Take-Two boss on GTA 6 taking 12 years: 'We have the balance sheet for it'

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Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick reiterates that long development cycles are funded by the company's strong balance sheet.

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If GTA 6 releases in 2025 as planned, then it'll have been 12 years in since GTA 5 released in 2013. Why has it taken over a decade? Games are tough to make, but more importantly, the length of development is directly depending on how much funding is available. Rockstar makes tons of revenue every year, and while Rockstar is owned by Take-Two Interactive, Take-Two's royalty-sharing & incentive plans ensure Rockstar have a hefty treasure vault to fund new games--especially something as big as Grand Theft Auto.

In a recent interview with Wall Street Week's David Westin, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick commented on how the company's continued performance growth create a kind of virtuous cycle that enables longer periods of development, presumably for bigger games that could have significant payoffs (like Grand Theft Auto 6).

Below is a quick transcript of the snippet in question:

Zelnick: We share with our colleagues. We incentivize them highly, and we're very proud of the way that we work together. But we are aligned, which is to say in success we all do well and in failure we don't do very well.

Westin: At the same time, it does increase the expense for you.

Zelnick: The fixed expense.

Westin: The fixed expense, that's exactly right. I mean, when you're spending 12 years developing something, that's a lot of investment presumably.

Zelnick: It is, and luckily we have the balance sheet for it.

Zelnick: It's one of the benefits of getting big, it's one of the pressures of the business. That's one of the reasons that standing up a company in a garage today will be awfully difficult. So in a way, the incremental costs have enhanced the barriers to entry to benefit companies like ours.