Take-Two Indie Program is the Cure Take-Two Needs for Yearly Absence of Releases
Take-Two Interactive is the third largest publicly traded game company in the USA and Europe that doesn’t give a hoot about release schedules and annual titles. In fact, CEO Strauss Zelnick claimed that annualizing titles like Ubisoft did for many years with Assassin’s Creed would be more harmful than anything else. But with Take-Two emphasizing quality over quantity, sometimes Take-Two didn’t have a big, triple AAA game coming out in a specific year outside of their sports franchises (NBA 2K and WWE, which proves that these games are crapped out and there’s zero development spent on them)., putting a monetary gap in their ledgers. To bridge the gap, the Take-Two Indie Program emerges.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, Strauss Zelnick said that “a number of titles” are being worked on in collaboration with independent developers, and that these will be AAA games.
“We have a number of titles that Michael Worosz’s group is developing with independent developers, which are intended to be AAA products. We are quiet about it because there isn’t much to say. They are in development and we’ll bring those to market as and when.”
The first mention of the Take-Two Indie Program came from Zelnick in July 2016 with another interview with GamesIndustry. At that time, he mentioned that the program had been running for about a year.
With two years running, Take-Two probably has some upcoming titles from these indie developers, and we can excpect to see an announcement either at Gamescom or by E3 2018. Which indie developers are part of this program remains a mystery.
So far, Take-Two has two titles coming out that we know about: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen coming in August, and Red Dead Redemption 2 in Spring 2018 I hope to God.