Join The Community
Amid heightened competition and expectations in gaming, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reckons good games just don't cut it anymore – or, as he put it, "good is the new bad."
Speaking with IGN, Zelnick sizes up the steady rise of AAA development costs and lengthening production timelines. "I think it's a reflection of the fact that as entertainment businesses mature, consumers seek quality and everyone realizes that the consumer is highly demanding and properly so," he said.
That said, his comments seem to parallel topical sentiments regarding reception and saturation in games. Most notably, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested last month that the industry is "a highly competitive environment where players are very sensitive to the quality and content of games." Guillemot argued that "the success of a video game depends as much on the efficiency of its development process as on its launch," and listed "bashing" from people online as a "high" risk factor.
Guillemot added: "The changing perception of the video game industry as a cultural and artistic medium is also leading to an increase in criticism based on ideological or societal considerations, sometimes to the detriment of technical or gameplay aspects. This trend increases the risk for publishers such as Ubisoft of being exposed to controversy relating to social, moral or identity standards associated with their productions."
This wasn't the first time we heard this rhetoric from Ubisoft, either. In September 2024, following the less-than-stellar reception of Star Wars Outlaws, Guillemot mirrored Zelnick's remarks even more closely, arguing that "delivering solid quality is no longer enough" when you're in a "challenging market" filled "with gamers expecting extraordinary experiences."
This followed a February 2024 "turnaround" for Ubisoft, with the company pointing to Assassin's Creed Mirage as a sign of its push toward "consistently creating and delivering high-quality, long-lasting games," which read like tacit admission that the company's output had been less than consistently great.
Analyst Mat Piscatella, games lead at Circana, attributes some of this effect to the dominance of accessible live service games. "It's like the substitution effect, right?" Piscatella told GamesRadar+. "You can go play game A and pay X dollars to get in the door, or you can just fire up the game you're already playing, your forever game that you've been playing for, in some cases, 7 to 10 years, right? That's the choice people are making now."
