Xbox recently made major headlines, ditching its leadership pairing of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, and appointing Asha Sharma as the new CEO of Xbox. Sharma is an accomplished professional, and while she might not have much gaming experience, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick seems confident in her ability to carry the company forward.
Speaking to The Game Business, he declined to offer her any advice stepping into her new role. "I don't think the newly appointed head of Xbox needs any advice from me," Zelnick said. "She's a highly accomplished executive who's done just great without ever having met me. I'm going to bet on her continuing to do great. Moreover, I have to focus on myself doing better, before I talk about other CEOs."
"At the end of the day, what drives success in our business is making the best entertainment. The rest does tend to take care of itself," he continued. "When I first became President of Fox, I was just responsible for the business side. My boss was the chairman, Joe Roth, and he was responsible for the creative side. If I did my job well running the business, and Joe did his job poorly running the creative, we would fail. If he did his job well, and I did my job poorly, we would succeed. And if we both did our jobs well, we would succeed mightily. And we did, thankfully."
"But the truth is that hits cure all ills. In the absence of making hits, you won't have a successful entertainment business. That's the thing to focus on. At Take-Two, we try to do all of the above. We try to run an amazing creative enterprise, and we try to run a highly rational, highly effective business enterprise. Sometimes we get it wrong, but that's what we try to do," Zelnick added.
It's a massive year for Take-Two, as we're looking ahead to Grand Theft Auto VI's potential launch finally arriving this November. Zelnick has his hands plenty full with that, both talking about the game not being too big, and assuring us that AI could never make something like GTA.