Rockstar and Take Two are truly among the most frustrating companies around, albeit in a good way. The games they release are usually incredible, genre and generation defining products, always polished and feature complete, and truly unmatched by most other games on the market. The problem, though, is that they also come out once every five years or so.
That is, according to Take Two president Karl Slatoff, a deliberate and conscious strategy.
“We don’t intend to change annual strategy because of product fatigue. [Take-Two] creates franchise value and [releases have] to be managed deliberately,” he said.
“It’s tempting to have continuous releases and milk a franchise as far as you can, [but] 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.”
He is absolutely right- Grand Theft Auto 5 alone, for instance, has outsold Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Assassin’s Creed III, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin’s Creed Unity, and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate put together- so there is definitely something to be said for Take Two’s model for franchise management (which is so similar to how other companies, like Bethesda, Blizzard, and Nintendo do it).
That said, it is definitely frustrating for us as fans!
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