Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says that the firm is still planning for long-gestating and recently rebooted online shooter Project Ethos to be a “massive hit” despite the escalating challenges of the market, which has seen even genre pioneer Bungie run into difficulties.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz ahead of the release of the firm’s strong full-year financials, Zelnick says that the recently-announced changes were driven by the lukewarm response to the game, rather than the state of the market in general.
“There’s no secret that we went out with an open beta and that we got a mixed response,” he says. “And we decided to make material changes in the development to make sure that we’re delivering an A-plus experience that consumers will love. We feel very good about how it’s going, but remains to be seen and we still have work to do between now and launch.”
He says that the firm “wouldn’t ever be working on anything if we didn’t think it could be a massive hit,” although with that caveat that “doesn’t mean we’re always right.”
“Sometimes we fall short, although certainly this year everything we’ve done, even the things that didn’t work out exactly as expected, have turned out to be hits. On behalf of the team, we will accept credit for this year. We will not accept credit for anything that hasn’t happened yet, but we sure are trying to make hits.”
He is enthusiastic about the firm’s full-year performance, which saw net bookings rise 19% driven by NBA 2K, Zynga’s mobile portfolio and stronger-than-expected performance of GTA Online. The firm also called out the performance of Red Dead Redemption, saying it achieved its highest level of annual sales since its launch year and hit 85M total units sold, which Zelnick describes as “an astonishing milestone.”
“But for the fact that we have the GTA franchise in our system, I think people would mostly be talking about Red Dead, because that of course is a massive entertainment property,” he says, although he demurs when asked if there was potential to expand those revenues through Red Dead Online. “There’s every reason to believe that it will continue to sell, and that Red Dead Online will continue to operate. We haven’t made any other announcements.”
He will also not be drawn on the hot-button topic of GTA 6 pricing, saying only that we’re “going to see marketing start this summer,” nor on the potential for additional revenue growth from the company’s launch of subscription service GTA+ or server and mod business FiveM. “I think the focus right now is on delivering the best experience to consumers and my belief has always been that if we do that, the revenues will take care of themselves,” he says.
He later said on the company’s earnings call that having “not having announced any online version for GTA 6,” it would be “premature to talk about an upcoming business model for something that we haven’t talked about.”
Does he think that the market has a better understanding of the influence that AI will have on game development? “I’m not sure. Perhaps. I think ultimately we trade on the fundamentals and the fundamentals are very strong indeed.”
Zelnick discussed his broader vision for Take-Two, and his goal of making it into “the biggest entertainment company in the world,” in a more extensive interview with GamesIndustry.biz published yesterday.
