Unlike my first playthrough of BioShock, Take-Two is not going to harvest everything it can get its grubby little hands on, according to chairman Strauss Zelnick. Outside of sports titles, Take-Two promises not to milk its franchises on a yearly basis and wants to promote quality over quantity.
“First of all, we’re driven first and foremost by making the best games in the business,” Zelnick boasts. “You can’t do that on a clockwork type schedule … even if we had the ability to do a triple-A title annually, the question is how do you optimize the consumer’s desire for a franchise title, the needed development time and the concern that if you come out [with a game] too frequently, you run the risk of burning the franchise out.”
Sound words from the chairman of the company that brought us the aforementioned gamer’s wet dream, BioShock. Despite the pledge to not milk franchises yearly, that particular game is set for a sequel every two years, and many argue that a sequel is neither necessary, nor truly desired.
That said, if it can be pulled off, here’s to not only a string of successful, well-crafted BioShock games, but to other titles that are carefully reared and not, as Strauss put it himself, harvested.
