With GTA 6 two weeks from its November 19 release, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick sat down with The Wall Street Journal and ended up answering three questions that have followed the game around: why it took so long, whether piracy is a threat, and what the company has besides Rockstar's biggest name.
The interview took place at the paper's tech conference. We couldn't check the original interview directly, so everything below is credited to the outlets reporting it: GamesRadar+, PC Gamer and Kotaku.
The delays
Asked how the delays unfolded, Zelnick told the interviewer that "these are very difficult decisions to make," GamesRadar+ reports. His argument was that a company can't claim a mission and then abandon it when it gets costly. When "your mission is to make the best entertainment on earth," he said, "sometimes you have to make these expensive and inconvenient decisions in service of that mission and goals."
That doesn't mean he always agrees to more time. According to GamesRadar+, he pointed to another situation at Take-Two where his answer was "actually, we're shipping," adding: "Oh, by the way, thankfully I was right. Imagine if I'd been wrong."
Then he reached for a comparison. "I'm not going to throw any competitors under the bus," he said, "but if you know anything about the video game business, in the past few years, there was a very high-profile release that fell into this category, and they shipped, and they had to pull the title after shipping." Zelnick didn't name the game. GamesRadar+ reads it as a reference to Cyberpunk 2077, which was temporarily removed from the PlayStation Store about a week after its launch.
Piracy
On piracy, PC Gamer quotes Zelnick as saying he is "worried about everything all the time, despite being very laid-back," before calling piracy "a fact of life." He recalled estimates of 10 to 20 percent in the movie business and argued that about 80 percent of the record market was pirated by the mid-2000s.
Games, in his telling, have some natural protection. "Because of the file sizes and the complexity, piracy is less of an issue in interactive entertainment, but it's not been a non-issue," he said. He also pointed to server connections: "for all of our games you have to be connected with our servers to have a good experience." If piracy does become a problem, he said, Take-Two will respond with "legal work and then with technical work."
He didn't wave it away entirely. "I think it's fair to say that piracy is going to be an issue in our business going forward—we're just going to have to be vigilant about it," he said, per PC Gamer.
The one-hit question
The third topic came when deputy media editor Jessica Toonkel asked about concern that GTA is the big hit and that Take-Two doesn't have enough others in its library. Kotaku reports the question came up in the context of the company's stock sitting nearly 20 percent below its peak from late last year, and that the moment has since gone viral.
Zelnick's answer, per Kotaku's transcript, opened with "Uhhhh…" and moved to the catalog: 15 franchises that have each sold at least 5 million in individual releases, Red Dead Redemption with more than 65 million for its most recent release, plus NBA 2K, WWE 2K, BioShock, Borderlands and Civilization. "I guess the way I respond to it is, like, examine the facts," he said.
Mason's take: The Cyberpunk line is the punchy one, but I think the one-hit question is worth keeping. Take-Two's list is long, and I doubt most of it will move the needle the way GTA 6 will. Zelnick's bet seems to be that patience is cheaper than a bad launch. We'll get an answer on November 19.
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