settle a personal score with a named peer, the people who get hurt are the developers who made the trailer and the players who did not ask to be props in somebody's grudge match. Pitchford has spent two decades building a public persona that is essentially begging for this kind of response, and Karch clearly decided the juice was worth the squeeze. That is a fair call by a CEO who is also a publisher and also a former board member of the company his peer publicly mocked inside a triple-A release. It is also exactly the kind of energy the industry does not need more of in a year where studios are closing, layoffs are accelerating, and the only people laughing are the ones not paying the bill.

What happens next is the interesting question. Pitchford has not publicly responded at the time of writing, and Take-Two's communications team will almost certainly try to keep it that way. Saber will keep marketing Rideshare Stimulator with the USB DRV plate front and center because it is the only reason anyone outside the sim-cab community knows the game exists. And somewhere, a long-suffering Saber community manager is going to have to answer fan questions about a license plate instead of the actual driving model. Welcome to game marketing in 2026.