Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick got candid in an interview with The Wrap, sharing his assessment of the video game industry through the pandemic, and where it’s moving forward.
He directly engages with the big elephant in the room, which some people may not be comfortable to talk about. Yes, it’s true, in the past two years of the pandemic, video games have seen a lot of success, because of inherent advantages that the industry had, that even other leisure or entertainment industries like movies or the travel industry did not have.
He also acknowledges that it’s not comfortable to talk about it because it was a tragic time. Implicit in his statement, however, is the indication that the video games industry bucking that trend was helpful to keep the people working in it protected. And that protection was necessary for what Strauss calls a US recession, without reservations. Strauss cites specific things relevant in video games that he can use to identify the recession as such. For example, with meaningful inflation, there is also less money to go around for what he calls ‘discretionary purchases’, which would, of course, include video games.
Strauss actually cited that he had correctly predicted that video games would be bigger during the pandemic than before it. He was also quick to qualify that the industry is not making as much money as it was at the peak of the pandemic. As of right now, he asserts that these leisure and entertainment industries, including Take-Two itself, will handle more demand in 2022 than there was in 2019.
Looking at the bigger picture, Strauss cites trends that were also observed in other entertainment industries when predicting the future of video games. Video games are an industry that has exceeded movies and shows, and he expects it to keep growing. He points out the average gamer is in their 30s, and they still engage with the same video game properties that they played when they were teenagers. This larger generation of middle aged gamers will continue to push the video games industry to growth for the next 20 years, and also pull other people into video games as well. Subsequently, he also believes when that segment of game consumers reach their 60s, video games will likely be seeing the same level of growth as these other entertainment industries.
Strauss also talks about his own company, of course. He characterizes Take-Two Interactive, the owner of Rockstar Games and Zynga, as a $ 3 billion enterprise at scale. In comparison, other game companies can’t afford to spend what Take-Two does to market games like Grand Theft Auto Online, and there are others that don’t have the capital to last a few bad years, which is definitely what we saw with THQ.
Strauss stresses that Take-Two does not automatically benefit from having such a captive market. They continue to be successful because they do put the work in to make hits. And that, of course, is also the situation for every video game company active today. It seems video games’ future remains positive, while gamers continue to play as they have the past twenty years, for another twenty more.
Source: TheWrap via YouTube
