Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick tells reporter Stephen Totilo in a new edition of his Game File newsletter that he's never shocked when studios like Rockstar inevitably delay GTA 6 to the moment of Christ's resurrection. Though, he wasn't fond of BioShock developers stalling on the next title in the creepy shooter series.
Zelnick explains to Totilo, "I tend to default to being very calm," since "I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency." So, even though the next BioShock game has been in development for nearly 10 miserable years, Zelnick repeats he was "never" surprised by how the team handled the dystopian franchise. He did, however, feel "deeply disappointed."
The last time Take-Two subsidiary 2K published a BioShock game, people were wearing infinity scarves while doing the Harlem Shake – it was 2013. 2K Games eventually announced follow-up BioShock 4 in 2019, but years kept passing, and BioShock 4 started to feel as real as a ghost, which may or may not exist.
"I think we, in retrospect, wasted a lot of time and money chasing down some creative alleys that turned out to be dead ends," Zelnick says. He summarizes this approach as the "nature of entertainment," adding that, "with big team activities, you can't necessarily tell how it's going to be until it all comes together, or begins to come together, and that can take a while and can be very costly."
Having experienced this many times in his 40-year career as an executive, Zelnick says, "I don't run the business" in a way that lends itself to surprise – "That's like, one day, everything's awesome, and the next day, I'm like, 'Holy shit.'"
He says he's more pragmatic than that. 2K ultimately hit BioShock 4 developer Cloud Chamber hard with layoffs in 2025 and brought in former Diablo boss Rod Fergusson to lead the project, taking over for fired studio head Kelley Gilmore, a Firaxis veteran.
With more than 80 positions now evaporated, "I'm feeling a lot better," Zelnick says. However, BioShock 4 still doesn't have anything close to a release date.
