Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the most highly anticipated games of the next few months, stretching over to the next year, in fact. And while we can be sure that the game will sell an insane amount of units upon launch and will continue to do well years afterwards, Take-Two Interactive does not expect the game to perform as well in commercial terms as 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V did.
GamesIndustry.biz recently held an interview with Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, who stated that the company is not going to measure the game’s success in context of how well it does when compared with GTA V’s sales. “The reason, in my opinion, why GTA V has sold 80m units, and GTA Online had another record year 3-and-a-half years since its release, is because it stands alone in the generation,” Zelnick explained.
“In every prior generation, there have been other titles that have clustered around GTA from a quality point-of-view,” he said. “That’s clearly not the case now. If you are over 17 and you have a new generation console, you have GTA. Otherwise we wouldn’t have shipped 80m units. Can any other title achieve that? It seems unlikely. Do we have incredibly high hopes for Red Dead? We do. But we are not putting it in the context of GTA.”
That seems perfectly reasonable to me. And why wouldn’t it? Grand Theft Auto V is an absolute success- it’s sold 80 million units, and that is by no means ordinary. To expect any game would be able to match those figures, even one as massive as Red Dead Redemption 2, is unrealistic and unreasonable.
Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more coverage on Red Dead Redemption 2.