It’s quite an interesting timing from Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick when he’s going to hype the most anticipated game of 2025, or maybe the last decade.
With the game from Rockstar Games, Take-Two is looking to repeat the success of Grand Theft Auto V (over 200 million sales, only Minecraft has had more). Zelnick kicked off the hype train in an interview with Conner Mather with one sentence: “I would say I think it’s going to be extraordinary and worth waiting for. He then went into more detail about how they take feedback from the Grand Theft Auto community into account, and seemed to hint that there will be features and content in GTA VI that fans aren’t expecting:
“We definitely listen to feedback from our fans, absolutely. You have to, in our business, and you’re able to. But remember, the biggest hits are always the unexpected ones. Everything we do has to be new and different, not derivative. So, by definition, when people comment on something that’s out there, they’re looking at something that’s been done before. Our teams are focused on what’s new, what you haven’t even thought of, like you thought you were anticipating this thing, but this is way bigger and way better and more exciting and beautiful than you could have possibly thought of,” Zelnick said.
He also talked about Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online. The publisher didn’t expect GTA V to sell this well or GTAO to be this popular. They didn’t even originally plan for a virtual currency! “I think we saw it as a really interesting addition to the title. We actually didn’t originally plan to have virtual currency in the game, so it wasn’t going to be an economic driver. It was relatively late in the game when we decided to do virtual currency because it was so long ago – we’re looking back at 2013. And it wasn’t an immediate success. You may remember it was pretty buggy at the beginning.
We had some problems coming out of the gate because everything was new and we were innovating; we were doing everything in real time. It was like building an airplane as you’re taking off and then flying. It is an incredible, enduring success, and it is still going strong many, many years later. It’s amazing, and no, I don’t think any of us expected it, but we didn’t expect to sell 205 million units. We never expected that. That was way out of the realm of anything we were looking at,” Zelnick added.
Grand Theft Auto VI is coming to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series this fall.
Source: WCCFTech
