Take Two Believes Red Dead Redemption 2 Won’t Affect Continued Sales of Grand Theft Auto V

Rockstar Games, and its parent company Take-Two, have some of the world’s most successful franchises under their hands, including the highly-anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2.

No one can deny the magnitude of success Grand Theft Auto V brought to the studio, and continues to do so to this day. However, Take Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick believes the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 won’t affect the continued performance of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online, since direct title-to-tile competition is rare.

I think four years after its initial release, we’re immensely gratified that Grand Theft Auto V continues to sell – sold in more than 80 million units. And that it looks like Grand Theft Auto Online will have another record year. Beyond that, we’re not making any projections. However, we have observed that when Rockstar Games drops additional robust content, people are enthusiastic about playing the game and monetization follows appropriately. And that’s kind of how we look at the world.

In terms of the competitive landscape going forward, look, our view is that all entertainment titles compete against every other possible use of your time. And they don’t compete specifically against our games or anyone else’s games. They compete against everything, against text messaging, going to the movies, reading a book, doing your work, whatever else can occupy your time. Entertainment is a nice to have, not a must have. However, when there is more than one title in the marketplace that compels people, the market also expands to take advantage of it.

So, the marketplace can be competitive, but it’s rarely directly competitive title-to-title, whether that’s a title that comes out under the Take-Two umbrella or any of our competitors or anything else for that matter. That’s sort of a roundabout way of saying we’re really looking forward to the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. We’re really excited and enthusiastic, of course. We don’t think that has anything to do at all with how Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto Online will perform.

Sadly, Red Dead Redemption 2 was delayed to Spring 2018.