John Wick and Jurassic Park: Survival developer and publisher Saber Interactive and the National Football League Player's Association are fighting. Last week, the NFLPA filed a petition in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York over missed royalties on Wild Card Football. Released in 2023, Wild Card Football included lots of NFL players because of a partnership with the NFLPA and sports licensing group OneTeam Partners.
(Wild Card Football is not named in the petition, but is named in subsequent exhibit filings.)
The NFLPA's lawyers wrote that "in exchange for [players'] intellectual property rights, Saber "agreed to pay [the NFLPA and its for-profit arm NFL Players Incorporated] royalties on game sales subject to certain minimum guaranteed payments to be remitted in installments over the life of the License Agreement." The NFLPA is a labor union that represents National Football League players for contracts and licensing deals.
The agreement went into effect on May 23, 2023 and was supposed to end on February 28, 2026, according to the document obtained by Aftermath and reported first by sports business reporter Daniel Kaplan. But on Sept. 30, 2024, the NFLPA acted to terminate the contract because it alleged "Saber stopped paying the guaranteed amounts" the union was owed. The document includes details of the licensing agreement about disputes, though some parts are redacted.
By November 2024, the NFLPA demanded the two parties head to arbitration to settle the dispute—that Saber Interactive stopped paying minimum royalties and kept using player likenesses after the NFLPA terminated the contract. Wild Card Football is no longer available for purchase on PC or console digital marketplaces. The game was removed from Steam and the Epic Games Store around November 2024; at the time, players surmised that the licensing agreement with the NFLPA had expired. (Saber Interactive "refused to take steps to stop further sales of Wild Card Football until Oct. 31, 2024, according to the final award document submitted as an exhibit.)
In arbitration, Saber Interactive filed a counterclaim, accusing the NFLPA of fraud and breach of contract, among other things. Saber Interactive's argument, per the final award document, is that it "is not liable for any additional 'Minimum Guarantees' or 'Marketing Commitments'" after the contract was revoked.
Oral arguments in front of an arbitration panel occurred on Oct. 21, 2025. By November 11, 2025, the NFLPA was issued "an interim award" that found Saber Interactive's counterclaims "meritless as a matter of law," and they were dismissed. One interesting detail of the arguments at this point is that Saber Interactive and the NFLPA were fighting over helmets in the game ahead of the game's release. Saber Interactive wanted to include a helmetless option.
"In the email correspondence, [the NFLPA] were criticized for trying to make the game 'a case study in head trauma' and 'remov[ing] all of the ‘fun elements,’” arbitrators wrote in the final award document. "Disputed game elements were referenced by [Saber Interactive] as 'comically over-the-top gameplay and animations that we believed critical to the success of the game.'"
The arbitrators found that the NFLPA was "well within the rights granted" in the licensing agreement to decline the helmetless mode the NFLPA said, according to the arbitrators, said "raised player safety concerns, could result in 'head trauma,' and constituted, in [Saber Interactive's] own words, 'over-the-top gameplay and animations.'"
The details of why this is included in the final award are muddied by redactions, but it seems this was part of Saber Interactive's claims that the NFLPA were acting in bad faith. Saber argued, the arbitrators said, that it wouldn't have signed the licensing agreement at all if it had previously known about the helmet restrictions.
The arbitrators called Saber Interactive's arguments "strained" in the final award document.
The next oral argument was on Jan. 15, 2026. On May 22, 2026, arbitrators found that Saber Interactive owed $1.75 million in royalty payments, interest of $286,774 and $172,947, $878,216 in attorneys' fees, $40,936 in "disbursement and costs," and $102,953 for arbitration costs. (The NFLPA lawyers contend that the final award was delayed because Saber Interactive wouldn't pay the arbitration fee, which was necessary to release the decision. The NFLPA ended up paying it, and wanted to get paid back in the final award.) The arbitration panel did find one of Saber Interactive's claims had merit—that the NFLPA's "appearances" were overstaffed, so it reduced the award by 5%. The total award is more than 3.1 million.
The case was closed on June 3, 2026, but, according to the NFLPA's lawyers, Saber has not paid up the full amount and "indicated that it has no intention of doing so." Saber Interactive paid $1,440,500 on May 9, 2026 in what was described as "in purported 'accord and satisfaction'" of its obligations in the petition. The NFLPA's lawyers said they will send the payment back. Now, the football players' union is asking the court to affirm the arbitration award and force Saber Interactive to pay the full amount. A summons of Saber Interactive was executed, but the company has yet to respond.
Aftermath has reached out to Saber Interactive for comment.
Saber Interactive was founded in 2001 by Andrey Iones, Matthew Karch, and Anton Krupkin. As of 2025, Saber Interactive had roughly 3,000 employees. The company was acquired by Embracer Group in February 2020 in a $525 million deal, then bought back by Karch in 2024 for $247 million. The company is both a developer and a publisher; it's got a bunch of different subsidiaries, like New World Interactive and Slipgate Ironworks. Some of Saber Interactive's studios stayed with Embracer Group. It had several major successes, including Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 in 2024. Lots of the games it's worked on, lately at least, have been licensed games. Chief operating officer Tim Willits told The Game Business in July 2026 that Space Marine 2 "changed the way that the team looks at making games, [and] it changed how people look at us."
The studio has a John Wick game, Hellraiser: Revival, Turok: Origins, and Jurassic Park: Survival on the way. Wild Card Football, though, is probably never coming back—unless the branding is removed. Wild Card Football's all-time player peak on Steam reached only 228 players. Console numbers aren't available.
Correction, July 22, 2025 at 1:58 p.m. ET: The original version of this article misstated the total amount Saber Interactive owes.
