It turns out that the videogame publisher Take-Two have no plans to squeeze as much money out of their popular franchises, which is a refreshing change of pace for the industry.
The company that brought us the likes of Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption, and Bioshock were explaining why they don’t put out non-sports titles annually, and said that they were wary of “milking” their respected properties.
Company president Karl Slatoff discussed his reasons during a business presentation held in New York. At one point he was asked if this decision was a challenge in terms of keeping investors interested in products like Red Dead that don’t get seen for years at a time.
Slatoff replied:
Yes, it is a challenge. We don’t intend to change annual strategy because of product fatigue. [Take-Two] creates franchise value and [releases have] to be managed deliberately. It’s tempting to have continuous releases and milk a franchise as far as you can, we’ve seen that fatigue in other franchises in the games industry. With almost every single franchise for us, the latest release is bigger than the one before.
This would certainly explain why we haven’t seen a new Bioshock or Red Dead title for a while. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, after all. Having said that, Take-Two continue to deliver regular content for GTA Online which as it turns out, makes them loads of money.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.