It looks like Take Two is still not convinced about the viability of the VR market- which admittedly makes sense when you consider how little impact VR hardware and software have had on the larger gaming market so far, more than a year since the launch of Oculus Rift.
“VR developing exactly as I expected,” Take-Two’s Chairman & CEO Strauss Zelnick said at the Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “Look, so far there’s not a significant entertainment market for VR software, I think that’s a factual statement. We have put out some VR games, sold some units, we put out the NBA2K VR experience. If VR develops as a meaningful entertainment platform, we’ll be there with our IPs and our teams would be really excited to do very cool developments.
“To be clear, there’s no shortage of passion to do something about it. I do think there are limitations. I do believe VR is a very powerful technology for medical and military uses; I am not convinced yet it will be a powerful technology for entertainment uses.”
That said, it does seem like Take Two believes in the commercial potential of the Nintendo Switch, and that it wants to be there to support the system.
“We’re there front and center, we have NBA 2K coming for the Switch. We consider ourselves to be in a very important partnership with Nintendo. We believe in it, it’s been a very successful launch. It remains to be seen how it does [going forward], but we’re excited about it and assuming there’s an install base, we’ll be there. Not with all of our titles, but selectively.”
The selectively bit is simultaneously disappointing and expected- after all, we have no reason to expect Red Dead or GTA on the Switch, after all. That said, if NBA does well, it will be interesting to see what other games Take Two decides to support Nintendo’s platform with.