The biggest on earth, Grand Theft Auto Online, and Red Dead Redemption Online and NBA 2K Online, and others to come. 'I'm not sceptical at all about huge, interactive, dynamic, entertaining worlds, because our company is responsible for three of them. In terms of the metaverse, it is a concept that Take-Two believes in, but Zelnick is critical of the amount of investment put into the buzzword. The executive discussed consolidation, streaming and the metaverse during the 20-minute session. Zelnick's comments came as part of a talk on the future of games at GI Live: Online. And when it makes sense, we support subscription services and if that's where the consumer wants to be, that's where we'll be.' This company does not operate based on one person's opinions, including mine. 'By the way, I could be completely wrong about this, which is totally fine. It is possible that small subset of the audience wants that, but I don't think it's a broad base, because it's not how people tend to consume interactive entertainment. So it's not clear that your broad based audience wants access to many hundreds of games in a month and is willing to pay for them.

It's perhaps two or three or four properties in a month. 'But interactive entertainment is consumed at a different level, about 45 hours a month and in a different way.

That's a very good deal compared to buying a la carte or even compared to prior cable packages. fill that need with two or three subscription services. People in this country, households, consume 150 hours of linear programming a month. So I understand why linear entertainment subscriptions exist. 'Not enough people are talking about what's right for the consumers.

Outside of the economics, Zelnick isn't convinced that subscription services will appeal beyond a certain subset of gamers. It can make economic sense to offer those on a subscription basis.' 'It can potentially be great for catalogue properties, sales of properties that have been in the market for a while and their price has been reduced. 'It's not clear that your broad based audience wants access to many hundreds of games' That's our opinion, and I think Sony agrees with us, because it said so. And you know, it doesn't make sense to do that for our properties. There always has to be an intersection between what the consumer wants and what the publisher is able to do. And we can't afford to turn our business upside down in a way that doesn't make sense economically. That doesn't make any sense to us, because economically speaking, we don't think consumers are prepared to pay for that. 'Our scepticism has been around making frontline console products available day and date with subscription. 'We've supported various subscription services and we're happy to do so,' Zelnick said during his keynote. 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). 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). Take-Two has regularly supported services such as Xbox Game Pass with legacy titles, including with the likes of Grand Theft Auto and NBA. 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. 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. 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.

It takes two game pass