Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick agrees with PlayStation's subscription plan
Christopher Dring
Head of Games B2B
Monday 13th June 2022
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick agrees with PlayStation's stance on not releasing brand new AAA products into a subscription service on the day they're released.
Speaking at GI Live: Online last month, the publisher boss reiterated his views on the business model, but says it can be effective for catalogue games. He feels that for the majority of gamers, subscriptions simply don't make sense in the same way that they do in music and TV.
Take-Two has regularly supported services such as Xbox Game Pass with legacy titles, including with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and NBA. Last year, around the launch of its Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy Definitive Edition, it put one of the games from the collection into Game Pass (GTA San Andreas) and PlayStation Now (GTA Vice City). And going back to 2019, Take-Two's Private Division publishing arm launched The Outer Worlds into Game Pass on the same day it launched at retail (it followed Microsoft's acquisition of the game's developer Obsidian).
"We've supported various subscription services and we're happy to do so," Zelnick said during his keynote. "Our scepticism has been around making frontline console products available day and date with subscription. That doesn't make any sense to us, because economically speaking, we don't think consumers are prepared to pay for that. And we can't afford to turn our business upside down in a way that doesn't make sense economically. There always has to be an intersection between what the consumer wants and what the publisher is able to do. And you know, it doesn't make sense to do that for our properties. That's our opinion, and I think Sony agrees with us, because it said so.
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