With EA officially private under Saudi ownership, Rockstar owner Take-Two is now comfortably the largest publicly traded game company in the US, as GamesBeat points out in a recent interview with T2 CEO Strauss Zelnick.
On this point, Zelnick says, "I don't love winning by attrition, but I'll take it."
Zelnick examines the landscape of the games industry, which has been rattled by ceaseless layoffs, record acquisitions, widespread cancellations, persistent funding droughts, and other systemic issues at all bands.
The EA takeover, for one, doesn't change much in Zelnick's mind. "I don't think EA becomes any less competitive from our point of view, and they have a great owner and they have a lot of other assets," he says. Some of those assets are notably expected to be cut loose, along with plenty of EA staff reportedly fearing layoffs, in the coming quarters.
"We assume that our competition is always aggressive and performing, and we're always running scared," Zelnick explains. "So I don't see any of that changing. We do think there are benefits to being a public company if you're transparent, which we are, and honest, which we are."
Zelnick, who's now 69 and notes he's "been running public companies since I was 29," suggests public companies don't have to be, and perhaps don't always deserve to be seen as, bad. A key strength of being on the stock market is, "when you're trading well, it can give you a currency with which to pursue accretive acquisitions, which we've done," he reasons.
"The people who hate running public companies are the people who hate telling the truth and showing up and doing the hardest thing and being compliant while they're at it," he argues. "That's not troublesome for us."
As it happens, Devolver Digital – a giant among indies, but a minnow to Take-Two – just announced plans to stop being a publicly traded company, arguing that the private life better serves its games.
Zelnick has less to say about the Xbox layoffs, which have seen multiple studios spun out, cut in half, or otherwise out valuable developers. "I don't feel comfortable commenting on Xbox's business, except [to] say that they're trusted and valued business partners [and] that I wish them well," he adds.
On the subject of staffing during this time of contraction, Zelnick sees Take-Two doing better than most.
"We've continued to be in growth mode more or less all of the time," he says. "We had some reductions in force around the Zynga acquisition. And we subsequently had some minor reductions in force, very selectively. But once again, we expect to be in growth mode creatively. We don't want to expand the size of our business footprint, but I think we will probably continue to expand the size of our creative footprint as we aim to deliver more hits to the marketplace."
Earlier this year, Zelnick claimed "big tech companies who laid off thousands of people and said it was because of AI were not telling the truth."
Through all the turmoil, games continue to come out and break through, and seemingly record pre-orders for GTA 6 would have you believe gaming is bigger than ever. A non-trivial chunk of Take-Two's valuation notably stems from confidence in GTA 6.
Zelnick pulls the camera all the way back to examine the roughly "2.5 billion people" who play video games. He thinks there are more gamers out there, and better ways to monetize 'em, too.
"I think we're scratching the surface still, both in terms of the size of the audience and the monetization of that audience," he argues. In a separate response, he adds, "I think there will be new formats, new form factors in the fullness of time. I don't think we've reached the creative or technical [peak of] aspects of the business."
