Take-Two - the parent company behind 2K Games and Rockstar Games - traditionally hasn't annualized its non-sports series, but the company's boss thinks taking time to build great games and generate hype is exactly the reason why GTA 6 and Borderlands 4 are at the top of their respective genres.
Speaking at the TD Cohen conference about the gap between Grand Theft Auto games, long-time Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says the company's plans "might not be to have a specific cadence around our properties because we're not a cadence-driven company."
The gaming giant has held onto that philosophy for the last two decades, ever since Zelnick first took the reins. "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."
Several big names were chasing yearly hits in and around 2007 (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Halo, Super Mario, Pokemon), but Grand Theft Auto's resistance to yearly releases is one of the reasons it's thrived so much, according to the Take-Two boss: "GTA was not the number one property [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."
The executive's reasoning was two-fold. One, developers get the time to create something great or, at least, interesting enough to become top-tier. Two is that the gap in releases gives gamers a chance to miss those games. Annual series are expected, they're a known quantity, there's never any question marks around them. "I'm not going to name the properties," he adds, "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."
"So we set a new standard in the business, which is you have to make stuff that's great and creating some anticipation on the part of the consumer is a good thing. That doesn't mean that we said there should be an eight-year gap between releases. What has driven the gap is the amount of time it takes to do something that is as good as it can possibly be for that intellectual property," Zelnick goes on.
In the case of Gearbox Software's two-to-four year cycle between Borderlands games and spin-offs, Zelnick says the developer has "succeeded mightily." Though the strategy hasn't quite worked out as well with the Bioshock series, which has "taken longer than we would like."
