Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick believes putting major “frontline” titles on a subscription service like Game Pass will no doubt help drive memberships, though he suggested this may only work for so long. In a new interview, Zelnick said Microsoft’s decision to put Black Ops 6 on Game Pass on day one “won’t affect” any decisions that Take-Two makes about its own games.
And why is that? “Because our decisions are rational,” he told GI.biz.
Zelnick added: “I think that offering a frontline title with a premium price in a subscription service, day-and-date, will push consumers to that subscription service for at least a period of time.”
Zelnick has been saying a version of this for years. In 2021, the executive said Take-Two doesn’t put its major new games on subscription services at launch because “the economics are much more difficult to make sense of.” In 2022, Zelnick said doing this makes no economic sense.
Zelnick maintains that there are major differences between the linear entertainment (TV/film) business and interactive entertainment (video game) business, and while a subscription service may make sense for linear entertainment, Zelnick doesn’t see the same viability for games.
“The interactive entertainment business is very different than the linear entertainment business. People consume far fewer hours of interactive entertainment in a given month than they do of linear entertainment,” he said. “And within that consumption, there are far fewer titles consumed in interactive entertainment than there are with linear entertainment. So I, at least, pose the question as to whether subscription makes as much sense for interactive entertainment as it does for linear entertainment and registered some skepticism, which I still hold.”
Launching a major new game into a subscription services is “just a lost opportunity for the publisher,” Zelnick said.
Take-Two has over the years experimented with bringing its biggest games, including GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, to services like Game Pass and PS Plus. Theses games have rotated in and out of the catalogs. Zelnick has said bringing its older titles to a subscription service might make sense, but for new titles, it’s not something Take-Two is looking to do.
While Microsoft launches all of its first-party games into Xbox Game Pass on day one, Sony doesn’t do this with its own PlayStation Plus membership program. PlayStation’s former president Jim Ryan seemed to agree with Zelnick and previously discussed how this doesn’t make economic sense.
