Fiscal year 2018 looks relatively empty for Take-Two following the announced delay of Red Dead Redemption 2. However, a change to the schedule could mean an exceedingly good fiscal year 2019 for the company.
"Ideally, we will have at least one triple-A title every year", CEO Strauss Zelnick said to Games Industry in a lengthy interview. But, what if there are two of these big hitters coming together next year?
"Obviously fiscal 2019 will look much better with the launch of Red Dead 2 and a huge new title from 2K, as well as the 2K Sports titles, catalogue, recurrent consumer spending, NBA2K Online in China, Social Point and the like", Zelnick said.
The huge project Zelnick alluded to could well be Borderlands 3. It is well known that Gearbox is working on it and they've even shown off some art, so maybe, just maybe they have assigned the game a release window.
RDR2 is obviously going to be big as well, but Zelnick knows that it's unlikely to surpass the success of Grand Theft Auto V. He thinks that the 80+ million copies of GTAV sold is because the game "stands alone in the generation" when compared to its rivals:
"In my opinion, why GTA V has sold 80m units, and GTA Online had another record year 3-and-a-half years since its release, is because it stands alone in the generation. In every prior generation, there have been other titles that have clustered around GTA from a quality point-of-view. That's clearly not the case now. If you are over 17 and you have a new generation console, you have GTA. Otherwise we wouldn't have shipped 80m units. Can any other title achieve that? It seems unlikely. Do we have incredibly high hopes for Red Dead? We do. But we are not putting it in the context of GTA."
Would you like to have Red Dead Redemption 2 and Borderlands 3 in the same year?