Dan Houser disclosed something that Rockstar fans may not believe about Take-Two Interactive.
IGN’s senior executive editor Ryan McAffrey talked to Dan about making Rockstar’s Games. He wanted to know when Take-Two would get involved in development of their games.
Dan said this:
Um, yeah, I didn’t really liaison with them very much. It wasn’t my day-to-day experience. They were smart enough to just leave you guys alone, basically. Yeah, I’m sure other people were liaising with them, but that wasn’t me on the creative side. There was no direct involvement or oversight.
Should Publishers Interfere With Their Developers Making Games?
We know some fans already have a position when it comes to this question. The ‘conventional’ wisdom is that publishers make games worse when they get in the way. Publishers give games low budgets, unreasonable deadlines, or just make demands that don’t help with the production of the game.
Perhaps the poster boy for this is Electronic Arts. Between Mass Effect 3, Dead Space 3, and Anthem, there is no lack of games whose failures can be blamed on their wrong decisions.
Games And Developers Also Need Oversight
But we have seen in more recent years that the opposite can also be true. Microsoft’s Redfall and PlayStation’s Concord were allowed to stay in development without proper accountability for too long.
In the case of Redfall, Microsoft could have clipped the wings on that project before it became a liability for the publisher. They didn’t have faith in Arkane’s project. They could have had the Austin team assigned to other games if they came in to cancel it earlier.
Concord is transparently the bigger fiasco. In that case, Sony was willing to spend on not only the IP, but its studio, Firewalk Studios. There were several instances where they could have walked away, but instead doubled and tripled down on the project.
Gamers generally hate to hear it when games get cancelled. But when the choice is the jobs of the developers and thousands of dollars that could have gone to better games, sometimes it’s the right choice.
So Was Rockstar Just Lucky?
Take-Two doesn’t always have a hands-off approach to their games. The story of the WWE 2K games between Yuke’s and Visual Concepts should be proof of that.
But it does seem that Take-Two is smarter than many other publishers when they decide to come in. Gearbox also cited a similar hands-off approach with Take-Two, even in the years when they didn’t own that studio as well.
Rockstar’s continued success was enough to keep Take-Two confident in them. And that’s something that other studios definitely wish they had.
