Take-Two wants to see more games from Rockstar Games.

There’s nothing worse than a leadership expecting more work from an employee, even though the employee has done a solid job. (Especially how they don’t even cause a financial strain on the employer!) Rockstar Games might be in a similar situation. In the current console generation, they made just two games: we saw Grand Theft Auto V in 2013 (although on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One ports followed a year later), followed by Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018, riding on a horse.

Both games became an insane success (especially Grand Theft Auto V: according to the current statistics, it’s at 115 million sold copies, making it the third best-selling game EVER, after Minecraft and Tetris…), and Take-Two Interactive, the owner/publisher of Rockstar Games, enters the picture here: „Take-Two is reportedly pressuring Rockstar Games to return to their more frequent game release schedule. Although this probably would be bad for bigger franchises like GTA and Red Dead, it could incentivize them to continue focusing on much smaller titles like Bully and Manhunt,” SWEGTA, a reliable Rockstar Games insider, wrote on Twitter. (We’d rather stay silent about Agent.)

SWEGTA’s tweet falls in line with Strauss Zelnick’s comments. The CEO of Take-Two told Gamesindustry the following last summer: „We believe in resting titles as a great thing. I was a real outlier 12 years ago when we said we don’t think it makes sense to annualize non-sports titles, and now most people would agree, but I think eight years is probably too long. It’s possible that the ability to deliver content on an ongoing basis for a long time after an initial release of a hit would mean that perhaps that initial release wouldn’t be as long in terms of number of hours of gameplay as previously had been demanded in a world where that was all you were getting.” In short, he wants smaller games at launch that would be expanded over time. These titles could require less development time, resulting in a more prominent Take-Two schedule. (It sounds like a games-as-a-service model. Examples: Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege, Electronic Arts’ Anthem.)

Manhunt 3 wouldn’t be as controversial today as the first one was in 2003 on PS2 (the PC and Xbox ports followed in 2004) – a few countries even banned its sales.

Source: PSL

Please support our page theGeek.games on Patreon, so we can continue to write you the latest gaming, movie and tech news and reviews as an independent magazine.
Become a Patron!