Take-Two CEO says Rockstar will continue to focus on both single-player and multiplayer experiences

Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and 2K Games, has announced that it will continue to invest in single-player games.

While the companies above might be best known for its multiplayer and live-service games like GTA Online and Red Dead Online, the studio has made a commitment to focus on single-player experiences.

This was revealed during an earnings call this week, with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick explaining that Rockstar is and will continue to be a studio that will focus on storytelling and single-player experiences going forward, even with the massive success of GTA Online.

The executive stated that the studio wants to follow this sort of pattern, with games like GTA 5 being billed as a single-player experience but offering a huge multiplayer expansion alongside it.

"The folks at Rockstar Games intended to create a powerful single-player experience and story-driven experience. And Rockstar has always been known for great stories and great single-player experiences and then developed in addition, a massive multiplayer opportunity over the past years," Zelnick said.

The earnings call mentioned the continued success of Red Dead Online and GTA Online and that, because these games are also single-player, that the company doesn't have to choose between one or the other; "Rockstar can do both of those things," said Zelnick. 

Speaking on the long-predicted speculation of single-player games fizzling away, Zelnick muses "there was an argument just a couple of years ago, not around here, not in this shop, but in some of our competitors' offices, that single-player is dead, that it's all about multiplayer. We didn't believe that I said specifically and publicly that we didn't believe that, our labels don't believe that".

As it stands, GTA 5 hasn't had any sort of story expansion since its original release eight years ago, but GTA Online has had a healthy supply of multiplayer expansions through the years, with free content continuously being added.

For more on Rockstars' most famous series, check out all the GTA 5 cheats.