While there have been games trying to compete with the Grand Theft Auto franchise developed by former Rockstar Games developers, with Build a Rocket Boy’s MindsEye being a recent example. CEO of parent company Take-Two Interactive, Strauss Zelnick, spoke about this during the TD Cowen 54th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. He noted that the maturity of the industry has led to making games that will be hits more and more difficult.
“Making hits seems to get harder and harder as entertainment industries mature,” he said. “The folks at Rockstar seem to be able to make these massive hits, and lots of other people have tried. Lots and lots, including former Rockstar employees. And so far, they haven’t been able to do it.”
Despite the challenges facing just about everyone in the entertainment industries, however, Zelnick has said that he doesn’t think that a true competitor will never come along. Rather, he wants to make sure that when such a talented group of people shows up, they’ll be working under the larger Take-Two Interactive umbrella, rather than as competition.
“Doesn’t mean they can’t [do it] in the future, by the way,” he said. “We’re always running scared. But it won’t be technology that changes the game. What’ll change is that some extraordinarily creative individual or individuals will show up and do something astonishing. Our goal is to get those people to work within the Take-Two system. If we fail to do that, we fail.”
As for the highly-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6, Zelnick spoke about how turning it into an annual franchise was never really a priority for the company. Without bringing up any particular name, he noted that there have been other franchises in the gaming industry that have attempted to have annual releases with mixed results when it came to critical reception. With Grand Theft Auto, on the other hand, he said that, while it wasn’t the top IP at the time, it has slowly gotten to that level by now.
“Our plan might not be to have a specific cadence around our properties because we’re not a cadence-driven company; we never have been,” he said. “I didn’t show up at Take-Two nearly 20 years ago and say, the way everyone else was, ‘We’re going to annualize our products like clockwork…’ I was an outlier at the time.”
“I’m not going to name the properties, but we’ve seen that some very competitive properties have had good annual releases and bad annual releases because it’s just so hard to do. GTA was not the number one property [when I joined in 2007]. It was a top five property, but it was not the number one property. And take a look at what happened to the properties that were higher up in the food chain that were annualized to see what happens.”
Grand Theft Auto 6 is being developed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is currently slated for a November 19th release. The title will also likely get a PC release at some point in the future. However, Zelnick has previously spoken about how console players serve as the core audience for Rockstar Games to focus on first.
